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"The fact that we are in Washington and are married to important men has
certainly helped our cause," says Mrs. Baker. But the founders did not expect the tidal
wave of public interest, including more than 10,000 letters from parents and teenagers
and nonstop phone calls.
"I absolutely had no idea this was an issue waiting to be born," says Pam Howar,
the group's president and wife of a top Washington real estate developer.
The music industry is responding with alacrity and some grumbling.
So far 19 recording companies have agreed to put the warning "parental guidance:
explicit lyrics" on selected records. Buyers will see them in stores "in a couple
of months," says a spokesman for the Recording Industry Association of America.
The National Association of Broadcasters has alerted its member rock stations. By
some accounts, program managers are beginning to screen music more carefully.
PMRC has been invited to present its case at the NAB convention in Dallas Sept.
12.
PMRC has also sparked a congressional hearing for Sept. 18 before a Senate
Commerce subcommittee. Although the subcommittee says the hearing is for "information
only," music industry spokesmen note that husbands of PMRC members are
members of the panel.
Gary Stevens, president of Doubleday Broadcasting and overseer of rock stations
in six cities, has become one of the few outspoken critics of PMRC. He opposes its
campaign as a first step toward censorship, which could prevent some records and
videos from being broadcast. "Who knows where it stops?" he says. "Once the labels
are on, they're going to be all over us."
Mrs. Howar, of the Parents Music Resource Workshop, confirms those fears. "I
think they're going to find they have to respond to community pressure," she says.
While PMRC has stirred activity, its founders are far from satisfied. The "parental
guidance" label falls short of their goal of formation of a panel, composed of
music industry and community members, to set uniform criteria for warning labels.
PMRC also wants the label to read "R," for restricted.
"It's a truth-in-packaging type issue," says Mrs. Gore. If each record company sets
different standards for labels, it will "confuse the consumer," she says.
Gore discovered the need for warnings when her 12-year-old daughter asked to
buy "Purple Rain," a hit album by superstar Prince. "All I knew was that Prince
was a new figure on the scene," she says, adding that she had liked one of his songs
on the radio.
Once her daughter brought "Purple Rain" home, Gore heard a song that began,
"I knew [a] girl named Nikki/I guess you could say she was a sex fiend," followed by a
graphic sexual description. The album was immediately remanded to an upper shelf.
PMRC makes no apologies for shocking other parents, public officials, and music
executives who seldom listen to rock music. On its list of unacceptable lyrics are
words from the group Motley Crue's top-selling "Shout at the Devil' album:
". . . now I'm killing you . . . Watch your face turning blue."
They also point to a Prince album entitled "Dirty Mind" that praises incest as
"everything it's said to be."
The trickle of explicit language in rock has become a river, says the Rev. Jeff
Ling, a minister, rock music expert, and consultant to PMRC.
"Kids have a very difficult problem with self image as it is," he says, adding that
problems increase when they see "mankind at its most base."
"All of society is saturated" with such messages, he concedes. But like his fellow
activists, he says that "you can only tackle one issue at a time." He says they are
choosing rock music because it is aimed at preteens and teens.
The group calculated that the average teen-ager listens to such music five hours a
day, or 10,000 hours during Grades 7 through 12.
Bill Steding, general manager of Central Broadcasting in Dallas, says he's expecting
a "lot more receptivity" from radio programmers at the broadcasters' convention
next month. He says he has noticed stations already becoming more "conservative."
"Even radio stations didn't listen very well to the lyrics" in the past, he says.
"Now they've started to pay attention."
His rock station, KAFM in Dallas, has long had strict rules about sex, violence,
and drugs in music. "We edit or do not play certain songs," Mr. Steding says. At the
same time, the station is one of the top five in the city.
"We just took a position . . . that we wanted to have a positive impact on teens,"
he says.
He adds that a recent survey found that policy helped the station's popularity.
The survey indicated that listeners who most objected to explicit or violent music
were 15- to 18-year-olds.
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