"Parental Advisory: Explicit Content" — Is the Dirt in Music Really to Blame for What Teenagers Do?

Less a standard of behavior than a product of parental anxiety after the culture changed.

In May 2018, the Canadian composer Nicole Lizée staged an unusual piece of music theater. She built it around songs from a list called the "Filthy 15," as a protest against music censorship.

Music censorship usually arrives attached to the charge of "corrupting the young." In 2013, Miley Cyrus's "We Can't Stop" had parents worried their children would start taking ecstasy. More recently, London authorities blamed a surge in crime on a violent strain of rap called drill.

Sex, violence and drugs were already loud in the blues and rock eras; in pop and hip-hop, the music teenagers love most, they are louder still. In 2017, two-thirds of the songs that reached number one on the Billboard singles chart carried "explicit" content. Between 1958 and 2001, only five explicit songs ever got there.

But neither the way these elements sit in music nor the way people react to them has stayed fixed. They peaked as subversion in the charged 1960s, went quiet under the conservatism of the 1980s, and have come back with new genres and new media.

The "Parental Advisory" sticker became the agreed-on marker of explicit content. It was proposed in order to clean music up, it works as self-censorship, and it eventually turned into a business opportunity. Explicit content has never been defined precisely, yet it always comes back to sex, drugs and violence. As the culture and the music business changed, the offending material found new forms and new places to sit. These dangerous elements can be read as a prism: hold them up and you see the society behind them.

What Is the Parental Advisory Sticker?

The "Filthy 15" that Nicole Lizée hates came about like this. In 1983, Tipper Gore — wife of Senator Al Gore, later Bill Clinton's vice president — was appalled to find her daughter listening to a song about masturbation. Two years later she and a group of Washington officials' wives founded the Parents Music Resource Center, or PMRC.

The PMRC drew up a list of the 15 pieces of music it judged most beyond the pale — the "Filthy 15" — songs carrying what it regarded as heresies: sex, violence, nihilism. Work by legendary artists was on it, including Madonna, AC/DC and Prince (the Gores' daughter had been listening to his "Darling Nikki").

The PMRC also asked the music business to set up a ratings system like the film industry's. Congress never passed any music-rating law, but the demand produced a sticker: the black-and-white mark reading "Parental Advisory – Explicit Content." After that, labels decided for themselves, based on their own reading of the content, whether to put it on an album.

"I like a lot of the artists on the Filthy 15, and I can't imagine the consequences of someone telling me I couldn't listen to them without my parents' permission. That's absurd," Nicole Lizée said. For satirical effect, she ran PMRC members' warnings about how Prince's music would corrupt teenagers through a synthesizer and into the piece.

The 1980s, the decade that produced the "Filthy 15," also look like the high-water mark of parental complaint.

In 1984, 19-year-old John McCollum died by suicide lying on his bed. A year later, 18-year-old Raymond Belknap and 20-year-old James Vance did the same: Belknap shot himself and died; Vance did not die on the spot but was left gravely injured.

Heavy metal bands were pulled into all of it. John McCollum's parents believed their son killed himself because he had listened to Black Sabbath's "Suicide Solution." They thought the song hid a devil's voice: play it backwards, they said, and you hear someone urging the listener to "get the gun and shoot." The two suicides of 1985 pointed at "Better by You, Better than Me," from Judas Priest's album Stained Class, a song accused of telling listeners to kill themselves. Both Black Sabbath and Judas Priest were summoned to court.

Parents of teenagers hated the dirt in music.

What Makes Music Dirty?

Look closely and the dirty elements do not map onto genres one for one — but because of what a music is and where it came from, certain genres are bound especially tightly to certain elements.

Blues and sex are tangled together, so much so that the tangle produced its own subgenre: dirty blues, saturated with sex, was already popular before the Second World War. "In blues singing, the last word of a line is often deliberately dropped, to suggest a powerful sexual control, or a perception too intense to be put into words," the American critic Greil Marcus writes in Mystery Train.

Rock, rising with the hippie movement, gathered every heresy at once: sex, violence, language, drugs — whatever you can think of turned up in the melodies of the 1960s. By the 1990s, hip-hop's rise made the treatment of drugs and violence fiercer still.

