Rock Censorship: Big Brother Meets Twisted Sister

Frank Zappa brought his lawyer, not to mention a copy of the First Amendment. John Denver spoke of Nazis and censorship. Dee Snider, sweating through his Twisted Sister muscle shirt, complained of being slandered by a housewife. The distinguished senator from South Carolina, Ernest “Fritz” Hollings, demanded that somebody, by God, rescue “the tender young ears of this nation from this” — he paused as if the words tasted foul — “this ROCK PORN.”

But first, of course, the senator’s colleagues, three rock stars, two wives of powerful politicians, a rock & roll-loving minister and a lady from the PTA, had to try to interpret, on this morning of September 19th, lyrical references to masturbation, bondage, rape, sodomy, incest, orgasm, anal vapors, codpieces and buzz saws. It was a fine show. When it was over, the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation hadn’t recommended any legislation, but it had familiarized itself with arguably the fifteen or so raunchiest rock albums in all the land.

That a Senate committee which normally presides over such esoteric issues as trade reciprocity should be interpreting the lyrics of Bitch’s Be My Slave album is not surprising, given the committee’s members. The wife of its chairman, Senator John Danforth (R-Missouri), is affiliated with that champion of purified rock lyrics, the Parents’ Music Resource Center (PMRC). So, too, is the wife of Senator Hollings. Mary Elizabeth “Tipper” Gore, wife of committee member Senator Albert Gore Jr. (D-Tennessee), is a PMRC cofounder. Another cofounder, Susan Baker, is married to James A. Baker, who happens to be the very conservative secretary of the treasury.

The committee hearing was, in fact, the culmination of a long summer’s work by the women of the PMRC. In less than five months, the wives of some of Washington’s most powerful men took their campaign against explicit rock lyrics from a church meeting to the national media to Capitol Hill. In the process, they pressured twenty-four record companies — over eighty percent of the music industry — into agreeing to place a PG warning label on all albums with lyrics deemed to be sexually explicit or promoting violence, suicide, rape, the occult or drug abuse.

Thanks to the women of the PMRC, the first albums marked PARENTAL GUIDANCE: EXPLICIT LYRICS are now on view for parents at record stores. The record companies believed the PG label would satisfy the PMRC’s expressed desire to alert the parents of young children who paw through record racks. It did not. The PMRC now wants the PG label upgraded to R on the theory that PG has been watered down by too many PG movies. The group also wants a panel of industry types and consumers to draw up guidelines for what constitutes an explicit lyric, rather than entrusting that chore to the very people who make dirty records.

Mrs. Gore and Mrs. Baker say they won’t be satisfied until questionable lyrics are printed on albums and tapes, until rock concerts are rated for content, until albums with objectionable covers are racked separately or sold in plain brown wrappers, until MTV “brackets” certain videos for late-night viewing only, and until lyrics are included with albums and tapes sent to radio stations. They also suggest that record companies “reassess” the contracts of performers who offend mainstream sensibilities. They suspect, too, that virgin minds are being poisoned by what they call “hidden messages and backward masking.”

After a while, it all got to be too much for Stanley Gortikov, president of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). Gortikov — Tipper Gore calls him “a wonderful man” — seemed insulted when the PMRC women shoved his PG offer back in his face. All this, after a long summer spent writing endless letters to the PMRC, addressing its concerns with long, roman-numeraled, pro-and-con paragraphs.

Gortikov, a ruddy-faced man with his silver hair slicked back, appeared before the PMRC husbands on the Senate committee and uttered these words: “Enough already!” And then he told the committee all the things the music industry cannot do, and why:

It cannot rate records the way the movie industry rates movies. About 325 movies are released every year, compared to some 25,000 songs. It cannot print lyrics on albums and cassettes — despite the endorsement of the idea by Zappa and Denver — because music publishers, not the record companies, own the rights to lyrics.

It cannot provide printed lyrics to radio stations for the same reason. Nor can it control the music each station chooses to air. That’s the FCC’s province.

It cannot control the actions, lewd or otherwise, of rock performers at concerts, nor rate concerts for content, because “the best control … is parental supervision of the concert attendance of their children.”

It cannot place certain records behind the counter or in plain brown wrappers because that is the province of the retailers.

And finally, Gortikov told the committee, the industry certainly cannot, as the PMRC has requested, “refrain from the use of hidden messages or backward masking” because, Gortikov claims, he has never encountered such things in his twenty-five years in the business.

Even the PG rating, Gortikov said, was “approached with trepidation. It is as far as we can and should go.” He suggested that the PMRC establish its own rating system, as the Catholic Church has done for films. To demand a “review panel” amounts to “an ad hoc first-stage form of censorship,” he said.

While he was getting all that off his chest, Gortikov also stressed that he was “getting a little apprehensive about [PMRC] motives and fervor…. I hope it does not allow a thirst for press, public and government attention to gain more priority than the olive branch we offer.”

Gortikov’s belated counteroffensive notwithstanding, the Washington Wives — and now their husbands — clearly have the rock industry on the defensive. The very day the PMRC opened up shop last May, for instance, the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) fired off a letter to its member stations to warn them of the sudden new national debate over what the letter called “porn rock.” Three weeks later, NAB president Edward Fritts asked the RIAA to send printed lyrics along with all music sent to radio stations — despite the fact that he later told the Senate committee that “of this limited number of [explicit] songs, only a very few ever receive any meaningful airplay.”