[On September 19th, 1985, Congress held hearings over the concept of parental advisory warnings for music. So this week, I’ll commemorate that complex anniversary by highlighting histories of censorship in America, leading up to a weekend post on the very fraught state of these issues in 2025.]
Three pairings
that reflect the multiple angles through which the Parents
Music Resource Center (PMRC) sought to censor pop music.
1)
Susan Baker and
Tipper Gore: The PMRC was formed in May 1985 by four powerful DC women
known as the Washington
Wives: Baker (whose husband was Treasury Secretary James Baker), Gore (Senator
Al Gore), Pam Howar (realtor Raymond Howar), and Sally Nevius (City Council
Chairman John Nevius). All four played important roles in both the short-lived organization
overall and the September 1985 Congressional hearings specifically, but it was
Baker and Gore who testified at length in those hearings, making an in-depth
case for at least labeling (and at worst directly censoring) pop music. Baker,
for example, argued
that pop songs feature “pervasive messages aimed at children which promote
and glorify suicide, rape, sadomasochism, and so on.”
2)
Joseph
Coors and Mike Love: As with most things in politics, it took a good bit of
financial support for the PMRC not just to come into being, but also and especially
to become prominent enough to merit those Congressional hearings. One of the
organization’s chief funders isn’t a surprise: beer entrepreneur Joseph Coors
had been a key supporter of Ronald Reagan’s 1984 re-election campaign, and a longstanding
conservative activist and fundraiser before (and after) this moment. But
the other chief financial backer of the PMRC is much more surprising, at least
to this AmericanStudier: Beach Boys founding member and vocalist Mike Love.
It’s fair to say that the PMRC might have had less of an impact if it hadn’t
been able to highlight a pop music icon as one of its supporters, had seemed
entirely like outsiders to the industry—so Love’s support for this pop music censorship
was as meaningful as it is frustrating.
3)
Joe Stuessy and
Paul King: As a professor and public scholar, though, it’s this final
pairing of “experts” who testified at the Congressional hearings which I find particularly
frustrating. Paul King was a child and adolescent psychiatrist, and so I
suppose it stands to reason that he might be willing to share his perspective
on factors that could negatively affect those groups (although I bet his teen patients
weren’t happy with him). But Stuessy was a professor of music at the University
of Texas at San Antonio, and one who, as he says in the opening of his
testimony (available at the hyperlink above, and also in this
video excerpt), had “taught a course in the history of rock music for 12
years at two universities.” I don’t like to judge the teaching of my fellow
professors, especially not from afar, but I have to think Stuessy’s course didn’t
do a good job tracing just how consistently and aggressively rock music had
been under attack since its origins—attacks that he helped continue and amplify
at these 1985 hearings.
Special
post this weekend,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Censorship histories or current events you’d highlight?
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