Via Reason.com: When Future VP Al Gore and Spouse Tipper Teamed To Brand Prince A Public Menace
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(April 22, 2016) -- Nick Gillespie recalls at the Libertarian Reason.com:
In 1985, the future president and planet-saver and his wife were, as Tipper's 1987 best-selling anti-rock, anti-Satanism, anti-sex manifesto put it, Raising PG Kids in an X-Rated Society. Tipper headed up the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC), whose sacred document was a list of songs it called "The Filthy Fifteen." These were songs that glorified sex, drugs, Satan, and masturbation and could pervert your kid -- or even lead them to commit suicide. At number one on the list was Prince's "Darling Nikki," from his massive soundtrack record to Purple Rain (jeezus, wasn't that movie a revelation? Of what exactly, I can't remember, but finally, it seemed, a rock star had truly delivered on the genius we all wanted to see emerge from pop music into film).
[Scroll down for further.]
On page 3 of Raising PG Kids, Tipper explained why that particular song had moved her to create an organization that would use the the threat of government action to clean up "sex and violence in the media":
In December 1984, I purchased Prince's best-selling album Purple Rain for my 11-year-old daughter....When we brought the album home, out it on our stereo, and listened to it together, we heard the words to..."Darling Nikki": "I knew a girl named Nikki/guess [you] could say she was a sex fiend/I met her in a hotel lobby/Masturbating with a magazine." The song went on and on, in a similar manner. I couldn't believe my ears! The vulgar lyrics embarrassed both of us. At first, I was stunned -- then I got mad!
Of course, when you're the wife of a second-generation U.S. senator, your mad counts for more than most of the rest of us. In 1985, the Senate wasted its time and our money by holding a hearing on the dread menace of dirty lyrics and the whole bang-the-gong medley of backward masking, rock-induced suicide, and sexual promiscuity. Just a few years later, Al and Tipper would reinvent themselves as diehard Grateful Dead fans, the better to look hip while campaigning with Bill and Hillary Clinton...
But before pretending to grok the Dead, Al would showboat at "the first session on contents of music and the lyrics of records," where he appeared as a witness in favor of the PMRC's record-labeling system. Strangely enough, Al stressed -- in front of a Senate subcommittee, mind you -- that the government need not be involved...
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And there are more inconvenient truths and opinions in Mr. Gillespie's full piece at this link.
And from LBREPORT.com's Amnesia File: Al and Tipper Gore busied themselves with this during Prince's Purple Rain tour...when Prince appeared at the Long Beach arena on March 10, 11 and 12, 1985, a few weeks after appearances at the Inglewood Forum on Feb. 18, 19, 20, 22, 23 and 24.
