AL GORE
Al Gore (born March 31, 1948) is an American politician and environmentalist who served as the 45th Vice President of the United States from 1993 to 2001. Gore was Bill Clinton’s running mate in their successful campaign in 1992, and the pair were re-elected in 1996. Near the end of President Clinton’s second term, Gore was selected as the Democratic nominee for the 2000 presidential election but did not win the election. After his term as vice-president ended in 2001, Gore remained prominent as an author and environmental activist, whose work in climate change activism earned him (jointly with the IPCC) the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. Gore has also a Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album (2009) for his book An Inconvenient Truth, a Primetime Emmy Award for Current TV (2007), and a Webby Award (2005). Gore was also the subject of the Academy Award-winning (2007) documentary An Inconvenient Truth in 2006. In 2007, he was named a runner-up for Time’s 2007 Person of the Year. (More from Wikipedia)
Dreamgirls created drama at the Oscars that year to match what was being portrayed on the screen. Despite not being nominated for Best Director or Best Picture (or any nominations for Best Actor or Best Actress either, for that matter), Dreamgirls had the most Academy Award nominations in 2007 with eight – a first at the Academy Awards. In a rare feat for an actor in a debut role, Jennifer Hudson was named Best Supporting Actress; but Eddie Murphy’s loss to Alan Arkin (for his role in the quirky and delightful comedy Little Miss Sunshine) as Best Supporting Actor was regarded as an upset. Three of the songs from Dreamgirls were nominated for Best Song, but they also lost out to the Melissa Etheridge song “I Need to Wake Up” from the Al Gore documentary film, An Inconvenient Truth.
(April 2015/1)
* * *
The recent untimely death of the legendary Prince – a former child prodigy simply bursting with talent who has a musical legacy anyone would be proud to call their own – revived the story of the founding of the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) that I remember being populated by Senators’ wives, with all of them being Republican save the most prominent member, Tipper Gore, the wife of then-Senator and future Vice President Al Gore. They were concerned about the effects of rock music lyrics on impressionable children, and that led to Senate hearings and notorious “Parental Advisory / Explicit Lyrics” stickers that appeared on many records beginning in the 1980’s. The controversy had the predictable result of both encouraging sales of supposedly offensive music while simultaneously making a lot of albums difficult to find – Walmart for one refused to sell any CD’s with a Parental Advisory sticker.
* * *
But before I get into all of that, let me share this appreciation for Prince that was posted by Nick Gillespie on reason.com as part of the best commentary on the PMRC that I have been able to find online. It is quite a bit more barbed than the mainstream accolades that you and I have been reading of late.
“No wonder he scared the living s--t out of ultra-squares such as Al [Gore] and Tipper Gore. In 1985, the future vice president and planet-saver and his wife were, as Tipper’s 1987 best-selling anti-rock, anti-Satanism, anti-sex manifesto put it, Raising PG Kids in an X-Rated Society. Tipper headed up the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC), whose sacred document was a list of songs it called ‘The Filthy Fifteen’. These were songs that glorified sex, drugs, Satan, and masturbation and could pervert your kid — or even lead them to commit suicide. At number one on the list was Prince’s ‘Darling Nikki’, from his massive soundtrack record to Purple Rain (jeezus, wasn’t that movie a revelation? Of what exactly, I can’t remember; but finally, it seemed, a rock star had truly delivered on the genius we all wanted to see emerge from pop music into film).”
* * *
The Nick Gillespie piece continued: “Of course, when you’re the wife of a second-generation U. S. Senator, your mad counts for more than most of the rest of us. In 1985, the Senate wasted its time and our money by holding a hearing on the dread menace of dirty lyrics and the whole bang-the-gong medley of backward masking, rock-induced suicide, and sexual promiscuity. Just a few years later, Al [Gore] and Tipper [Gore] would reinvent themselves as diehard Grateful Dead fans, the better to look hip while campaigning with Bill [Clinton] and Hillary Clinton (another couple of revanchist baby boomers who burned a hell of a lot of time in the 1990’s attacking broadcast TV and basic cable as impossibly violent and desperately in need of regulation).”
* * *
Rolling Stone’s article provides reflections from some of the rock artists involved in the PMRC controversy. Blackie Lawless, frontman for W.A.S.P., is also a born-again Christian today; but he isn’t letting these people off the hook: “At the time, to have a female senator hold up a picture of my crotch in front of the Congress of the United States made me ask myself, ‘Are you kidding me? I’m just some kid in a rock & roll band. Do these guys have nothing better to do with our tax money?’ But now being a born-again Christian, I’ve not played that song [‘Animal (F--k Like A Beast)’] for almost 10 years. Knowing what we know now, the PMRC should have stood for ‘Politicians Masked as Reelection Campaigns’. It was Al Gore’s ‘Joe McCarthy moment’.”
(June 2016)
