 Recently, on Out of Frame, we talked about how jazz, blues, and soul musicians led the charge for civil rights and racial integration in America. But that was far from the only time artists have had to stick up for individual rights. We flash forward to the 1980s, when a group of well-connected busybodies, I mean fine upstanding ladies who called themselves the Parents' Music Resource Center, launched an attack on recording artists like Prince, ACDC, Madonna, and Death Leopard. The PMRC was founded by a group of four women, infamously known as the Washington Wives, and as the moniker suggests, they were all married to powerful figures of national politics. They were Sally Neveas, wife of a former Washington DC city council chairman, Pam Hauer, the wife of a successful DC area realtor, Susan Baker, wife of Treasury Secretary James Baker and Tipper Gore, wife of then-Senator and everybody's favorite Emperor of the Moon, Al Gore. At its peak, the group consisted of just 22 members, and yet, through their influence, they were able to get national attention and even congressional hearings to combat lyrics and music videos they believed were corrupting America's youth. Now, given the musical landscape we all live in today, it's hard to imagine recording artists like Cindy Lauper being considered porn rock, but in 1985, that's exactly what the PMRC claimed. In fact, that year, they released a list of songs they called the Filthy 15, a group so objectionable that something absolutely had to be done to protect parents and kids from their pernicious influence. For the children. Okay, fine, you say. Parents groups are always finding new things to worry about and it's everybody's right to decide what their kids get exposed to, so what's the big deal? The big deal is that even though the PMRC publicly asked record companies to voluntarily replace warning labels on their albums, their proximity and connection to government made it clear that just like with the movie rating system established in 1968 or the Comics Code Authority in 1954, if the industry leaders didn't regulate themselves, politicians were all too happy to step in and do it for them, stomping on the First Amendment in the process. To that end, in September 1985, the United States Senate's Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee held a hearing on behalf of the Parents' Music Resource Center, quote, on the subject of the content of certain sound recordings and suggestions that recording packages be labeled to provide a warning to prospective purchasers of sexually explicit or other potentially offensive content. And surprise, one of the key senators overseeing the hearing was Al Gore. Al Gore and his cohorts like Senator Paula Hawkins and my own former Senator Jim Exon led the charge. Playing music like Van Halen's Hot for Teacher and Twisted Sisters, We're Not Gonna Take It, accusing these songs of glorifying suicide, rape, and sadomasochism. How do you think there is so much sadomasochism and bondage in some of these new songs? They invited psychologists and musicologists to come talk about the influencing power of music and use their testimony to say that parents just had no possible way of ever knowing what their kids were listening to, and that exposure to this devil music would create Satan-worshipping, violent, drug-abusing children around the country. Seriously. Keep in mind, this was 1985, not 1885. Fortunately, in order to balance the hearings, the Senate committee also invited a handful of recording artists to testify, including John Denver, Frank Zappa, and Twisted Sister frontman Dee Snyder. If you watch the hearings, which I encourage everyone to do in full, it's clear that the senators were expecting John Denver to be on their side, for Zappa to come off like a weirdo, and for Snyder to be an incomprehensible troglodyte. But in a shocking twist, these three men spoke as eloquently on behalf of free speech as anyone has ever done. Zappa came out of the gate hard. The PMRC proposal is 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. It is my understanding that, in law, First Amendment issues are decided with a preference for the least restrictive alternative. In this context, the PMRC demands are the equivalent of treating Dandruff by decapitation. John Denver expressed serious concerns that any kind of rating system would be subject to political tampering and would be controlled by people who misunderstand or misinterpret the music they're rating. These hearings have been called to determine whether or not the government should intervene to enforce this practice. Mr. Chairman, this would approach censorship. May I be very clear that I am strongly opposed to censorship of any kind in our society or anywhere else in the world. I've had, in my experience, two encounters with a sort of censorship. My song, Rockin' Mountain High, was banned from many radio stations as a drug-related song. Mr. Chairman, the suppression of the people of a society begins, in my mind, with a 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. In a mature and incredibly diverse society such as ours, the access to all perspectives of an issue becomes more and more important. Those things which in our experience are undesirable generally prove to be unfurthering and sooner or later become boring. That process cannot and should not be stifled. And Snyder presented the case that, far from being pernicious, his music and his stage presence was about freedom of expression