Artifact Six

Darick Lee. "Parental advisory warning labels steeped in controversy". 23 Jan 2007.http://www.hushyourmouth.com/parental_advisory_labels.htm.

There was once a time when parents didn't care what their kids listened to, just as long as they knew it as well. In 1984, Tipper Gore, former Vice President Al Gore wife, bought her twelve year old daughter Prince's "Purple Rain"album, expecting only hear the songs she knew such as " When Doves Cry" and "Let's Go Crazy". While so enjoyed those songs, she was appalled by the content of the rest of songs on the album, where Prince sang some racy lyrics. Tipper decided that action must be taken to help prevent music like Prince's to be heard by children and in 1985, the Parent's Music Resource Center was born.

The PMRC was made up of congressmen, senator's wives and many other people with some degree of political power. The spokesperson for the PMRC, Susan Baker, wife of Secretary of Treasury James A. Baker III. Baker, joined the cause when she overheard her 7-year old daughter singing Madonna's "Like A Virgin".

Baker's motto to inappropriate music was treating it like something you would never give to a child, like a dirty magazine."Pornography sold to children is illegal. Enforcing that is not censorship. It is simply the act of a responsible society that recognizes that some material made for adults is not appropriate for children." What she means in this that while some songs are okay for everyone to hear, there are those that should never reach young ears.

Although songs had been censored from the air since the 1950's from Billie Holiday's "Love for Sale" for endorsing prostitution to Frank Zappa's " I Don't Want To Get Drafted" for fear of a backlash against recruiting for the service, anyone, from a 10 year old to a 50 year could buy their album with no repercussions. While the PMRC wanted a rating system similar to the video game rating system today, by the time of the hearing, they changed their minds and wanted to label offensive albums.

Through out the years, the "PARENT ADVISORY" label has become a music industry standard. Some stores such as Wal-Mart wouldn't take any albums with the label in the early 90's, so record companies released edited versions of the albums so that Wal-Mart could sell them. But by 2003, the line between kid-appropriate and kid-inappropriate began to blur. Artists who used obscenities regularly such as Eminem had labels on his CD's while artists such as Janet Jackson and TLC also had their CD's labeled. The only problem was that there was no real indicator of what CD had what kind of lyrics, from drug references to sexuality explicit, the PMRC had accomplished something while creating another problem.