[On September 19th, 1985, Congress held hearings over the concept of parental advisory warnings for music. So this week, I’ll commemorate that complex anniversary by highlighting histories of censorship in America, leading up to a weekend post on the very fraught state of these issues in 2025.]
Three pairings that reflect the multiple angles through which the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) sought to censor pop music.
1) Susan Baker and Tipper Gore: The PMRC was formed in May 1985 by four powerful DC women known as the Washington Wives: Baker (whose husband was Treasury Secretary James Baker), Gore (Senator Al Gore), Pam Howar (realtor Raymond Howar), and Sally Nevius (City Council Chairman John Nevius). All four played important roles in both the short-lived organization overall and the September 1985 Congressional hearings specifically, but it was Baker and Gore who testified at length in those hearings, making an in-depth case for at least labeling (and at worst directly censoring) pop music. Baker, for example, argued that pop songs feature “pervasive messages aimed at children which promote and glorify suicide, rape, sadomasochism, and so on.”
2) Joseph Coors and Mike Love: As with most things in politics, it took a good bit of financial support for the PMRC not just to come into being, but also and especially to become prominent enough to merit those Congressional hearings. One of the organization’s chief funders isn’t a surprise: beer entrepreneur Joseph Coors had been a key supporter of Ronald Reagan’s 1984 re-election campaign, and a longstanding conservative activist and fundraiser before (and after) this moment. But the other chief financial backer of the PMRC is much more surprising, at least to this AmericanStudier: Beach Boys founding member and vocalist Mike Love. It’s fair to say that the PMRC might have had less of an impact if it hadn’t been able to highlight a pop music icon as one of its supporters, had seemed entirely like outsiders to the industry—so Love’s support for this pop music censorship was as meaningful as it is frustrating.
3) Joe Stuessy and Paul King: As a professor and public scholar, though, it’s this final pairing of “experts” who testified at the Congressional hearings which I find particularly frustrating. Paul King was a child and adolescent psychiatrist, and so I suppose it stands to reason that he might be willing to share his perspective on factors that could negatively affect those groups (although I bet his teen patients weren’t happy with him). But Stuessy was a professor of music at the University of Texas at San Antonio, and one who, as he says in the opening of his testimony (available at the hyperlink above, and also in this video excerpt), had “taught a course in the history of rock music for 12 years at two universities.” I don’t like to judge the teaching of my fellow professors, especially not from afar, but I have to think Stuessy’s course didn’t do a good job tracing just how consistently and aggressively rock music had been under attack since its origins—attacks that he helped continue and amplify at these 1985 hearings.
Special post this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Censorship histories or current events you’d highlight?
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