And a single element does not always mean the same thing, or get expressed the same way.

Take drugs. They were already in the melodies of the jazz and blues years, but only in the literal sense. Set to the rock of the 1960s, they became a badge of counterculture. Ask the flower children about the Summer of Love and Woodstock and the memory will carry the noise of rock and the smell of marijuana.

In hip-hop, drugs are closer to a portrait of the artist's own life. When hip-hop was born in the late 1970s, street crime in New York ran high, and for many rappers who came out of the poorest neighborhoods, dealing had been an early way to make a living.

So they tell those stories in their verses. In a given song it may be a narrow escape, a warning about how dangerous that life is; or it may be a proud look back, because it is where they actually come from and it measures the distance between what they were and what they are now.

A Billboard article observed that the new hip-hop has a great deal to say about drugs and addiction, and that something curious is going on: pop songs no longer merely approve of drug use, they build the lyrics around it. In a sense, pop has not been this high since the Beatles and the Doors of the 1960s.

With sex, the change shows up mostly in how artists describe it.

One survey split artists by gender and found men and women describing sex differently. In male pop singers' songs in the 2000s, "dating" turned up 10 percentage points less often than in the 1960s — 59% against 69% — while material directly about sex was more than five times as common, up from 7% in the 1960s to 40%. Women also sang about sex more, from 6% in the 1960s to 21% in the 2000s, but their appetite for dating barely moved: about 80% in both decades.

"(On singing about sex) Elvis was already quite an active presence, but even he can't compare with many artists today," said Andrew Smiler, one of the researchers behind the survey.

What Did the Music Video Change?

MTV, launched in 1981, gave music a visual form, and sex in videos exploded, because sex holds the eye. A 1987 study logged 30 hours of MTV and found touching in 50% of it, and many women dressed to provoke. In the 1990s, MTV banned Madonna's "Justify My Love" video for showing sex too plainly.

The New York Times wrote in one article that what television could sell was the pop star with a pretty face, while the music video created a different kind of star: Madonna had only to give her hips a shake to set the media shaking too.

Provocative by nature or fresh and wholesome, rhythm and blues or country — once music touches a visual medium, sex is everywhere in it.

A 2008 survey found sexual content of some kind in 73% of music videos. By genre, 90.09% of hip-hop and R&B hybrids had it; even rock and country carried a 40% and 37% chance.

Violence, also a visual element, spread through the video era in the same way. The difference is what it does: both draw criticism, but sex made videos and songs more popular, while violence tends to make viewers uncomfortable.

The video's effect on sex and violence is plain enough. Less obvious is that the rise of streaming is one reason swearing keeps gaining ground in music. Radio had one version; streaming carries both the edited clean version and the explicit one, with every word left in.

Of the tracks Spotify marks "explicit," the first ever to top the Billboard singles chart was Prince's 1984 single "Let's Go Crazy" (its lyrics mention drugs). Up to 2001, only three number-one singles carried the tag. In the first month of 2017, three of the four number ones did.

"Chart success used to depend on radio play, and an artist's work had to be edited before it was aired, whether by bleeping or by swapping words," said Larry Bartleet, a reporter for the British music magazine NME. "Now, thanks to streaming, artists can make things their own way. They don't have to worry about censorship."

Does "Dirty" Stop at the Border?

In the United States, swearing, drugs and race in music are usually handled not by banning the whole song but by muting a word or swapping it for another.

Standards vary with the audience. The Disney Channel, which plays mainly to children, is stricter than the rest and bleeps out swearing; some radio stations play the unedited originals in late-night slots.

Part of the sound engineer Joel Mullis's job is taking the profanity out of songs. Talking about MTV, which plays to the whole country, and BET, whose audience is mainly Black, he said the engineering team has to make different versions for different platforms, and sometimes has to get the band back in to re-record with substitute lyrics.

Outright bans do happen. Madonna's video is one example. Another: in 1992, "Cop Killer," written by the rapper Ice-T for the metal band Body Count, was condemned for declaring an intent to kill police officers — by the president at the time, George H.W. Bush, by PMRC founder Tipper Gore, and by others. Ice-T defended it as a protest song, but in the end he withdrew the album that carried it.

