Rock Is a Four-Letter Word

By JAY COCKS

Tipper Gore can do something you can't. She can quote the loopy lyrics of a rather recherche song by W.A.S.P.: "I got pictures of naked ladies lying on my bed/ I whiff the smell of a sweet convulsion/ Thoughts are sweating inside my head/ . . . I start to howl in heat/ I . . ." and this next word presents a problem. How to handle propriety and make her point at the same time? Spelling is the answer. She pronounces each of the four letters, then finishes, ". . . like a beast."

Few people outside a core of heavy-metal diehards will know that Gore gets the lyrics a little askew. Not many others may even have heard of W.A.S.P. Tipper Gore, wife of Senator Albert Gore Jr., and some other well-connected women in Washington are changing all that. They have banded together as Parents Music Resource Center (P.M.R.C.) and, with the National Parent-Teacher Association, want everyone to know that rock-'n'-roll music has gone too far. "The music industry is cashing in on shock value, and parents have said, 'That's it--no further,' " says Ann Kahn, president of the NPTA. It is not only the W.A.S.P. who stand accused. It seems as though everyone is coming down on Judas Priest, Motley Crue, AC/DC, Twisted Sister and other metal machines. Madonna is being scrutinized. So is Sheena Easton, singing about her "sugar walls," and Sheila E., strutting her stuff. And Prince, going on about a girl masturbating with a magazine. And Michael Jackson too.

Gore's worries were fully aired in Washington last week when she and kindred spirits appeared before the Senate Commerce Committee to thrash out rock's putative excesses. Gore faced at least one friendly face on the committee: her husband, the Democratic Senator from Tennessee. The opposition included such music-business figures as Rock Avant-Gardist Frank Zappa, John Denver, and Dee Snider of Twisted Sister. Whatever their political effects, the hearings were certainly high on entertainment value.

Senator Ernest Hollings, a Democrat from South Carolina, announced that "the only redeeming social value" he could find in rock "is that the words are inaudible." The P.M.R.C.'s Susan Baker, wife of Treasury Secretary James Baker, evoked a "proliferation of songs glorifying rape, sado-masochism, incest, the occult and suicide by a growing number of bands." Zappa announced that "the complete list of P.M.R.C. demands reads like an instruction manual for some sinister kind of toilet-training program to housebreak all composers and performers." Nebraska Democrat J. James Exon suggested ominously that "unless the music industry cleans up its act, there might well be legislation." Singer Dee Snider showed up in tight jeans and a cut-off T shirt and fought past his nervousness to tell everyone that the band's song Under the Blade, allegedly a glorification of S-M, was in fact about fear of surgery. "The only sado-masochism present," he insisted, "was in Tipper Gore's mind."

Gore and other P.M.R.C. founders want song lyrics made available with records and tapes, and are demanding, in Gore's words, "a one-time panel to recommend a uniform set of criteria." The P.M.R.C. has backed off from its earlier insistence on specific ratings, such as V for violence, X for explicit lyrics and O for occult. "We do not want censorship in any shape or form," Gore insists. Comments Baker: "The issue affects my family. I really believe that the escalation of violence and sexuality is a form of child abuse."

The ruckus over rock's excesses flares on historical cue: Elvis' pelvis in the '50s; Beatles and drugs, sex and Stones in the '60s; punk anarchy in the '70s. Those controversies were just as intense and at times even more widespread. Presley shook up the whole country; the Sex Pistols played yet another funeral march for the British Empire. Things simmered down with time, which is probably what is most needed now. Even liberals like New York Governor Mario Cuomo have voiced concern about explicit lyrics. Danny Goldberg, president of Gold Mountain Records, has organized his own group to counter the influence of the P.M.R.C., but readily admits, "I empathize with parents who are shocked to see what happens as their kids grow up."

Shock waves really started spreading this spring. The NPTA had been weighing in against the record companies for a year before that, but their only response was a stereophonic yawn. The women of the P.M.R.C. fired off a strong letter to the Recording Industry Association of America, an organization whose most prominent responsibility is to certify record sales. They also arranged for an interdenominational minister named Jeff Ling ("I am to religion what a free agent is to football") to put on an audiovisual show of rock naughtiness in Washington in May. Capital movers and shakers shifted in their seats while Ling read from the works of Judas Priest. Not long after, the women heard from RIAA President Stanley Gortikov. He announced that record companies would, at their own discretion, put warning labels on certain albums: PARENTAL GUIDANCE--EXPLICIT LYRICS.

This satisfied no one. The P.M.R.C. and the NPTA agreed that such caveats were too mild. Some record companies have gone along, but others have resisted. "It's moronic," David Geffen, chairman of Geffen Records, told TIME's Peter Ainslie. "I have no intention of carrying a warning label on my records. It's censorship. They'd have to pass a law before I would do it." Some observers of the music business believe that the RIAA acquiesced to label warnings because it did not want to ruffle feathers while lobbying for passage of a bill that would place a surcharge on the manufacture of home recording equipment and blank tape. Gortikov denies such charges and instead talks generally about "de facto censorship" and "the possible dilution of rights." Ling, now a consultant for the P.M.R.C., asserts that "any artist who is a true artist won't care about a rating." Singers and songwriters have other ideas. "I feel more akin to the rebels than the reverends," says John Fogerty. "This whole thing sounds kind of dangerous to me. Who will assign these labels anyway? Once you get a rating system, you may then in fact not see certain records with certain ratings in the stores or hear them on the radio." Jackson Browne wonders if his albums could get rated P for political, or whether such exercises in innocent hedonism as Rosie and Redneck Friend would be slapped with an X.

Many of the songs targeted for censure are performed by marginal rock acts or are obscure cuts on albums. Indeed, the W.A.S.P. song that Gore quotes has not even been released in the U.S. But implicit in the concerns of Browne and his peers is that writers and performers, not record companies, will be the ones to pay the heaviest price if a ratings deal is struck. "A lot of my records would have been banned or stickered under this system," says Randy Newman. "Even without it, a lot of my stuff has been kept off the radio." Fogerty recalls reading a newspaper column attacking one of his loveliest Creedence Clearwater Revival tunes, Lookin' Out My Back Door, because the writer thought a line about a lawn was a reference to smokable grass.

Heavy-metal music is a particularly easy target for critics because its audience is relatively small: a crowd of tuned-out, working-class white adolescent males who drink too much beer and whoop it up for the thunderous guitar licks and outrageous stage antics. The major social impact of a heavy- metal concert is belching. Nevertheless, pressure groups have seized on the music's theatrical excessiveness, literalized it, then tried to get all of rock to take the rap.

Rock is disinclined to do that. Goldberg says bluntly, "I don't believe these mothers speak for anything resembling the majority," and has enlisted the American Civil Liberties Union to buttress the Musical Majority, an organization of managers, radio executives, publishers and artists, who will mount an offensive against the ratings plan. Increasingly, with Band Aid, Live Aid and Farm Aid, this is a time of social activism for rock, and this storm over ratings breaks at a time when, as Goldberg puts it, "music is getting political again, and some political forces want to put music back in its place." It comes down to a simple matter of history. Rock 'n' roll is proud music that has never known its place, so it will be hard to put it in one now.

With reporting by Richard Stengel/Washington and Denise Worrell/Los Angeles