Frank Zappa Vs The PMRC [Highlight From Episode 301]

Bradley Morgan, author of "Frank Zappa's America", on Zappa's battle with the PMRC in 1985.

Listen to Episode 301: Frank Zappa's Legacy: Music Against Mainstream Norms

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Here's a highlight from a recent episode of Booke Don Rock.
Bradley Morgan is the author of Frank Zapp As America.
The PMRC talk about the Parents' Music Resource Center, What
was their mission and how did Frank Zappa respond?

Speaker 2 (00:12):
So the Parents Music Resource Center were a collection of
the wives of affluent leaders in Washington. They were the
wives of senators, of congressmen, of business leaders who were
having issues with the MTV generations exposure to sex and
things that they felt were inappropriate for children. Tipper Gore

(00:34):
has written about how she came in on her daughter
listening to Darling Nicky by Prince. It was very disturbed
by the lyrics mentioning masturbating with a magazine. And so
they had took their Christmas card list and just collectively
put it together to create this mailing list of people
they could contact who might be sympathetic to their goals

(00:55):
in limiting the access that children could have to content
that they deemed to be not acceptable. And they kind
of positioned themselves to say, we want to have a
rating system for music that movies have. If movies have ratings,
why can't music have ratings. But there's a lot of
issue with that. First, there's a commercial response that as

(01:17):
albums were being targeted for potential labeling, there were threats
to companies that sold those albums. There's a report that
I talked about in the book how Camelot Music had
received a letter from the owner of the mall that
they were in that if you sell these records, you know,
we're going to cut your lease. So there was that
impact that it had on the commercial aspect, but also
on the artistic aspect was that it creating a freezing

(01:38):
effect for artists and the ideas that they wanted to communicate.
And Frank and his testimony says effectively that an actor
is not judged really by the role that they take.
No one thinks that someone that they're seeing on the
movie screen. They're not thinking that's that person. But when
they're listening to the album, there's kind of a different
thing that's happening. We tend to think that the person

(02:00):
and singing to us is somehow endorsing certain ideas, or
they're saying that what they believe. There's not a lot
of room for irony in that or a kind of
allegory in that. So Zappa's response to this was to
address potential censorship issues with the impact that that could
have on artists, which is been the largest aspect of

(02:23):
his legacy regarding the PMRC. But he was also very
clever in how he communicated the business element of this,
because what the PMRC was doing and how they were
able to accelerate so quickly with their mission was that
they talked about all the sex and all the bad
content in the music. But they wanted to wrap this
legislation in a tax bill that was going to put

(02:45):
a tax on blank tapes that the music industry wanted
as a mitigation effort to fight piracy. That was a
huge deal in the eighties, and Zappa had seen the
culture war issue as being that poison pill that would
get people to to swallow taking on a private tax
that he felt that the industry should have paid themselves.
I mean, if we think about today, with a lot

(03:06):
of the tariffs that are happening, who is paying for
those tariffs? It's us consumers. You're paying more for those
products because these companies don't want to bear that re
kind of responsibility. And so he recognized that there was
this kind of private tax being levied on American citizens
without their consent without their voting for it, and that
was really at the heart of what his argument was,

(03:29):
and he was right to do it because the PMRC
was very limited in their scope and focus. They were
only targeting rock and pop music. In the book, I
talk about how a lot of representatives in the music
industry and Zappa identified that no one in country music
was being targeted. And it was no coincidence that one
of the Senate leaders who was at the PMRC was

(03:52):
Al Gore, who was the Senator of Tennessee and whose wife,
Tipper Gore, was one of the leaders of the PMRC.

Speaker 1 (03:58):
I wonder how much these politicians were aware of how
intelligent Frank Zappa was. I wonder if they even realized
what they were going up against.

Speaker 2 (04:07):
I don't think they had any clue.