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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.