It never was required by law.
The Parental Advisory Label (PAL) is a voluntary program, one that labels participated in. It can even be argued the PAL helped people move more records. Something about clearly identifying projects that contained content surrounding sex, drugs and alcohol, made the young folk want it more.
The PAL was created in an era before streaming.
When we distribute songs now, there is a check box asking if there are explicit lyrics in the song. The tools we use to listen to music have now built in ways to either hide explicit content from children or mark it outright. How did this even come to be?
The RIAA implemented this system to make 4 white ladies married to important politicians happy.
Tipper Gore was mad at sexy lyrics
Long before Al Gore shared an inconvenient truth with us, his wife, Tipper Gore created an inconvenient truth for us.
She bought a Prince album. She pictured a lovely moment of her sitting there with her daughter, excited to be relevant around the water cooler. Bonding with her 11 year old.
Then, out of nowhere Prince assaulted all their senses with the following lyrics:
I knew a girl named Nikki
I guess you could say she was a sex fiend
I met her in a hotel lobby
Masturbating with a magazine
You can almost picture Tipper getting all red faced and jumping up to turn that filth off.
She realized at that moment that young Americans had access to foul lyrics. The 1980s were underway and the moral fabric of society was under attack from vile artists advocating their dreadful messages. They had no right to infect her child’s mind without her consent.
From then on, a 1980s Karen brigade was formed.
The Parents Music Resource Center began its war on free speech.
Tipper Gore teamed up with other wives to create the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC).
Back in 1985 Mike Love of the Beach Boys and the Coors Beers dude gave money to the “Washington Wives” (the aforementioned Karen group) to start the PMRC. They peer pressured the RIAA to add a music filtering system akin to the one with the Motion Picture Association of America. To illustrate their point they came up with the “Filthy Fifteen”.
These were fifteen songs that best exemplified profane content.
They did a giant media tour and hit up the senate and lobbied real hard.
They also went in on retailers and vendors to not sell music with explicit content. To this day Wal-Mart does not allow music with swearing to be sold. It must be the clean version or it will not be carried.
This didn’t go over well with everyone. Letting a bunch of rich moms in Washington decide what is “explicit” felt a lot like censorship. Also given the focus on metal and rock, it didn’t feel like the new censorship was being applied across the board.
This felt like a tool to define what music should be sold in America and the artists were not happy.
The “Musical Majority” joined forces to fight back.
Frank Zappa and his musician homies organized themselves to out-committee the PMRC.
The PMRC had already proven that they were not exactly the greatest at defining why lyrics were offensive. “We’re Not Gonna Take It” by Twisted Sister was clearly on the list over a music video. Other songs were there because Tipper Gore or her allies misunderstood the intention of the song.
During 1985 when the big senate hearing happened to help sway the creation of the stickers the Musical Majority was there with the counter point.
Frank Zappa said his piece all over, pointing out the hypocrisy in the PMRC’s messaging. Dee Snider was mad that the PMRC had slandered his name. John Denver was there so they had a normal looking, regular white guy to say some regular stuff.
Snider was able to prove the PMRC had rearranged lyrics to misrepresent the meaning entirely.
Still, despite the musician's best efforts in 1985 the RIAA agreed to implement a voluntary sticker program.
The PAL program becomes a “voluntary” thing many music labels agreed to
A lot of effort went into making this label look good at all sizes. It was designed to be as inoffensive as possible to the art. Homeboy really did well with the design and ultimately achieved cultural lexicon status with his symbol.
While the PMRC originally wanted a full rating system, the RIAA settled on the one off warning instead. Either the packaging/cover art needed that label, or the lyrics had to be printed on the back. That means from its inception, the PAL has been arbitrarily applied at best.
Most majour labels chose to use it although there was one other way to get around the PAL system.
Artists could record clean versions. This would either censor foul language, or in some cases re-record entire song segments with newer, cleaner versions. Back in the days of physical sales, this made a difference.
Wal-Mart, and other retailers, could ban your album if you didn’t have a clean version.
It’s completely optional to use it but you may sell more records to kids with the PAL in place
The ironic impact of the PAL system is it told youngsters who the profane artists were.
I remember the first time I made album art I was proud to add the PAL. I said words like fuck and it qualified. It felt naughty for some reason.
At the current moment I don’t plan on adding it to any future album art. Since it’s unnecessary I’d rather focus on something nice. I do appropriately mark my music as explicit on streaming, I don’t mind volunteering that information.
I also started creating clean versions. There are just advantages to it. Like accessibility in public places with kids around.
There’s no good answer on if you should use it.
Given its brief history you can see its entire existence is corny.
Do what you will with that info.
Live Long and Prosper
Here’s some videos I watched on the topic:
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