The Top Seven Broadsides Against The PMRC

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The PMRC is one of those faint memories that music fans that grew up in the '80s try to brush away. The Parents Music Resource Center was launched in 1985 by a group of Washington power wives—the most visible face being the wife of then-senator Al Gore, Tipper—who saw rock and rap as, in Ms. Gore's words, "a poisonous source infecting the youth of the world with messages they cannot handle."

While the PMRC's power eventually only yielded one major change—the ubiquitous black-and-white "Parental Advisory" insignia that you can still find on physical copies of albums—at the time the metal, punk, and hip-hop artists that it would have affected most made some loud and vehement statements against what they saw as potential censorship of their work. With that in mind—not to mention Mother's Day and the current pieces of proposed legislation that are threatening our access to information in the modern age—let's take a quick stroll down memory lane to take a listen to some of the best of the anti-PMRC bunch.

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Presented For Your Thanksgiving Enjoyment: A Cornucopia Of Songs With "Pie" In The Title

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txkimmers/Flickr
Today is Thanksgiving here in the States, and in addition to getting irritated by Nickelback's existence, lots of Americans will probably celebrate by eating pie. The word "pie" is a bit more prevalent in the lyrics of non-"Weird Al" Yankovic-crafted popular music than one might a dessert to be, but that's because of the way the term can handily double as a euphemism for a lady's nether regions. This particular double-entendre use goes all the way back to 1533, according to the slang dictionary crafter Jonathon Green: "First cite I have is 1533: 'But how say you, Sir John, was it good, your pie?'. Double entendre, as is next in 1600," he told us (thanks to the ever-resourceful Maud Newton for the research assistance). And so it went—and oh, it went!—from there. (Language expert Ben Zimmer also notes that "'Pie' is part of larger set of slang: beaver pie, fur pie, hair pie, hairburger, hairy clam, bearded clam." Quite the feast.) A bunch of the songs listed below take the euphemistic usage and run with it, for better or worse, but there are also scientific applications and materialism critiques below. Happy holiday!

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Jani Lane, R.I.P.


Jani Lane, the former lead singer of the hard rock band Warrant, was found dead in a California hotel room last night. Lane was Warrant's primary songwriter, penning radio hits like "Heaven," "I Saw Red," and "Cherry Pie"; in his later years, he would leave and get back together with his former band a few times, finally departing for good in 2008.

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Can We Please Retire The Phrase "One-Hit Wonders" From Our Lexicon? (OK, Probably Not, But Let's At Least Use It Better)

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A #1 hit, but not a one hit.
Yes, the VH1-clip-showization of music-discussion culture is pretty much a given at this point, thanks to, well, the Internet, and its tendency for shared laughter to hold more ballast than shared enjoyment within. (Shh.) And it follows that calling certain artists "one-hit wonders" is a common way to act as a laugh track for pop music, since it allows people to point and giggle at the parts of their past that they miss, but don't want to admit doing so for whatever reason (sadness/shame at getting older, the deep-seated knowledge that Stock/Aitken/Waterman's best songs are much more pleasurable than 90% of "authentic"/"mature" music). But you'd expect a retailer to at least be a little careful when pigeonholing some of its artists as such if only to wring maximum profit out of their back catalogs—and yet iTunes' latest stab at collecting so-called "one-hit wonders" that it's deep-discounted to 69 cents isn't just lazily compiled, it seems to exist on Planet I've Never Been Inside A Rite Aid Playing The Follow-Up Singles To These Admittedly Very Big Songs. Five such examples, below.

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