On This Day: Nov. 1, 1990
The Happening
No doubt that people who weren’t born in the ’80s are tired of hearing how unsheltered children were back then compared to now, how we rode our bikes around for hours on gravel roads without a cellphone, and how many of us were latchkey kids from a very young age. But there was something else we did with no restriction: listen to music.
That is, until 1984, when a group called the Parents Music Resource Center, led by high-profile Washington, D.C., women — including , the then-wife of U.S. Senator Al Gore, a Democrat from Tennessee, and Susan Baker, who was married to James Baker, the secretary of the treasury — came on the scene.
Gore had recently been outraged to hear her young daughter listening to the Prince’s “Darling Nikki,” which references masturbation and calls the title character a “sex fiend.” The future first lady assembled a group that came up with a list of the “Filthy 15” songs, which included tracks by Prince, as well as Madonna, AC/DC, Mötley Crüe and others. The PMRC also publicly demanded that albums be labeled with parental advisories similar to movie ratings. Per Newsweek, the PMRC proposed to the Recording Industry Association of America and record labels that “violent lyrics would be marked with a ‘V,’ Satanic or anti-Christian occult content with an ‘O,’ and lyrics referencing drugs or alcohol with a ‘D/A.'” (People were seriously worried about Satanic cults back then.)
Of course this was a no-go with labels, and nothing happened at first. That prompted the high-powered parents group to suggest a general advisory system. By September 1985, the wives of 10 senators and six House representatives who now comprised the PMRC had an attentive audience: the United States Senate. Tipper Gore and the others argued their case in a public hearing, while artists such as Twisted Sister’s Dee Snider, Frank Zappa and even folk singer John Denver called the labeling demands censorship, pure and simple.
“The beauty of literature, poetry and music is that we leave room for the audience to put its own imagination, experiences and dreams into the words,” Snider said during his testimony.
Althought it seemed the sides were far apart, on Nov. 1, 1985, the RIAA agreed to put warning labels on certain albums. The industry group felt it was a better option than allowing an outside organization to regulate it. Labels were responsible for policing their own content.
What Happened Next
Albums began bearing labels that cautioned consumers about the content, but there wasn’t a uniform system. There weren’t even rules about what merited a label and what didn’t.
This past July, Ice-T wrote on social media that he designed his own such label for his 1987 debut, Rhyme Pays. He explained that he had purposely “made it look like a Bullet or a condom.”
Hilary Rosen, at the time the president of the RIAA, later reflected to Spin magazine that “the use of the warning was kind of a joke and that the industry wasn’t holding up its part of the bargain.”
States began to craft their own legislation to dictate the format of the warning labels. Pennsylvania lawmakers, for example, favored a fluorescent yellow sticker that warned against “suicide, incest, bestiality, sadomasochism, sexual activity in a violent context, murder, morbid violence, illegal use of drugs or alcohol.”
To avoid having to deal with a patchwork collection of rules, the RIAA and the PMRC agreed to come up with one design in a size that “wouldn’t overwhelm the record.“
The first of the familiar black-and-white parental advisory sticker debuted on 2 Live Crew’s “Banned in the U.S.A.” The album was released on July 24, 1990 — almost five years after the RIAA first agreed to labeling music.
Chris Molanphy, the host of Slate’s entertaining Hit Parade podcast, told Newsweek that the label was often distributed unevenly, with white artists given more leniency and artists of color more likely to be flagged.
“If you were a white rock act, you could get away with a couple of F-bombs or a couple of curses on your album and not get stickered,” Molanphy said. “But if you were a rapper or even a hard R&B singer and you said something as daring as ‘pee,’ you could get labeled.”
Where We Are Now
With most of us buying music digitally these days, consumers are more used to seeing the “E” in Apple’s iTunes Store than the old school “Parental Advisory: Explicit Content” label.
Some of the more successful albums of the past 40 years have been, in fact, slapped with that now familiar logo.
That’s something 2 Live Crew rapper Fresh Kid Ice figured out long ago. Instead of scaring people away as the PMRC hoped, the label, he acutely observed, actually “helped sell the records a little bit more because it was considered taboo.”
