Washington, 19 September 1985. A Senate committee room, a long table, a row of senators, and three musicians called as witnesses: Frank Zappa, John Denver and Dee Snider of Twisted Sister. The subject was the content of popular records. The complainants were four women who had founded the Parents Music Resource Center that May, and the list they brought with them ran to fifteen songs.
Not one of those fifteen was a death metal record. There were no death metal records. Death had put out four demos and no album, Morbid Angel had not been signed, and the record that gave the style its name, Possessed's Seven Churches, was still six weeks from release on Combat. The hearing that is blamed for everything that later happened to this music took place before the music existed.
What it produced instead was a machine. Death metal walked into that machine about five years later, and the parts of it that actually caught the genre were not the parts anybody was arguing about in 1985.
What the hearing actually built
Nothing was legislated. That is the first thing people get wrong. The four founders, Tipper Gore, Susan Baker, Pam Howar and Sally Nevius, wanted a rating system for records, and what they got, on 1 November 1985, was an agreement from the Recording Industry Association of America to put a generic warning on releases the labels themselves judged explicit. The familiar black and white version of that mark arrived in 1996. It was voluntary throughout.
The PMRC proposal is an ill-conceived piece of nonsense.
Frank Zappa, testimony to the United States Senate Commerce Committee, 19 September 1985
Voluntary is the word that matters, and it is why the whole exercise was more effective than a statute would have been. A law can be tested in a court. An industry agreement cannot, because there is nobody to sue.
The sticker was never the punishment
The shelf was.
A warning mark on a sleeve does nothing on its own. What it does is give a retailer a reason, and the largest music retailers in the United States took it. Walmart and others refused stickered product outright or restricted it to adults, and since Walmart was for years the biggest record shop in the country, a mark applied by a label in New York could remove an album from more counters than any censor could have reached with a warrant.
The hearing built a sticker, the sticker built a shelf, and the shelf did the work a law could not.
For death metal, all of this was academic and revealing at the same time. These records were never in Walmart. They were in independent shops, in mail order lists and in envelopes, which is exactly the economy set out in tapes, zines and covers. The PMRC machinery closed the mainstream door on a genre that had never been inside the building. The genre lost nothing, and the mainstream metal bands who did lose something learned to live with it.
The courts said no, repeatedly
Wherever anybody tried to turn the mood of 1985 into an actual instrument, the courts took it apart.
In Nevada, the families of two young men sued Judas Priest on the theory that subliminal commands had been hidden in a 1978 recording. The trial ran from 16 July to 24 August 1990. The judge dismissed it, holding that what the plaintiffs had found was a chord and a breath falling together by accident. That is the high water mark of the whole panic: two years of preparation, a full trial, and a finding that the evidence was a coincidence of sound.
Washington State tried statute instead. House Bill 2554 was signed in March 1992 and required recordings judged erotic to be labelled for adults only and kept away from anybody under eighteen. A coalition of Seattle musicians challenged it, and in April 1994 the Washington Supreme Court struck it down on due process grounds: five days was not enough notice before a hearing, not every affected dealer was told proceedings were under way, and a civil finding could not be contested at the criminal trial that followed it.
And in Los Angeles on 31 May 1995 a senator running for president read out a short list of acts he said were producing nightmares of depravity, with a death metal band at the top of it. No bill followed. No agency acted. The speech was the entire event.
The register in Bonn, which did work
While American legislators were losing in court, a German office founded in 1954 and sitting in Bonn was quietly doing what none of them managed. It keeps an index of media judged harmful to young people, and an index entry is not a bonfire. It is a locked drawer. An indexed record cannot be advertised, cannot be displayed where minors can see it, cannot be sold to them, and generally cannot be sold by mail order at all. The title stays sellable in theory and disappears in practice, because no shop will carry stock it is not allowed to put in a window.
An entry runs for twenty five years and then lapses automatically unless the office starts again. As of 31 October 2025 the register held 2,069 indexed audio recordings, which is a far larger number than most people outside Germany would guess.
Cannibal Corpse got the heaviest version of it. Until 2006 the band's first three albums could not be sold in Germany and the songs on them could not be performed there, so that a set list crossing the border had to be rewritten. That is not a sticker and it is not a retailer's preference. It is the only case in this genre where the music itself, rather than the packaging around it, was reached by an authority.
| Instrument | Who operates it | What it can do | Effect on death metal |
|---|---|---|---|
| Parental advisory mark, from November 1985 | The labels themselves, voluntarily | Flag a release | Almost none, the records were not in chain stores |
| Retail policy | Walmart, Kmart and other chains | Remove a title from most counters in the country | Kept the genre in independent shops and mail order |
| The courts | Plaintiffs and state legislatures | Nothing, on the record so far | Judas Priest cleared in 1990, Washington's statute struck down in 1994 |
| The German index | A federal office, since 1954 | Ban advertising, display, mail order and sale to minors, for 25 years | Cannibal Corpse shut out of a whole market until 2006 |
What the siege actually achieved
Very little of what it intended, and a great deal it did not.
The commercial effect is the one everybody predicted and nobody in authority believed: a warning on a record is an advertisement. Musicians said so at the time and sales figures across the period support them. Telling a fifteen year old that an object is forbidden is not a deterrent, it is a recommendation, and death metal in particular was already sold on the promise of being unacceptable.
The real damage was structural and it fell on the boring things. Touring bands had to worry about what was in the van at a border. Distributors had to keep two versions of a catalogue. Whole territories went dark for a decade. A German promoter booking Cannibal Corpse in the nineties was booking a band that could not play half its own material.
And the argument was never really about pictures or stickers anyway. It was about what the songs said, which is a subject with far more in it than any of the people at that table in 1985 suspected, and it is set out properly in death Metal Lyrics. The words are where this fight always ends up, because the words are the only part of a record that anybody has to read.
