PMRC Senate hearings — explicit-lyrics 'Parental Advisory' stickers established
The Parents Music Resource Center, co-founded by Tipper Gore and Susan Baker, holds high-profile Senate hearings calling for warning labels on records with explicit content. The RIAA agrees to implement the 'Parental Advisory: Explicit Content' label in 1985. While not exclusively about hip-hop, the labeling regime becomes a defining commercial constraint on rap distribution through the late 1980s and 1990s.
Why it matters
September 19, 1985. The Senate Commerce Committee held a hearing about whether records should carry warning labels. The Parents Music Resource Center, founded by Tipper Gore (then the wife of Senator Al Gore) and Susan Baker (then the wife of Treasury Secretary James Baker), wanted them to. The PMRC had a list of fifteen songs they thought were the worst, the Filthy Fifteen. Prince was on it. Madonna was on it. Twisted Sister was on it. Hip-hop was not really on it. Hip-hop in September 1985 was Run-DMC and Whodini and the Fat Boys, and nobody on the PMRC was scared of the Fat Boys yet. Here is the irony. The labeling regime the hearings produced, that black-and-white "Parental Advisory: Explicit Content" sticker you have seen on every CD and digital download since, is what later kept N.W.A., Geto Boys, 2 Live Crew, and most of late-80s and 90s rap out of major retailers like Walmart. The PMRC was not trying to regulate rap. They built the cage anyway. Rap is the thing that ended up in it.
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