and kindness while outing himself as a T-Total in Christian, a loving husband and father who took the responsibility for raising his own kids very seriously. I don't advocate sexism, the use of drugs, and drinking, so I don't write about those things. I only write about things I believe in. As I said, I pride myself on writing lyrics that are not offensive and that are saying something positive. Most of my songs are about personal freedom. So when someone says there's a song about sadomasochism and bondage, when someone says we're not going to take it, it's violent lyrical content, which is what it's been rated for, yes, I'm defensive, yes, that gets me angry. I'm trying to get adults to see that heavy metal is not totally a bad thing. At one point, Senator Slade Gordon accuses Frank Zappa of not understanding the difference between government action and private action and claims that no one is pushing legislation. But watch how quickly the thin pretense of voluntary action falls away. I simply want to say to you that I suspect that unless the industry quote cleans up their act and I use that end quote word again, there's likely to be legislation and it seems to me that it would not be too far removed from reality or too offensive to anyone if you could follow the general guidelines right wrong or indifferent that are now in place with regard to the movie industry. I can't help but hear Exxon's words and think about how much it actually sounds like organized crime. You know, I'd hate for something bad to happen to you if you don't do what we want. If it's clear to everyone in the music industry that if they didn't give in to the Washington wives, their politically powerful husbands would make life a lot worse for recording artists using the law. That's not really voluntary, is it? And here's the thing, the PMRC did have a point. Kids are influenced by the music and entertainment they're exposed to and of course it's difficult for parents to vet every song their children are listening to. But if Tipper Gore and her friends were really just going for voluntary action, they could have created a publication that warned people about the albums and songs they thought were dangerous or highlighted uplifting music the kids should be listening to. They could have spent their efforts creating value for parents like consumer reports and car and driver do for their readers. But they didn't do that. Instead, thanks to their position and political connections, they got the federal government to drag musicians in front of Congress, conducting hearings and threatening legislation, all while claiming that they were just looking out for the best interests of children. And maybe that's the actual lesson here. There's a school of economics called Public Choice that looks at political action with the same kind of clear-eyed skepticism as we tend to look at other areas of life. It's tempting to think that politicians are always working for the well-being of everyone or at least all of their constituents, but in reality, they're just human beings. Often self-interested, acting mainly on behalf of themselves and their friends. Or their wives. It didn't matter to the PMRC or their powerful friends in the Senate if their actions might come at the expense of thousands of artists and business owners, didn't matter to them if they cost consumers billions of dollars by requiring more lawyers, censors, and more printing expenses on every album. They were prepared to go a lot farther than that, including pushing legislation that directly violated the First Amendment of the Constitution. And if you listened to the PMRC hearings, they had some support in the Senate to do it. In the days just before the hearings, the recording industry caved to the Washington Wives' demands and started putting parental advisory stickers, the tipper sticker, on albums they deemed to be offensive. But in an ironic twist, sales of albums with explicit lyrics actually went up after the hearings and the parental advisory warnings. And they outraged artists, spurring the rise of a new wave of anti-censorship recordings and statements from across the musical spectrum, with contributions from punk bands like No Effects, the Ramones, and the Sex Pistols, to hip-hop and rap artists like Ice T and NWA, to rock bands like Sonic Youth. After all that effort, including direct threats of legislated censorship, the Parents' Music Resource Center got exactly what it wanted and yet created a massive cultural and artistic backlash against censorship at the same time. What's troubling now is that it seems as if censorship is once again on the rise, but this time it's not coming from social conservatives or uptight school moms, it's coming from young people and their professors who believe that controlling the language people are allowed to hear will be able to stop the spread of ideas they don't like. But thinking about what happened in the 80s with the PMRC hearings gives me hope. The enemies of free speech may sometimes win the upper hand, but censorship cannot survive for long, no matter how well intended it might be. The kids just ain't gonna take it. Thanks for watching this episode of Out of Frame, so what do you think about censorship and free speech? Leave a comment below and let's start a conversation. And if you want to see more video essays like this, hit that subscribe button and check us out at FeeOnline on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. See you next time.