The Filthy Fifteen
As I was researching 1984, I came across some songs that, while not fitting the scope of last week’s issue, were too historically important not to highlight. I may have mentioned last week that 1984 did not turn out to be Orwell’s dystopia—but there was one consequential act of censorship that occurred. It was no panopticon, no ever-present Big Brother, no. Instead, it took the form of a tiny sticker—one that read “Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics,” and has adorned nearly every heavy metal, punk, and hip hop album since the mid-1980s.
Here’s why: In 1984, “Darling Nikki,” track 5 from Purple Rain—the one that leads into “When Doves Cry”—begins with a dirty image:
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.
Selling the 13 million copies it did, Purple Rain eventually entered the house of Tipper Gore, future Second Lady and wife of then-Senator Al Gore, via her 11-year-old daughter. She was aghast. She used her power to pull together a team of Washington wives to form the Parents Music Resource Center, and the next year they held a hearing in the Senate to decide the fate of this so-called “porn rock.” Their mission was founded on the “Filthy Fifteen”: 15 songs that contained lyrics filled with the exact type of sex, violence, and occult references that were corrupting American youth.
Present to defend the anti-censorship side of things were Frank Zappa, Dee Snider (whose Twisted Sister song “Where Not Gonna Take It,” one of the Filthy Fifteen, was later tame enough to be featured in the 2001 Walt Disney movie Max Keeble’s Big Move), and John Denver, who many expected to side with the PMRC. Instead, he likened them to Nazi book burner, having experienced censorship himself for the innocent line "everybody’s high” in his song “Rocky Mountain High.” Denver pointed out something that became true of a lot of the albums plastered with the “Parental Advisory” in the next few decades: “That which is denied becomes that which is most desired, and that which is hidden becomes that which is most interesting. Consequently, a great deal of time and energy is spent trying to get at what is being kept from you.”
The true transgressive, sometimes downright scary music, of course, could never be popular enough to reach the homes of the upper classes like the Gores. By nature, this art comes from those in the margins—the queer genius of Mica Levi, the liminality of the Caretaker, the feminine rage of Lingua Ignota. The Filthy Fifteen, by contrast, are profoundly anodyne. They are manufactured to please; they can barely provoke, let alone corrupt. Other than W.A.S.P.’s “Animal (Fuck Like a Beast)”—that title alone blasts through the garage door at 200 mph—these all sound pretty quaint today. And I bet they did then, too.
Strap in—these are the Filthy Fifteen (other than Vanity’s “Strap On ‘Robbie Baby,’” which is nowhere to be found on streaming). If they all have one thing in common, it’s not that they’re scadalous. It’s that they’re driving and propulsive as opposed to the usual mainstream sedative. They make you want to pull on your leg warmers, rush down the stairs, and dash across the front yard into your friend Shannon’s Ford Escort.
So listen, if you dare.
I may have mentioned last week that 1984 did not turn out to be Orwell’s dystopia—but there was one consequential act of censorship that occurred. It was no panopticon, no ever-present Big Brother, no. Instead, it took the form of a tiny sticker—one that read “Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics,” and has adorned nearly every heavy metal, punk, and hip hop album since the mid-1980s.