From Prince to Madonna: the erotic songs that led America into a censorship war
Rock ‘n’ roll was pretty much the product of sexual liberation. As Paul McCartney posits in his new photobook, “Although we had no perspective at the time, we were, like the world, experiencing a sexual awakening. Our parents had fears of sexual diseases and all sorts of things like that, but by the middle of the 60s, we’d realised that we had a freedom that had never been available to their generation.” Madonna and the likes were the benefactors of this movement.
The pill came around and changed the cultural landscape. So things took a revolutionary turn. However, years later, the children of the revolution started having children, and when they came of age, some began to wonder whether cutting-edge sexual liberation was being pushed too far. A lot of this came to the fore when a little guitar maestro began remoulding the next zeitgeist and grabbed hold of the 1980s.
Prince was so filthy that, apparently, a plumber once wrote, ‘I wish my wife was this dirty’ with their index finger on his back. In 1985, that attitude changed culture forever. One of his raunchiest hits and a single household incident that it spawned would change the music industry forever. Purple Rain is a record that tells a liberated narrative, but one chapter of the tale drew the attention of censors.
The track, ‘Darling Nikki’, portrays Prince’s encounter with a nymphomaniac who he finds “in a hotel lobby masturbating with a magazine”. She then takes him back to her “castle”, complete with a cornucopia of sexual devices that change the little maestro for life. In the morning, this dominatrix is no longer by his side, but she sure did teach him how to “grind”. Then, in trademark Prince fashion, he ends the track with a biblical analogy, singing: “I’m fine because I know that the Lord is coming soon, coming, coming soon.”
Now, that’s certainly a song with some overt adult overtones. Thus, when a mother (Tipper Gore, the wife of Al Gore) found her 11-year-old daughter singing along to it, she set about barring it from young ears forevermore. The mother in question was the founder of the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC). The PMRC then proceeded to collate tunes that they deemed unsuitable for minors and presented them to the Record Industry Association of America (RIAA).
They soon set about singling out the songs that peeved them in the charts. They picked out tracks that became known as the ‘Filthy Fifteen’ that served as their indictment against current chart indecency. Rather comically, it also included Sheena Easton’s ‘Sugar Wall’, which was also secretly written by Prince. And when Judas Priest’s ‘Eat Me Alive’ ended up on the list, they even wondered, “Have we gone too far?” before deciding, “We were a metal band. We didn’t sing about daffodils and roses,” the trick is in the name there.
Vince Green of Mötley Crüe also pointed out the irony of the movement. This is something the American government have been getting wrong ever since they investigated ‘Louie, Louie’ by The Kingsmen for two years and thrust it towards a sensation. As 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.” Meanwhile, Madonna simply laughed: “I’m sexy. How can I avoid it?”
It also rallied other artists around the 15. Frank Zappa, Dee Snider and John Denver were among the artists who spoke out against the censorship of music amid the wave of discussion that followed. However, the PMRC demanded that a system must be put in place for parents to decipher what music was deemed suitable. Thus, the RIAA came up with a route around censoring the music itself and came up with the explicit content warning sticker on albums. And Gore’s children, as expected, are now well-adjusted adults, with Prince’s perversions clearly not affecting them too much.
‘Darling Nikki’ is a mark of Prince’s uncompromising approach to the artists not only of the 1980s but the revolutionary ’60s before them. When a commercially damaging Parental Advisory label was slapped on the records, they refused to yield to the assertions that they were “sex fiend[s]”. They felt safe in the knowledge that they were not living a life of sin, and any messages they extolled wouldn’t be harmful if sense and sensibility were applied.
The ‘Filthy Fifteen’ songs censored for eroticism:
- ‘Darling Nikki’ – Prince
- ‘Sugar Walls’ – Sheena Easton
- ‘Eat Me Alive’ – Judas Priest
- ‘Strap on Robbie Baby’ – Vanity
- ‘Bastard’ – Mötley Crüe
- ‘Let Me Put My Love Into You’ – AC/DC
- ‘We’re Not Gonna Take It’ – Twisted Sister
- ‘Dress You Up’ – Madonna’
- ‘Animal (F–k like a Beast) – WASP
- ‘High ‘n’ Dry’ – Def Leppard
- ‘Into the Coven’ – Mercyful Fate
- ‘Trashed’ – Black Sabbath
- ‘In My House’ – Mary Jane Girls
- ‘Possessed’ – Venom
- ‘She Bop’ – Cyndi Lauper
