Tipper’s Refrain

When a raunchy lyric by Prince sent Tipper Gore on a mid-1980s crusade to clean up the music industry, she and her followers in the Parents Music Resource Center were shrugged off by many as prudes, tiresome dilettantes and, perhaps most dismissive of all, as “those Washington wives.”

But when Mary Elizabeth “Tipper” Gore goes to the dais tonight at the Democratic National Convention as the prospective first lady, she brings with her the PMRC movement’s surprising, lasting legacy--and, for the music industry, the lingering anxieties that come with it.

In recent years, she has been relatively quiet on the issue, and her group’s acronym, PMRC, long ago faded from headlines. But with her husband’s selection of running mate Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman, her moral mission has come back into the national spotlight. For the music industry, it never receded into the shadows.

Her campaign has had a very real effect, both on consumers and recording artists themselves--some of whom think that the woman derided as an ad-hoc censor might have been ahead of her time.

For example, the ubiquitous stickers warning of graphic material on albums were a direct result of Tipper Gore’s 1985 push for Congress to enact restrictive legislation. Twenty-two record companies, fearing she just might succeed, agreed to police themselves.

The agreement promptly created a marketplace reality for the music industry, and a new headache.

The nation’s huge mass merchandisers, such as Wal-Mart and Kmart, slammed the delivery door shut on any stickered album. Suddenly, the major music merchants for America’s heartland--and in many rural areas the only merchants--had a codified filter.

To sidestep that barrier, record companies began producing “clean” versions of albums full of bleeps and voids, which are free of the warning labels and their stigma. Artists resent them because their work sounds like broken video games filled with odd sound effects. Fans hate them.

“A lot of teens, looking for rebellion or their rite of passage or what have you, they won’t buy an album without the sticker,” says Michael Greene, president and CEO of the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences. “To them it’s the ‘Bad Housekeeping’ seal of approval.”

Cleaned-Up Songs Are a Compromise

Still, the clean versions provide a middle ground for families battling over what their kids can buy. Parents can keep the profane version out of the house, while the kids get to listen to at least something from their favorite artists, be it DMX or Limp Bizkit, both of which hit No. 1 on the nation’s pop charts.

Reprise Records President Howie Klein is perhaps the most vocal critic of Tipper Gore’s short-lived but far-reaching campaign that led to these significant changes, which he calls “insidious.”

“It goes deeper than economic issues,” Klein says. “It affects what artists record and who the record companies sign.”

You wouldn’t think so from perusing the pop charts for the past year. Never has there been a greater proliferation of music with lyrics that push every conceivable boundary of the past. Artists such Eminem, Limp Bizkit, Dr. Dre, Lil’ Kim and dozens of others with albums bearing warning labels have sold millions upon millions of copies.

In rural areas, where the major--and conservative--retailers dominate, fans are finding what they want via the Internet.

Although the industry’s attention on Tipper Gore’s campaign against them mostly has been focused on the aisles of department stores, Artemis Records President Danny Goldberg says the most dangerous result has been in the corridors of government.

“What I would say it did do was legitimize culture-bashing for the Democrats,” said Goldberg, also president of the ACLU Foundation of Southern California. “Now, from left to right in Washington, you have a political class that’s tone-deaf to popular culture. For 15 years, there’s been a constant drumbeat telling young people that their culture is immoral.”

He traces that back to the day Tipper Gore, a mother of three, first heard Prince purring sexually explicit lyrics in the song “Darling Nikki” on her 11-year-old daughter’s “Purple Rain” album.

A longtime activist, Gore quickly turned her shock and anger to action on that day in 1984. She and Susan Baker, wife of then-Treasury Secretary James A. Baker III, founded Parents Music Resource Center, known as PMRC.

The appeal of the cause cut across party lines, drawing in an unlikely ally for the wife of a Democratic senator--the Christian right.

Suddenly, Tipper Gore had greater national recognition--and notoriety--than her husband. She became Public Enemy No. 1 for the music community, an odd situation for a longtime follower of the Grateful Dead (a group that, interestingly, has drug-laced lyrics and fan culture) and a former drummer in a high school rock band.

