The 39th Anniversary of the PA Sticker and the Filthy 15 that started it all
I was 11 years old when I learned which records had the coolest words contained inside their shrink-wrapped packages. They were the ones with that black & white sticker, and the all-caps font that read “PARENTAL ADVISORY EXPLICIT CONTENT”. Man, I couldn’t wait to get my dirty little hands on that content.
However, rather than determining whether albums would be labeled (nineteen record labels had already voluntarily added advisory stickers a month earlier), the Senate hearing would provide a chance to hear all sides. John Denver, for example, spoke about his own experience with censorship when his song “Rocky Mountain High” was thought to be about drugs. (“This was obviously done by people who had never seen or been to the Rocky Mountains,” he told the committee.) Ultimately, the PMRC won, and through a deal with the Recording Industry Association of America, labels were added to albums on November 1, 1985.
The label was created to help parents make informed decisions about what music their children listen to. I mean, that was the idea anyway. The proposal was to, “establish a rating system like that used for films.” Ratings like “V” for violent or “X” for sexually explicit lyrics would appear on the album so that parents would know exactly what was in their kid’s Walkman (explained).” Fifteen Songs were put on a ban list known as the “Filthy Fifteen”. These were the songs where parent, educators and politicians (Mainly Tipper Gore) said, “enough is enough”.
1: Prince: Darling Nikki (1984)
Prince’s song, from Purple Rain, had the reference to a girl masturbating that particularly enraged Tipper Gore. Looking back in 2004, Prince said simply: “Times were different back then.” The album has been certified 13-times platinum and has sold more than 25 million copies worldwide.
2: Sheena Easton: Sugar Walls (1984)
“Sugar Walls” was from Scottish singer Sheena Easton’s album Private Heaven, and it was obvious what she was getting at with references to “blood racing to private spots” and “spending the night inside my sugar walls.” The song was credited to Alexander Nevermind, a pseudonym for Prince. The single had everything to rile the women who put together the Filthy Fifteen. At the time, Easton defended herself, saying, “We are not embarrassed to be sexy when we want to be. Men have never had to apologize for being sexy. Art is all about being free and if you don’t like it, then tune in to something else.”
3: Judas Priest: Eat Me Alive (1984)
Judas Priest had been making albums for a decade by the time Defenders Of The Faith came out. The song on the album that caused such a rumpus was “Eat Me Alive,” with lyrics about a “rod of steel” and “groan in the pleasure zone.” Gore said the song advocated “oral sex at gunpoint.” The band responded in 1986 with a tune called “Parental Guidance.” The band’s founding guitarist, KK Downing, said they wondered: “Have we gone too far?” before deciding, “We were a metal band. We didn’t sing about daffodils and roses.”
4: Vanity: Strap On Robbie Baby (1984)
Wild Animal was the debut solo album by Canadian singer Vanity (Denise Katrina Matthews), which was released by Motown Records in November 1984. The sexually provocative lyrics – “If you want to glide down my hallway, it’s open/Strap yourself in and ride” – were written by her then-boyfriend Robbie Bruce. A few years later she posed nude for Playboy and said she was “just putting all of me out there.” Before her death, in 2016, aged 57, she said she regretted being “young and irresponsible, a silly woman laden with sin,” and said that, in later life, “seeking truth in Jesus Christ set me free.”
5: Mötley Crüe: Bastard (1983)
Shout At The Devil is the second studio album by US heavy metal band Mötley Crüe and the song “Bastard” made it on to the Filthy Fifteen list because of the violent lyrics about stabbing someone to death. However, the warning sticker just seemed to attract buyers. Singer Vince Neil said years later: “Once you put that sticker on, that parental-warning sticker, that album took off. Those kids wanted it even more.”
6: AC/DC: Let Me Put My Love Into You (1980)
A five-year-old tune from the Australian band AC/DC, from the album Back In Black, stirred up a row between the band and the PMRC, who said the lyrics “let me cut your cake with my knife” were profane. The band claimed the attempt to censor them was “Satanic intolerance.”
7: Twisted Sister: We’re Not Gonna Take It (1984)
Dee Snider, the vocalist and songwriter of Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It,” defended the song from allegations that it promoted violence; ultimately, it reached No.2 on the Billboard charts. Snider said: “It strikes me that the PMRC may have confused our video presentation for this song… with the meaning of the lyrics. It is no secret that the videos often depict storylines completely unrelated to the lyrics of the song they accompany. The video ‘We’re Not Gonna Take It’ was simply meant to be a cartoon with human actors playing variations on the Road Runner-Wile E Coyote theme. Each stunt was selected from my extensive personal collection of cartoons.”
8: Madonna: Dress You Up (1984)
No list of shocking songs from the 80s would be complete without Madonna. The one that got her on to the Filthy Fifteen was “Dress You Up,” from the album Like A Virgin. The song was composed by Andrea LaRusso and Peggy Stanziale, who were described as “two New Jersey housewives” in newspaper reports. The lyrics – “Gonna dress you up in my love/All over your body” – hardly seem explicit and Madonna laughed off the row, saying, “I’m sexy. How can I avoid it?”
9: WASP: Animal (F__k Like A Beast) (1984)
There were claims that WASP lead singer and guitarist Blackie Lawless wrote the song after seeing a photograph of lions mating in National Geographic magazine; its title alone guaranteed its place on the PMRC hit parade. The band used to introduce the song at concerts with the words, “Well, this one is for Tipper Gore.” Lawless also later became a born-again Christian and stopped performing the song.
