This is a question, particularly for older people.
When was the last time you listened carefully to some of the words the rock singers sing?
Rock music has always been controversial but in the 1980s, many parents felt lyrics had finally gone too far.
Songs glorifying rape, or incest, or bondage
Rock lyrics have turned from "I can’t get no satisfaction" to
"I’m going to force you at gun point to eat me alive."
Some of it is encouraging unlawful behavior and music is harmless? I don’t think so.
The high-profile crusade raised age-old questions of what crosses the line.
I said, “If I’m going to go to jail for something, I’ll go to jail for free speech.”
You know what I’m saying?
People have been complaining about popular culture since ancient Greece.
There are quotes from Plato about the violence in Greek tragedies and their effect on kids. Aristotle disagreed.
It really raises the question of how do we know? How do we define harm?
MTV gave musicians of the 1980s a new kind of exposure.
Today, rock and roll comes right into your living room and not just on records, but in living color.
Our daughter was only seven. And she came to me one day and she said, "Mom, what’s a virgin?"
And she said, “What does that mean?” I said, “Oh, my gosh.”
And then Tipper, her daughter bought Purple Rain, Prince’s Purple Rain.
“I met a girl named Nikki I guess you could say she was a sex fiend.”
I did not feel that was appropriate for my then ten-year-old child to have purchased.
It just made us angry and we knew that others didn’t know about it so we just thought,
you know, “We have to do something.”
Susan Baker and Tipper Gore formed the Parents Music Resource Center, or PMRC,
though they soon became known by a different name.
The Washington Wives they’re called. Mrs. Albert Gore, the Senator’s wife,
and Mrs. James Baker, the wife of the Treasury Secretary.
They compiled a list of songs they found particularly offensive, branded the ‘Filthy Fifteen’.
It was Motley Crew. It was Wasp. It was the, the album that had the guy
with the codpiece that had the big buzz saw on it. I mean, please.
I think maybe rating records is going too far. I don’t know. That would be like rating books.
If it looks like censorship and it smells like censorship, it is censorship,
no matter who’s wife is talking about it. It’s censorship.
As the PMRC grew to include the wives of 10 Senators and 6 House Representatives,
the Senate held a hearing on rock lyrics in September of 1985.
If you could speak directly into the microphone. Thank you.
Some say there’s no cause for concern. We believe there is.
The PMRC argued that songs about sex and violence were having a dangerous impact.
Teen pregnancies and teenage suicide rates are at epidemic proportions today.
And they gave Senators a taste of the Filthy Fifteen.
In all candor, I would tell you it’s outrageous filth
and if I could find some way constitutionally to do away with it, I would.
It wasn’t the first time that pop culture had been accused of poisoning America’s youth.
In the 1950s, politicians took aim at a different menace: comic books.
This seems to be a man with a bloody axe, holding a woman’s head
that’s been severed from her body. Do you think that’s in good taste?
Yes sir, I do, for the cover of a horror comic.
The post-World War II boom in horror, crime, and romance comics
alarmed psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, who testified at Senate hearings in 1954.
It is my opinion without any reasonable doubt, and without any reservation,
that comic books are an important contributing factor in many cases of juvenile delinquency.
There was just one problem with Wertham’s case against comics: he manipulated
his research to prove his point. Historian Carol Tilley recently uncovered these distortions,
but Wertham had already left his mark on the comic book industry.
The comics publishers in 1954 came together to create the Comics Code Authority, the CCA.
Publishers would have to submit their stories and artwork to the Code Authority for approval.
In short, comics have undergone a major face-lifting.
There were smaller publishers that chose to go out of business rather than try to comply
with the code. It was an industry regulating itself, taking away its provocative edges
and dulling them for a very long time.
Three decades later, the Washington wives proposed a code of their own,
an explicit lyric warning label, which the industry soon agreed to.
But the idea of a warning label worried musicians like Frank Zappa.
They may say we are not interested in legislation, but there are others who do
and there’s this fervor to get in and do even more, even more.
A few years later, Zappa’s fears became a reality.
In 1990, a federal district court judge in Florida ruled that some of the 2 Live Crew's songs
were obscene, and could not legally be sold or performed in three Florida counties.
Yesterday Ft Lauderdale authorities arrested store owner Charles Freeman.
He had refused to stop selling the group’s best selling album, As Nasty As They Wanna Be.
My reaction was, “Are these people crazy?”
Adults should be able to listen to whatever they want to listen to.
Group leader Luther Campbell refused to cancel an upcoming concert.
It was important to perform, you know, and exercise my free speech.
Undercover officers, who had been hiding in the audience, arrested band members
Luther Campbell and Chris Wong Won on charges of violating Florida obscenity laws.
If performers do things that outrage the people in a community, this is probably going to happen.
I mean that is not what we were about. But I’m not surprised.
Campbell was acquitted on obscenity charges, but found that all the controversy surrounding
2 Live Crew had an effect Florida officials didn’t anticipate.
It took us to a whole other level as a group. On one end we became household names.
But on the other end it became bigger than 2 Live Crew.
This is gangsta rap. It is raw, in-your-face music that reflects violence, drug use
In then end, neither warning labels nor legal challenges dulled music’s provocative edges,
despite occasional flare-ups in the press.
Hip Hop. Is it art or is it poison?
Today, the parental advisory label is less controversial, but also less relevant.
The difference now, of course, is that the way that we buy music and share music
is so completely different.
Sociologist Karen Sternheimer studies popular culture. She says neither comic books in the 1950s
nor rock music in the 1980s had the impact on children that critics claimed.
It’s really difficult to think about the complexities of what actually causes things
that we consider to be social problems. So it’s easier and much more visible to say,
“Oh, well, these movies right now. Or there’s video games. Or there’s music that’s really graphically sexual.”
Whether or not they're effective, warning labels have become such a part of daily life
that, today, it's not just parents who are calling for them.
Some students are calling on professors to implement what are known as trigger warnings.
Labels used to flag course materials deemed violent or sexually explicit.
A trigger warning or a content warning kind of warns the person that,
“Hey, this is coming up. You’re going to deal with some tricky stuff.
Make sure you’re ready for it."
In 2014, Bailey Loverin sponsored a student resolution at the University of California
Santa Barbara, calling for trigger warnings on course syllabi to alert students
who have had a traumatic experience like sexual abuse.
It’s about students that could be suffering from PTSD and not wanting to be triggered
in the middle of an 800-person classroom and feeling afraid or feeling completely out of control.
Growing up in a society that has all these warnings already it’s not necessarily an irrational proposal.
Students on several college campuses support trigger warnings, but many professors fear
they could limit exposure to ideas, and the proposals have been publicly criticized.
There’s such a sort of moral fervor to protecting people from potential emotional harm.
It's taking on this edge that I actually think that it’s preventing people from talking to each other.
Even one of the staunchest advocates of labeling thinks this goes too far.
But for her, it’s a question of who gets to decide.
I don’t think labeling is a bad thing.
But for curriculum and things, I don’t know that the kids get to call the shots.