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."