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Prince's legendary Purple Rain record had been purchased by over ten million Americans by the spring of 1985. Among them was young Karenna Gore. At home, Karenna's mother was stunned to hear Prince sing on the song Darling Nikki: “I knew a girl named Nikki / I guess you could say she was a sex fiend / I met her in a hotel lobby/ masturbating with a magazine.”

“I was astonished,” said Karenna's mother, Tipper Gore. “The explicit lyrics embarrassed both of us. At first, I was stunned – then I got angry!”

Mothers and fathers getting upset by their children's musical tastes is commonplace, but Tipper was not just any Tennessee mother– she was the wife of rising Democrat politician Senator Al Gore. Determined to do something, Tipper bridged the Democrat-Republican gap to Susan Baker, wife of James Baker, the finance chief under Ronald Reagan. They recruited two more women and established the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC). As all four women had husbands with strong connections to government, the US media nicknamed the committee “the Washington wives.”

Putting Parental Advisory stickers on albums surely backfired as they became the ones kids wanted to buy

The PMRC arranged a US Senate hearing for September 1985, with the goal to increase parental oversight over recorded music. Even before hearings began the PMRC had significant traction: financial support came from Beach Boys vocalist Mike Love and Joseph Coors, owner of Coors beer, both active Reagan supporters, and the committee gained considerable media coverage, garnering support from the likes of Jerry Falwell, US preacher and co-founder of the Moral Majority. The campaign emerged at a opportune time. While controversial films served as folk devils in the UK, in the US Ronald Reagan's emphasis on “family values” had strengthened the conservative Christians: with the surging popularity of MTV, the music video channel, musicians were now attracting increasing criticism from Christian organizations.

“Initially, I wasn't very concerned to the PMRC,” says Blackie Lawless, leader of Wasp, one of the bands singled out by the organization. “Then it went on to have a huge impact, took on a life of its own.”

The US had experienced occasional outbreaks of music-related moral panics before. The mid-1950s saw Elvis Presley censured by segregationists for making “jungle music”, while John Lennon's 1966 observation “The Beatles are more popular than Jesus” led to burnings of Beatles records. But there had never been a concerted government attempt to censor music. As the Senate hearings got under way it became clear censorship was now being considered.

For the hearings the PMRC compiled a list of 15 contemporary songs – the “Filthy Fifteen” – that they determined had “objectionable” qualities: sex, violence, references to drugs or alcohol, occult themes and bad language. Prince was connected to three of them, as an artist, writer and producer. The list also included Mary Jane Girls, Madonna and Cyndi Lauper, all listed for singing very suggestive, pro-female sexuality songs. Heavy metal bands (then the most popular genre in US music) dominated: AC/DC, Black Sabbath and Mötley Crüe, veterans of attacks by evangelical organizations, were included, along with newer acts Def Leppard, Judas Priest, Twisted Sister and Wasp, who suddenly found politicians and religious fundamentalists calling for their music and videos to be removed from radio and MTV.

“I had been tracking all of this building up on the news so I wasn't completely surprised,” says Judas Priest vocalist Rob Halford, “although being called ‘enemy of the people’ was a exaggeration.”

In the Senate hearings the PMRC requested the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) to create a form of music rating akin to that used by the Motion Picture Association for film classifications. Their agenda included calling for caution labels on album covers, requiring record shops to put albums with explicit covers out of sight, pressuring television stations not to broadcast explicit videos and, more ominously, reassessing “the contracts of musicians who performed violently or sexually in concert”.

It wasn't just the musicians on the Filthy Fifteen list who voiced disapproval at the PMRC's campaign – experienced artists Frank Zappa and Alice Cooper, both of whom had provoked controversy early in their careers, objected about what they saw as the PMRC serving as a cover for increasing censorship.

Cooper was a seasoned participant of censorship battles in the UK. In the summer of 1972 his self-titled group's song School's Out became a hit in the UK, prompting calls for its banning. “I sent Mary Whitehouse flowers and Leo Abse a box of cigars,” Cooper chuckles at the outraged response from, respectively, the conservative activist and the Welsh Labour MP at the time.

The PMRC campaign 12 years later was less of a laughing matter: for Cooper a troubling example of government overreach. “It was like they were saying to kids: ‘You are not allowed to see something or hear something because you're not smart enough to deal with it,’” he says. “If something is really violent or horrible it should be a talk between the parents and their kids, not the government and the kids.”

