Zappa gets own back on protesting parents

Press, 16 January 1986, Page 26

Zappa gets own back on protesting parents

By

TOM BRIDGMAN,

NZPA staff correspondent

Washington Frank Zappa, the hard rock star, is getting his own back after a bid by parent groups to get rating labels about explicit record lyrics. His latest L.P. is “Frank Zappa Meets the Mothers of Prevention,” and the central track is a 12-minute electronic collage of taped comments made before a Senate hearing months ago on the issue.

“I could have done a whole album, but at 12 minutes, I think it’s already more than the human mind can tolerate,” said Zappa. “Besides, I can’t imagine too many people yukking it up over a few beers and snapping their fingers to the Senate.” The L.P. has come after a Senate hearing into the question of labelling records for their explicit lyrical content.

Groups such as Parents’ Music Resource Centre, whose members include Susan Baker, the wife of the Treasury secretary, James Baker, and Tipper Gore, whose husband is a Democrat senator from Tennessee, became alarmed at the explicit sex and violence in modern record lyrics. In a bid to keep it under control, they pushed the record companies which control the multi-million dollar industry to affix parental guidance labels to records or print the lyrics on the album covers so people could see what they or their children were buying. They were worried about the effect on teenagers of songs such as “Suicide Solution,” “Necrophilia” and “Dancing in the Sheets.” Prince, in a song called "Sister," sings a tribute to incest, while oral sex forced at gunpoint was described in another by Judas Priest. The videos that go with the music have also caused alarm.

Van Halen’s “Hot For Teacher” shows primary

school-age children lusting for their bikini-clad teacher, and Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Going To Take It” shows a teen-age boy rebelling against his father by smashing him into a brick wall and throwing him downstairs and through a window.

Mrs Baker explained the P.M.R.C.’s position: “We are saying,‘Goodness gracious, we have a right to protect our children from trash’.”

President Reagan is also involved in the issue. He declared last month to a Republican political meeting: “I don’t believe that our founding fathers ever intended to create a nation where the rights of pornographers would take precedence over the rights of parents, and the violent and malevolent would be given free rein to prey upon our children.” But the issue has not been resolved so simply. The argument raged between those who wanted some form of control and others who saw it as censorship and in conflict with freedom of expression. The “New York Times” columnist, William Safire, put the issue as he saw it: “0.K., what’s to be done about sex-violence, sadomasochism and satanism being sold to youngsters? As we refuse to hum along with ‘Well now, I’m killing you, watching your face turnin’ blue,’ we are faced with charges from record company fatcats of being bluenoses seeking to censor artistic expression.” A Democrat senator, Ernest Rollings, told the Senate hearing, held in a circus-like atmosphere in a room packed with rock fans and foes, that he wanted some way to do away constitutionally with the music. It did not have any redeeming social value. “It’s outrageous filth, and we have got to do something about it,” he declared. Not so, said the opponents.

Zappa, at the hearing,

said that P.R.M.C.’s proposition to rate or label rock records was “an illconceived piece of nonsense which fails to deliver any real benefits to children, infringes on the civil liberties of people who are not children and promises to keep the courts busy for years, dealing with the interpretational and enforcemental problems inherent in the proposal’s design.” “Taken as a whole, the complete list of P.R.M.C. demands reads like an instruction manual for some sinister kind of ‘toilet training programme’ to housebreak all composers and performers because of the lyrics of a few.” Another star opposed was Dee Snider, the lead singer and song-writer for Twisted Sister.

Dressed in a black singlet and with curly blond, brown and black hair cascading down his back, he called criticism “slanderous” and “little more than character assassination.”

“Believe it or not, I do not smoke, I do not drink, and I do not do drugs,” said the self-confessed Christian. He said he did not write songs inconsistent with his beliefs.

He said that his song, “Under the Blade,” was meant to describe the fear of surgery, not as critics asserted, to back bondage, rape and sado-masochism. The video, “We’re Not Going To Take It,” was a cartoon based on the Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote cartoons.

John Denver, whose songs would be acceptable in any Moral Majority living room, was also opposed to rating of any kind.

He said that the number of objectionable lyrics was so small “it is not going to affect our children to a degree that we need to be fearful of.”

The end result, after months of haggling between record companies and the Ktal groups, was a •potch accord.

A two-pronged compromise was announced.

In dealing with lyrics involving sex, violence, or “substance abuse” (coyness for drugs) the record companies agreed to choose between two options. \

They can print a fourword warning (Explicit Lyr-ics-Parental Advisory) boxed and lined on the lower quarter of back covers, or print the potentially offensive lyrics so that buyers can judge for themselves. P.R.M.C. and the national parent-teacher asociation praised the agreement. “We welcome all aids to parenting,” said Pam Howar, the group’s president.

The majority of the recording industry, represented by the Recording Industry Association of America, described it as a “constructive policy” that was designed to respond to parental concern and '‘achieve a fair balance with the essential rights and freedoms of creators, performers, and adult purchasers of recorded music.”

However, Danny Goldberg, president of Gold Mountain Records and head of Musical Majority, a lobby group against lyric censorship, remained opposed.

“We remain adamantly opposed to labelling because it raises the same question as any rating system,” he said. He said that they would urge record companies to follow the second option.

Perhaps the last word should go to a West Virginian, Ronald Hooser, who in a letter to “U.S. News” and “World Report” on the debate said: “Since when did the older generation ever like the music of the younger generation?”

“Back in the late 60s and early 70s everyone thought that the Beatles and the Rolling Stones would ruin the country. You know what? It’s 1985 and we all survived.”