Frank Zappa and his link to the ‘Parental Advisory’ sticker
In 1985, a set of high-profile women formed a committee called the ‘Parents Music Resource Center’. Their goal was simple: to censor art that they considered to be obscene. On the committee were two wives of prominent politicians – Tipper Gore, the wife of Senator and future Vice President Al Gore, and Susan Baker, the wife of then-Treasury Secretary James Baker. After Gore heard her 11-year-old daughter Karenna listening to Prince‘s raunchy ‘Darling Nikki’, she decided to take action into her own hands.
Their initial idea was for the RIAA to adopt a rating system similar to the one used by the Motion Picture Association of America. The rating system would point out certain songs’ topics, including violence, sex, drug use, and occult themes. Thanks to financial help from none other than noted rock and roll villain Mike Love of The Beach Boys, the PMRC were able to organise a senate hearing to assess the validity and merit of adopting the system.
Three prominent musicians testified against the proposals laid out by the PMRC. The first was folk/soft rock troubadour John Denver, who compared the censorship proposed by the committee to Nazi book burnings and pleaded for more open interpretations of music, citing his own song ‘Rocky Mountain High’. The second was shock rocker Dee Snider, lead singer of heavy metal titans Twisted Sister. Clad in denim, Snider proposed that those looking for sadomasochistic themes in art, like Gore, were bound to find it regardless of intention and explained that parents should be in charge of the content that goes in front of their children, not committees.
The third was legendary experimental rocker Frank Zappa. Across two decades, Zappa had consistently pushed the envelope in the world of popular music, with his work’s sophomoric humour and sexual references pervasive. Zappa was a noted anti-authoritarian and loathed censorship of any kind, so when he had the opportunity to appear before the PMRC, he let loose by calling the committee an “ill-conceived piece of nonsense which fails to deliver any real benefits to children, infringes the civil liberties of people who are not children, and promises to keep the courts busy for years dealing with the interpretational and enforcemental problems inherent in the proposal’s design.”
Ultimately, none of the three musicians were able to stop the PMRC from having their way. While the rating system wasn’t adopted, a generic advisory sticker was. The ‘Parental Advisory’ sticker began appearing in different forms shortly after the hearings, but it wasn’t until 2 Live Crew’s 1990 album Banned in the U.S.A. that the familiar black and white ‘Parental Advisory: Explicit Content’ sticker began appearing on albums.
On Zappa’s next release following the hearings, he parodied the PMRC by naming the album Frank Zappa Meets the Mothers of Prevention, satirising both the PMRC and his former backing band, the Mothers of Invention. The album’s penultimate track, ‘Porn Wars’, was a sound collage of the PMRC hearings that excluded excerpts of the participants in the hearing, notably Al and Tipper Gore. An urban legend also spread that Zappa’s 1986 instrumental LP Jazz From Hell was given a ‘Parental Advisory’ sticker, but it appears that only a single retailer requested that an advisory sticker be included on that release.
You can watch Zappa’s full Senate testimony down below.
