Within the Nineteen Eighties, The Par­ents Music Resource Cen­ter (PMRC), an orga­ni­za­tion co-found­ed by Tip­per Gore and the wives of sev­er­al oth­er Wash­ing­ton pow­er bro­kers, launched a polit­i­cal cam­paign in opposition to pop music, hop­ing to place warn­ing labels on information that professional­mot­ed Intercourse, Vio­lence, Drug and Alco­hol Use. Alongside the best way, the PMRC issued “the Filthy Fif­teen,” a listing of 15 par­tic­u­lar­ly objec­tion­ready songs. Hits by Madon­na, Prince and Cyn­di Lau­per made the record. However the record actual­ly took purpose at heavy met­al bands from the 80s — title­ly, Judas Priest, Möt­ley Crüe, Twist­ed Sis­ter, W.A.S.P., Def Lep­pard, Black Sab­bathtub, and Ven­om. (Inter­est­ing foot­notice: the Sovi­ets sep­a­fee­ly cre­at­ed a list of black­balled rock bands, and it seemed pret­ty a lot the identical.)

Above, you’ll be able to watch Twist­ed Sis­ter’s Dee Snider seem earlier than Con­gress in 1985 and accuse the PMRC of mis­in­ter­pret­ing his band’s lyrics and wag­ing a false conflict in opposition to met­al music. The evi­dence 40 years lat­er sug­gests that Snider per­haps had a degree.

A study by psy­chol­o­gy researchers at Hum­boldt State, Ohio State, UC River­side and UT Austin “examination­ined Nineteen Eighties heavy met­al groupies, musi­cians, and followers at mid­dle age” — 377 par­tic­i­pants in complete — and located that, though met­al enthu­si­asts cer­tain­ly lived riski­er lives as children, they have been nonethe­much less “sig­nif­i­cant­ly hap­pi­er of their youth and wager­ter modify­ed cur­hire­ly than both mid­dle-aged or cur­hire col­lege-age youth com­par­i­son teams.” This left the researchers to con­tem­plate one pos­si­ble con­clu­sion: “par­tic­i­pa­tion in fringe model cul­tures could improve iden­ti­ty devel­op­ment in trou­bled youth.” To not males­tion that heavy met­al lyrics don’t eas­i­ly flip children into dam­aged items.

You possibly can learn the report, Three Decades Lat­er: The Life Expe­ri­ences and Mid-Life Func­tion­ing of 1980s Heavy Met­al Groupies here. And, proper above, lis­ten to an inter­view with one of many researchers, Tasha Howe, a for­mer head­banger her­self, who spoke sure­ter­day with Michael Kras­ny on KQED radio in San Fran­cis­co.

Observe: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this publish appeared on our web site in July 2015.

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