It is worth noting that free-speech protection for what artists say leaves the United States unable to deal with music at the national level. The censor is the platform that plays it, the record company, or the artist.

That the Filthy 15 affair rose to the national level in the 1980s — by which time music had in fact been thoroughly commercialized and tamed — had to do with the mood of the era. Chang Tieh-chih writes in Sound and Fury (《声音与愤怒》): "The 1980s were the heyday of the New Right in postwar Anglo-American history. The neoconservatism of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan became the new spirit of the age: in economics it stressed laissez-faire and the omnipotence of the market, and the matching social values were individualism, traditional morality and the family — so any seed of resistance was a thorn in their side."

As in the United States, in Britain it is the BBC that decides how far a ban goes. Any work touching the dirty elements risked being pulled. Songs the BBC once banned include the Beatles' "A Day in the Life," which hints at drug use, and "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," suspected of the same; "Hard Headed Woman" by Elvis Presley, "the King," which talks about the Bible; and George Michael's "I Want Your Sex," for its sexual content.

By the BBC's own account in recent years, it no longer bans songs at all.

One case has nothing to do with forbidden material but shows how completely a platform holds the power of life and death: some American radio stations recently decided to stop playing any Kanye West song — not because there was anything wrong with the songs, but because of his remark that "slavery was a choice."

When a ban comes from the state, it tends to be wider, and to arrive more suddenly.

In 2009, Jamaica's Broadcasting Commission banned a style of song called "daggering." The word literally means attacking with a knife, but the dancehall hits it refers to are songs full of sexual suggestion. The ban went beyond sex. It covered "any recording, live performance or music video which promotes or glorifies guns or other weapons, and any recording, live performance or music video which promotes or glorifies acts of violence against persons, such as murder, rape, violent robbery or arson." It also stated plainly that radio and television could not get around it by airing edited, filtered versions.

When the Australian pop singer Kylie Minogue's album came out in China in 2008, it held only 10 songs, three fewer than the overseas edition. The three were "Nu-di-ty," "Speakerphone" and "Like a Drug."

In 2015, the Ministry of Culture published a blacklist of 120 banned songs, because "these online music products contain content that promotes obscenity or violence, incites crime, or harms public morals, in violation of Article 16 of the Interim Provisions on the Administration of Internet Culture. They have been placed on the online music blacklist, and no organization or individual may provide them."

The interesting part is that a ban makes people want to hear the thing. Plenty of records now put the Parental Advisory sticker on themselves, hoping to catch the wind of teenage contrariness. Before Ice-T pulled that album, it was already selling fast in the stores that had not taken it down.

Should Music Answer for What People Do?

Neither camp in this argument seems able to talk the other round.

Some have tried to settle it with data. The Rap Research Lab compared crime in hip-hop lyrics with crime in the world and found no direct link between them. "The data shows crime and lyrics are barely correlated. From 1993 to 1995, for example, crime fell sharply, while over the same years hip-hop's mentions of crime climbed steadily," said the researcher Emmanuel Kohdra. Parts of his data, though, did show the two moving together.

When London authorities tied crime to drill, they produced figures showing the number of offenses rising. Amnesty International replied that the London police database "stigmatizes young Black people based on the music they listen to or their behavior on social media."

Still, the argument has produced a few points of agreement. The first is that any such behavior comes from several causes at once. Take the teenagers who killed themselves after listening to metal: their lives had been going badly already. Raymond Belknap and James Vance had both been abused as children; Belknap, who grew up in a broken home, also drank, and his sister had twice tried to kill herself (she was not a metal fan); Vance had used drugs, and his father was in the grip of alcohol and addiction. The court eventually dismissed the charges against both bands.

The second is that tying music straight to crime gets in the way of looking for answers to harder questions. Sam Dunn, an anthropologist and a metal fan, says people are sometimes just after a scapegoat: "I think people stick all sorts of labels on metal only to find simple answers to complicated problems."

Set aside the cases where music is used as a propaganda tool and the artist is only after expression, not egging anyone into extremes. Defending Judas Priest against the "hidden message" charge, the band's manager said that if they were going to bury a message in their music, it would be one telling fans to buy more albums — not to kill themselves.

Cover image and in-article images from: Wikimedia Commons, Douban Movies, Flickr, Pixabay, Pexels