“I know they think I’m a prudish, uptight, sex-disliking Washington housewife with nothing better to do than eat bonbons all day,” she said back then. “Most rock music is perfectly fine. I’m anti-explicit-sex and -violence to younger kids without notification.” The punk band the Ramones chided her in lyrics, and Ice-T made ugly references to her family in one of his rap songs. More recently rockers Rage Against the Machine stood naked and mute onstage with duct tape across their mouths and P-M-R-C spelled out across their chests. After 25 minutes, they left the stage, without playing a note.

Tom Morello is the guitarist for Rage, which played Monday for convention protesters. He is a Harvard graduate who once worked for Democratic Sen. Alan Cranston of California. He said that, although Tipper Gore may have reined in her criticisms, the mind-set is back now that Al Gore has tapped Lieberman, a self-described “culture warrior.”

“The Republican side, of course, is not any better,” Morello said, “they’re just more open and blatant in their pro-censorship stance. It’s yet another case of both parties being on the same side--the wrong side--of an issue.”

But unlike Morello, some other longtime foes of the PMRC have begun to hear words and ideas in music that exceed their own thresholds, much as Prince’s lyrics offended Tipper Gore’s parental sensibilities.

The acts pushing the envelope today, they say, are so prurient, so vile, that perhaps something does need to be done.

One of Tipper Gore’s old targets, Twisted Sister, seems like a cartoon compared to the gory, latex nightmare of Marilyn Manson; Ice-T’s fearsome imagery seems almost quaint after listening to Eminem shriek about cutting his wife’s head off. Many critics hail Eminem’s album as bold art, but others hear nothing more than thug anthems.

Jeff Pollack, a programming consultant for MTV and more than 100 radio stations, said he is still adamantly opposed to government regulation of content. But he is more welcoming of a PMRC or Lieberman-style challenge to self-regulate what’s reaching youthful fans.

“I used to be absolute about it, but now I think some things aren’t OK,” Pollack said. “The hateful stuff, the anti-gay stuff, the anti-women. . . .”

‘Rock the Vote,’ With a Wry Twist

A similar view is shared by Jeff Ayeroff, a longtime record label chief who is now an industry consultant. It was Tipper Gore’s crusade that inspired Ayeroff to create the youth-targeted “Rock the Vote,” which became famous on MTV and, in many quarters, was credited with marshaling key youth votes for President Clinton’s victory in 1992.

In a wry twist, “Rock the Vote” helped make Al Gore the vice president and, early this week, Karenna Gore Schiff--the daughter whose copy of “Purple Rain” started this whole storm--was a speaker for MTV’s “Choose or Lose,” a companion effort to “Rock the Vote.”

Ayeroff says the “Lenny Bruce defense” for raunchy artists now rings hollow. Edgy, shocking underground art is vital, he says, but becomes problematic when co-opted and packaged by the corporate mainstream. “You have to shake your head when you see Eminem and say, ‘Why is this the biggest record in America?’ ”

That it is the biggest record suggests that Tipper Gore may be needed again--or dangerous again, depending on political perspective. The surprising part of it all, though, may be that while her thinking was once mocked as a moral throwback to the 1950s anti-Elvis days, she may have actually been ahead of her time.

“In many ways, Tipper was at the forefront of the culture issues in modern days,” says Hilary Rosen, the CEO of the Recording Industry Assn. of America and a member of the Maryland delegation at the convention. “And much of what Tipper said then, the things she fought for, have become standard operating procedure.”

Gore’s brainchild, the PMRC, is still in business, but she has distanced herself since 1988, when her husband turned to national politics. The Virginia-based group is now headed by Barbara Wyatt, who wonders why the presidential candidate’s wife isn’t championing her old--and newly invigorated--cause.

“It’s a shame, she has the bully pulpit now and she could make a big difference,” Wyatt says. “But much of [Al Gore’s donation] money comes from the entertainment world, frankly, so I don’t see that happening.”