Bought a new album the other day, released 2017, and I was surprised to notice it has the 'Parental Advisory' warning on the cover. Which is this, if you didn't know or had forgotten:



I thought that this Tipper Gore/Mary Whitehouse crap had died out years ago? Obviously not.

I remember buying Guns & Roses 'Appetite for Destruction' when it came out back in 1987 and the whole moral crusade against music thing had just started. It never occurred to me to peel off the sticker and my mother saw it and complained about me buying 'records that are just swearing.'

The difference then was that it was a vinyl LP so you could just take the sticker off. With this CD it is actually on the artwork. And I'm nearly fifty and no longer live at home so I don't really see the need to caution my one remaining parent that I might be listening to bad language. Now you may say well a youth could buy it in which case it is still pertinent. Well that's true except I doubt very much anyone under the age of 18 is still buying CDs. They will stream it or download it. So where is the warning sticker if they do that? Does it send an e-mail to their parents? I doubt it.

Worse still I have a cd of ACDC 'High Voltage' and that contains the following lyrics:

'You can stick your nine to five living and your collar and your tie'
'You can stick your moral standards 'cause it's all a dirty lie'
'You can stick your golden handshake, you can stick your silly rules'
'And all the other shit that you teach the kids in school'

Which is obviously far more subversive than someone saying 'Fuck'. But because it isn't sweary, there is no 'Parental Advisory' mark.

I remember at the time people saying that the whole thing hadn't been thought through, but of course it was lost in the moral outrage.

Then I go into work and people, people a lot younger than me, are complaining about Kendrick Lamar's performance on the Brit Awards, saying it was 'disgusting'. All the swearing was blanked out of course, but they still didn't like it or that some bloke was smashing up a car as part of the act. Apparently this is setting a 'bad example' to youngsters and that these people should be more aware of their 'duty' as 'role models to the young'.

I just don't know where to start with that. You're always going to have 'mum friendly' artists like Ed Sheeran, for example. But do we really want all music and musicians to be bland conformists? Wasn't part of the whole 'music' thing that it was subversive, offensive and rebellious? That it challenged societal norms? Is it not the problem with modern music and artists that they are no longer pushing any boundaries and are instead trying to be good role models?

Well fuck that! I want my rock music loud and offensive, I want its perpetrators to be vilified by the older generation and the establishment. I want explicit content! Otherwise, we are lost, truly lost, in the anodyne world of Gore and Whitehouse, the world of 'dirty lies'.