Blackie Lawless recently joined an interview with Metalshop and talked about W.A.S.P. being under fire in a witch hunt while discussing their experience with the Parents’ Music Resource Center in the mid-1980s.
With a list known as ‘The Filthy Fifteen,’ PMRC called for a ban on the songs on this list, which primarily consisted of metal music artists, including W.A.S.P. Looking back on those days, the frontman noted:
“I think I was in Indiana — I think it was Indianapolis — this girl came in to interview me. And this was, like, ’87. And she had worked for the PMRC at one point. And she, at this time I was talking to her, was a journalist. And she goes, she brought in a cassette tape, and she goes, ‘I’ve got something I need you to hear.’ And she played this cassette tape for me. And on it were Susan Baker [co-founder of the PMRC] and a few of the others talking about what their real motivation was.”
Revealing the real reasons for the actions of the PMRC, Lawless went on to explain:
“And their motivation was not to get stickers on records. Their motivation was to get Al Gore a platform to then run for president of the United States. So they were trying to create a political profile for him — because what better way to get attention, if you’re a political candidate, a southern caricature, which is what he was, what better way to get attention than to go after an attention getter?”
The singer also drew a parallel between those days and the campaign of McCarthyism in the US during the 1950s against alleged communists, saying:
“I mean, this is McCarthyism [political repression and persecution] — you know, it’s no different. Richard Nixon did it. All these witch hunts that went on in D.C. for years. But they come to a generation who’s not heard it. So this thing comes around once every 15 years. The generation hasn’t heard it. They haven’t heard the same old lies that come out of it. So it sounds pretty good to them because it sounds sincere and genuine.”
At a special Q&A session before W.A.S.P.’s concert in Huntington, New York, on November 18, 2022, Blackie was asked how the PMRC case had affected him, explaining:
“It changed my life, if that’s what you mean. It made me more of a recluse. Yeah, a couple of thousand death threats and bomb scares and getting shot at a couple of times usually has a tendency to alter your outlook on life a little.”
Back in August 1985, 19 record labels decided to put a label on albums that said ‘Parental Guidance: Explicit Lyrics.’ This stirred up quite a response in the rock music scene. W.A.S.P. also reacted by creating a song called ‘Harder, Faster’ from their 1987 live album, ‘Live… in the Raw.’
You can watch the rest of his interview with Metalshop below.