10: Def Leppard: High’n’Dry (1981)
Drug and alcohol references landed Def Leppard in trouble with the PMRC, especially for the lines “I got my whiskey/I got my wine/I got my woman/And this time, the lights are going out.” The British rockers were bemused by the row, declaring that they had no interest in people with “closed minds.”
11: Mercyful Fate: Into The Coven (1983)
The song “Into The Coven,” by Danish heavy band Mercyful Fate, appeared on their album Melissa. The women behind the Filthy Fifteen claimed the song fostered an unhealthy interest in the occult, with its plea to “come into my coven and become Lucifer’s child.” The band said the song was just a musical horror story and, years later, singer King Diamond told Rolling Stone magazine, “The whole thing was just pathetic. We thought they must be really bored to have time for this. How they saw those songs said more about them than it did about us.”
12: Black Sabbath: Trashed (1983)
Lyrics about driving after drinking a bottle of tequila would make any sensible person worried, but singer Ian Gillan said that “Trashed” was in fact about how he had crashed drummer Bill Ward’s car during an alcohol-fueled race around the grounds of the recording studio. He claimed that the real purpose of the song was to act as a warning against driving under the influence. The band admitted that the accompanying video was intentionally lewd.
13: Mary Jane Girls: In My House (1985)
“In My House” was written and arranged by Rick James and recorded by American girl group Mary Jane Girls for their album Only Four You. The so-called explicit lyrics were lines such as “I’ll satisfy your every need/And every fantasy you think up.” Singer Jojo McDuffie said that the song was just “making an innuendo, purposely and tastefully, because Rick wanted the song to be played on the radio.”
14: Venom: Possessed (1985)
The album Possessed was released on April Fool’s Day in 1985, and the title track was one of (deliberately, presumably) 13 songs. The lyrics – “I drink the vomit of the priests/Make love with the dying whore” – were certainly unpleasant, and landed the band on the Filthy Fifteen list. “It was by no means the most controversial song I wrote,” said frontman Cronos. The album, incidentally, was recorded in a quaint Sussex village whose claim to fame was being the subject of a surreal Spike Milligan sketch about victims of the plague, suffering from burned trousers.
15: Cyndi Lauper: She Bop (1983)
You could argue that Lauper was following in the grand tradition of female singers such as Bessie Smith, who were being suggestive back in the 20s. Some 60 post-Bessie, Cyndi Lauper offended the PMRC with her innuendo-full lyrics such as “I want to go south and get me some more/They say I better stop or I’ll go blind,” and the lewd video that accompanied the song “She Bop.” The song about self-pleasuring was a catchy hit. As Lauper noted, sex sells in the music industry. “It was a scandal. I brought shame upon my family,” she said with a smile.
That’s a phenomenal mixtape. However, Tipper Gore was destined to Make America Puritan Again. Tipper Gore, wife of then future Presidential Candidate Al Gore, became the spokesperson for concerned mothers after forming the Parents’ Music Resource Center (PMRC). Joining forces with Susan Baker, wife of the secretary of the treasury, and other similarly well-connected women of the day, Gore formed the PMRC to combat, in her words, “porn rock”. This was a catch-all term she gave for the explicit sins and excesses depicted in some of the music of the time. It sounds like she was a whole lot of fun.
I do remember this time though. I was starting to form opinions and noticing the landscape of society and grasping onto the threshold… I’m kidding. I was 11. I did like music, and I did not like anyone telling me what I could and couldn’t listen to and I knew “bad” meant it was probably awesome. I remember the stickers being talked about and I remember rock stars in front of judges arguing their side. This was the first time that I heard the word “Censorship”, and I didn’t like it. “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,” Dee Snider, of Twisted Sister said during his testimony.
John Dever even went so far as to draw a comparison to Nazi Germany, asserting “the suppression of the people of a society begins in my mind with the censorship of the written or spoken word. It was so in Nazi Germany. It is so in many places today where those in power are afraid of the consequences of an informed and educated people.”
The first of the familiar black-and-white parental advisory sticker debuted on 2 Live Crew’s “Banned in the U.S.A.” That album was released on July 24, 1990 — almost five years after the RIAA first agreed to labeling music.
Hip hop was one of the genres whose music tended to receive the advisory label and saw a massive boost in popularity in sales following the warning label’s inception. Without the notoriety of the Parental Advisory Warning, some argue that hip hop might never have become a part of mainstream music the way it is today. I don’t know if that’s exactly true but, that’s how I discovered all my favorites.
Today we have the internet and it’s much harder to regulate who downloads what and how old that consumer is. Digital platforms do try to inform their subscribers about suitable content, but if an 11 year is the customer than…yeah, you get the idea. Some artists still use them on their records, but they are not required to in the United States. Even the beloved Taylor Swift and her peeps have asked that a PA sticker slapped on her Folklore LP. Believe me, I know. I worked at a record pressing plant and saw over 100,000 go down the line.
Artists’ producing free expression through edgy lyrics and album art that would probably make Tipper Gore and the PMRC run for the hills proves that despite the creation of the “Parental Advisory” sticker, the PMRC did not truly win. Music will always be an art form that tests the boundaries of social norms. Looks like going forward parents are going to have to be parents.
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