As the Senate hearings began, Zappa travelled to Washington DC. There he was joined by pop-folk singer John Denver – who, like Zappa, happily appeared as a witness despite not being included on the Filthy Fifteen list – and Twisted Sister's vocalist Dee Snider, who was listed. The trio spoke during the hearings as to why music censorship was a mistake. Zappa, dressed conservatively in suit and tie, provided the enduring image of the hearings as he debated with the PMRC and their supporters, saying that “the PMRC proposal is an ill-conceived piece of nonsense which fails to deliver any real benefits to children [and] violates the civil liberties of people who are not children”.

Denver, in turn, noted how his song Rocky Mountain High had been misunderstood by those who deemed it a paean to taking drugs (when it was a appreciation of Colorado's natural beauty) while Snider asserted the PMRC misinterpreted the lyric to Twisted Sister's Under the Blade – it wasn't about sadomasochism (as Gore claimed), but surgery.

Judas Priest's Halford wasn't at the hearings, but says that the PMRC misinterpreted his lyrics, too. The committee claimed the song Eat Me Alive was about the forced performance of oral sex at gunpoint. Today Halford says it was in fact about gay S&M sex, although in 1985 he said nothing. The Birmingham musician didn't come out until 1998.

The Wasp song on the list, Animal (Fuck Like a Beast), was, says Lawless, simply a direct celebration of sweaty sex. Not subtle but not obscene, either. “At first I was going to attend the Senate hearings and testify,” he says, “but EMI – our record label – asked that we didn't go. They felt it was a wise move. Frank, John and Dee all did a excellent job in speaking on artists' behalf, not that it had a significant impact.”

The three may have spoken eloquently but US record labels caved before the hearings ended: the RIAA agreed to put Parental Advisory stickers on any album containing “controversial” content. This led to certain retailers – including Walmart (then the US's largest record retailer) – refusing to stock albums carrying the stickers. “At the time the conservative faction pressured Walmart so they had no choice,” says Halford. “I would imagine that sales took a hit for every label.”

Lawless, meanwhile, claims that the PMRC Senate hearings threatened not only his career but his life. “In the US there was an segment of society who thought: ‘The world would be better off without these people,’ and we began getting death threats. I was twice shot at – not in concert, thankfully, although once while we were playing someone threw a heavy glass jar and it hit me right on the top of my head and split my scalp open.”

Musicians responded to the PMRC in song: Judas Priest's Parental Guidance and Alice Cooper's Freedom both condemned the organization, while on Wasp's Live … In the Raw album Lawless devotes the song Harder, Faster to the Washington wives: “They can suck me, suck me, eat me raw!”

The Senate hearings broadened discussion around censorship in the US while inspiring lawsuits against “offensive” musicians. San Franciscan punk band Dead Kennedys became involved in a court case not for their songs, but due to an insert of HR Giger's artwork Penis Landscape inside the cover of 1985's Frankenchrist album: a parent upset by their teenage daughter's purchase of the album sued the band. On 7 March 1990, Dead Kennedys vocalist Jello Biafra argued with Tipper Gore on the Oprah Winfrey show, with Biafra asserting Gore's defence of being “a liberal Democrat” was weakened by her PMRC cheerleading, noting how the committee had encouraged the Christian right.

Both Cooper and Lawless argue that that Tipper's motivation behind the PMRC was to help build support for her husband's 1987 campaign to win the Democratic presidential nomination (Al Gore would be defeated, but later become Bill Clinton's vice-president, before losing to George Bush in disputed fashion in the 2000 presidential election). “Just as McCarthy used the red scare to gain more power, this was a campaign to establish a political base through suggesting musicians were bringing sexual perversion and the occult into children's bedrooms,” says Lawless.

Rap would soon overtake rock as the US's most popular youth music and gangsta rap's rhymes would attract even greater outrage. In 1989, NWA and 2 Live Crew generated huge controversy – the former for rhymes that, among other things, celebrated shooting LAPD officers, the latter over the explicit sexual content on their album As Nasty As They Wanna Be. After a federal judge decided the album to be obscene – an first-time verdict for a US music recording – Bible belt states began taking legal action against stores that sold the album, and that hosted their performances. The US court of appeals would ultimately reverse the obscenity ruling, but by then the controversy had helped both outfits sell millions of albums – though the numerous legal battles would fracture both groups.

“I found the whole thing condescending and stupid,” says Cooper. “And putting Parental Advisory stickers on albums surely had the opposite effect as they became the ones kids were eager to buy.”

Despite the PMRC closing down in the mid 1990s, its legacy can be seen in the Parental Advisory stickers that continue to be used on many US albums. In the internet age where seemingly anything, no matter how offensive, is just a click away, the committee's attempts to censor popular music now seems outdated. Still, there are echoes of their crusade today in the attempts to censor comedians such as Jimmy Kimmel over his comments on the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.

“We are in dangerous times around the world,” says Halford. “I've lived long enough to witness history happen again.”