Latest / Booked On Rock with Eric Senich / Frank Zappa Vs The PMRC [Highlight From Episode 301]

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Frank Zappa Vs The PMRC [Highlight From Episode 301] · Booked On Rock with Eric Senich

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Here's a highlight from a recent episode of Booke Don Rock.
• 0:03
  Speaker 1: Bradley Morgan is the author of Frank Zapp As America.
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: The PMRC talk about the Parents' Music Resource Center, What
• 0:10
  Speaker 1: was their mission and how did Frank Zappa respond?
• 0:12
  Speaker 2: So the Parents Music Resource Center were a collection of
• 0:16
  Speaker 2: the wives of affluent leaders in Washington. They were the
• 0:20
  Speaker 2: wives of senators, of congressmen, of business leaders who were
• 0:24
  Speaker 2: having issues with the MTV generations exposure to sex and
• 0:32
  Speaker 2: things that they felt were inappropriate for children. Tipper Gore
• 0:34
  Speaker 2: has written about how she came in on her daughter
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  Speaker 2: listening to Darling Nicky by Prince. It was very disturbed
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  Speaker 2: by the lyrics mentioning masturbating with a magazine. And so
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  Speaker 2: they had took their Christmas card list and just collectively
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  Speaker 2: put it together to create this mailing list of people
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  Speaker 2: they could contact who might be sympathetic to their goals
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  Speaker 2: in limiting the access that children could have to content
• 0:59
  Speaker 2: that they deemed to be not acceptable. And they kind
• 1:02
  Speaker 2: of positioned themselves to say, we want to have a
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  Speaker 2: rating system for music that movies have. If movies have ratings,
• 1:09
  Speaker 2: why can't music have ratings. But there's a lot of
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  Speaker 2: issue with that. First, there's a commercial response that as
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  Speaker 2: albums were being targeted for potential labeling, there were threats
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  Speaker 2: to companies that sold those albums. There's a report that
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  Speaker 2: I talked about in the book how Camelot Music had
• 1:26
  Speaker 2: received a letter from the owner of the mall that
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  Speaker 2: they were in that if you sell these records, you know,
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  Speaker 2: we're going to cut your lease. So there was that
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  Speaker 2: impact that it had on the commercial aspect, but also
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  Speaker 2: on the artistic aspect was that it creating a freezing
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  Speaker 2: effect for artists and the ideas that they wanted to communicate.
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  Speaker 2: And Frank and his testimony says effectively that an actor
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  Speaker 2: is not judged really by the role that they take.
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  Speaker 2: No one thinks that someone that they're seeing on the
• 1:51
  Speaker 2: movie screen. They're not thinking that's that person. But when
• 1:54
  Speaker 2: they're listening to the album, there's kind of a different
• 1:57
  Speaker 2: thing that's happening. We tend to think that the person
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  Speaker 2: and singing to us is somehow endorsing certain ideas, or
• 2:03
  Speaker 2: they're saying that what they believe. There's not a lot
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  Speaker 2: of room for irony in that or a kind of
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  Speaker 2: allegory in that. So Zappa's response to this was to
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  Speaker 2: address potential censorship issues with the impact that that could
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  Speaker 2: have on artists, which is been the largest aspect of
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  Speaker 2: his legacy regarding the PMRC. But he was also very
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  Speaker 2: clever in how he communicated the business element of this,
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  Speaker 2: because what the PMRC was doing and how they were
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  Speaker 2: able to accelerate so quickly with their mission was that
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  Speaker 2: they talked about all the sex and all the bad
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  Speaker 2: content in the music. But they wanted to wrap this
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  Speaker 2: legislation in a tax bill that was going to put
• 2:45
  Speaker 2: a tax on blank tapes that the music industry wanted
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  Speaker 2: as a mitigation effort to fight piracy. That was a
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  Speaker 2: huge deal in the eighties, and Zappa had seen the
• 2:55
  Speaker 2: culture war issue as being that poison pill that would
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  Speaker 2: get people to to swallow taking on a private tax
• 3:02
  Speaker 2: that he felt that the industry should have paid themselves.
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  Speaker 2: I mean, if we think about today, with a lot
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  Speaker 2: of the tariffs that are happening, who is paying for
• 3:09
  Speaker 2: those tariffs? It's us consumers. You're paying more for those
• 3:13
  Speaker 2: products because these companies don't want to bear that re
• 3:15
  Speaker 2: kind of responsibility. And so he recognized that there was
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  Speaker 2: this kind of private tax being levied on American citizens
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  Speaker 2: without their consent without their voting for it, and that
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  Speaker 2: was really at the heart of what his argument was,
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  Speaker 2: and he was right to do it because the PMRC
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  Speaker 2: was very limited in their scope and focus. They were
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  Speaker 2: only targeting rock and pop music. In the book, I
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  Speaker 2: talk about how a lot of representatives in the music
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  Speaker 2: industry and Zappa identified that no one in country music
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  Speaker 2: was being targeted. And it was no coincidence that one
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  Speaker 2: of the Senate leaders who was at the PMRC was
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  Speaker 2: Al Gore, who was the Senator of Tennessee and whose wife,
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  Speaker 2: Tipper Gore, was one of the leaders of the PMRC.
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  Speaker 1: I wonder how much these politicians were aware of how
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: intelligent Frank Zappa was. I wonder if they even realized
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  Speaker 1: what they were going up against.
• 4:07
  Speaker 2: I don't think they had any clue.