Parental Advisory – Explicit Content: The Parents Music Resource Center, Conservative Music Censorship, and the Protection of Children

Abstract

Historians have long overlooked and misunderstood the Parents Music Resource Center, an activist group formed in 1985 to correct perceived excesses in heavy metal music. Scholars have focused their analyses almost exclusively on the First Amendment implications of the group’s actions, largely dismissing the PMRC in the process. This thesis argues that by expanding the historical analysis of the group to include the social and political climate of previous generations and of the 1980s, the self-stated goals of the PMRC, and a musicological discussion of heavy metal and why the group specifically targeted this genre, we can see that the PMRC was in fact an incredibly influential sociopolitical activist group that is representative of the political shift in the United States in the 1980s.