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Who’d like to hear about the “1985 Rock Porn Hearings”?
- It’s become known as the “PMRC Senate hearing,” or the “Tipper Gore-Frank Zappa hearing,” or the “rock-porn hearing.”
- It was September 19, 1985, smack dab in the middle of the Reagan era. Moral panics were the order of the day.
- Sen. Al Gore’s wife, Tipper, was upset that a Prince album she bought for her daughter had risque lyrics. She literally made a federal case out of it.
- As politicians and their wives implicitly threatened the music industry and the First Amendment, the unlikeliest trio of musicians — avant-garde composer Frank Zappa, hair-metal howler Dee Snider, and safe-as-milk singer-songwriter John Denver — passionately defended artistic freedom before the federal government simply because it needed to be done.
- But in the end the censors got what they wanted. “Objectionable” records received a warning label, and rappers — not heavy-metal bands — were the most likely to be labeled.
–except from a business insider article on the subject
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