On 19 September 1985 the Senate Commerce Committee sat down to consider whether popular music was harming American children, and the three witnesses called to speak for the music industry were a progressive rock composer, the singer of Twisted Sister, and John Denver. It is the single most quoted afternoon in the history of heavy metal and almost everything popularly believed about it is slightly wrong, including who won.
No law came out of it. What came out of it was a sticker, and the sticker turned out to matter more than a law would have, for reasons nobody in the room predicted.
Four women with very good access
The Parents Music Resource Center was founded in May 1985 by Tipper Gore, Susan Baker, Pam Howar and Sally Nevius. Their husbands were, respectively, a senator, the Secretary of the Treasury, a prominent Washington property developer and a former chairman of the city council, and that combination is the entire reason a complaint about record sleeves reached a Senate committee within four months of being made.
The stated grievance was reasonable enough on its face: records had become more explicit, and a parent in a shop had no way of knowing which ones before buying. The proposed remedy was a rating system modelled on the one used for films, with categories for sex, violence, drug references and the occult, and it was that last category which turned an argument about explicit language into an argument about what a young person is allowed to think about.
The Filthy Fifteen, and who was not on it
The evidence was a list of fifteen songs, each with a letter beside it indicating the offence. Nine of them were about sex, which tells you where the real anxiety sat. Prince, Sheena Easton, Madonna, Cyndi Lauper and Vanity are on the list alongside the metal bands, and the metal bands are Judas Priest, Motley Crue, AC/DC, W.A.S.P., Def Leppard, Black Sabbath, Mercyful Fate and Venom, with Twisted Sister filed under violence for a song about a boy arguing with his father.
Not one thrash band appears anywhere on it. In September 1985 Metallica had two albums out, Slayer and Exodus had one each, and none of them had reached far enough into American retail for a committee in Washington to have heard of them. The genre that would spend the next decade being policed by the system built that afternoon had no representation in the room and no part in the argument.
| Artist | Song | Category |
|---|---|---|
| Prince | Darling Nikki | Sex |
| Sheena Easton | Sugar Walls | Sex |
| Judas Priest | Eat Me Alive | Sex |
| Vanity | Strap On Robbie Baby | Sex |
| Motley Crue | Bastard | Violence |
| AC/DC | Let Me Put My Love Into You | Sex |
| Twisted Sister | We're Not Gonna Take It | Violence |
| Madonna | Dress You Up | Sex |
| W.A.S.P. | Animal | Sex |
| Def Leppard | High 'n' Dry | Drug and alcohol use |
| Mercyful Fate | Into The Coven | Occult |
| Black Sabbath | Trashed | Drug and alcohol use |
| Mary Jane Girls | In My House | Sex |
| Venom | Possessed | Occult |
| Cyndi Lauper | She Bop | Sex |
Three witnesses, and the one nobody expected
Frank Zappa treated the proposal as a constitutional question rather than a musical one, argued that a rating system administered by a private lobby with senatorial spouses in it was an ill fitting solution to a problem nobody had measured, and was thoroughly unimpressed by the committee.
Dee Snider did the thing that made the afternoon famous. He arrived in jeans, a cut off t-shirt and hair down his back, having been set up perfectly by the committee's expectations, and then produced a careful, sober, extremely well prepared demolition of the specific claims made about his own lyrics. The PMRC had read a Twisted Sister song about a hospital operation as being about sadomasochism, and Snider said so, politely, on the record.
John Denver was the surprise. The committee had presumably invited him expecting an ally, and he told them instead that he had watched radio stations refuse to play one of his own songs because they had decided a phrase in the title was about drugs when it was about a mountain, and that people who set out to interpret lyrics on behalf of others will get it wrong every time. Coming from him, it was the most damaging testimony of the day.
The committee invited John Denver expecting an ally. He told them that people who interpret lyrics on behalf of others get it wrong every time.
What was actually agreed
Nothing was legislated and nothing was ever going to be, because a statutory rating system for records would not have survived the First Amendment for a fortnight, and everybody in the room knew it. What happened instead was a negotiated settlement with the recording industry: a warning label, applied voluntarily by the labels themselves. It became the black and white Parental Advisory logo, standardised at the start of the 1990s and still in use.
A voluntary label sounds like a defeat for the PMRC. In practice it was the more effective outcome, because it moved the decision from Congress, where it could have been challenged, to retailers, where it could not.
The sticker did its work in the shops
This is the part that hit thrash, and it hit five years after the hearing rather than during it. Large American chains, including the biggest of them, declined to stock stickered records at all. That is not censorship in the legal sense and no court could touch it. It simply meant that for a substantial part of the country, an album with a label on it was unavailable.
The result was the edited version: a second master with the offending words removed or reversed, prepared so the record could be sold in places that would not take the original. Bands who refused to make one lost that distribution. Bands who made one had to explain themselves to an audience whose whole relationship with the music was built on it not being edited for anybody.
Thrash sat awkwardly inside that regime for a further reason. The system had been designed around explicit sex, and thrash almost never wrote about sex. What it wrote about was war, addiction and institutional failure, which no category on the PMRC's list quite covered, so the stickers that landed on these records were frequently a judgement about violence in the broadest and vaguest sense.
Who actually won
Both sides, on different questions, and neither in the way they wanted. The PMRC got its label and never got its rating system, and the label taught a generation of teenagers exactly which records to look for. The industry kept legislation off the statute book and paid for it by handing retailers a veto they still hold.
The lasting damage was to the argument itself. Thirty years of subsequent research has failed to establish the causal link the hearing took as its premise, and the courtrooms of the following decade would fail to establish it too. What the afternoon of 19 September 1985 really demonstrated was how quickly a cultural anxiety with the right social connections can reach a Senate committee, and how little evidence it needs to bring with it.
That anxiety did not stay in Washington. It went out into police departments, church halls and daytime television, and it got considerably less careful on the way, which is The Satanic Panic and Thrash Metal. The full account of the trouble this music caused and attracted is the chapter this belongs to.
