During the 1980s, a group of wives of senators and other busybodies got together to form a group they called the “Parents Music Resource Center,” or PMRC. Their intention was to protect children from the dangerous heavy metal, rock and rap music which had sexual, drug and occult themes. After essentially shaming the interesting bands, the group finally used the coercive power of shame to force labels and record stores to insist on warning labels for albums with content that might upset the precious snowflakes and their absentee parents.
Unlike acid-washed jeans and Valley Girl slang, the PMRC unfortunately did not die with the 1980s. It lives on in zombie form through the Parents Music Resource Center appreciation group, which has taken to flagging certain metal bands, zines and labels as hostile to decency, morality and good taste as all metal should be.
Morpheus Descends proved to be the most recent instance of quality metal running afoul of these deranged censors, who feel that the new material from this band will cause “casual sex, drug use, enema fetishism and voting Republican” (PMRC boss Tipper Gore was wife to Al Gore, at the time Democrat senator from New Hampshire). We’re not really sure that people — at least still living people — want to have sex to old school death metal, but as the internet’s “rule 34” implies, any imaginable fetish has already occurred.
This clash between good and evil occurred at the moment when Morpheus Descends released one of the two newly written and recorded tracks to be on their From Blackened Crypts compilation. Check it out below.
Tags: censorship, dark descent records, death metal, morpheus descends, Old School Death Metal, pmrc, sodomy
Nostalgia is a hipster thing but DMU certainly had better days.
I wonder what happened to the Sadistic Metal Reviews.
I do oppose the “castration” of metal, pushed by manipulative people, in special Social Justice Wankers who want to ban only some of the offensive music, aiming to create a safe space for certain people – won’t someone please think of the children? I don’t want my kids to grow up listening to songs that idolise violence, Satanism and sex.
But this article really shows DMU’s forcibly attempt to remain relevant: we can tell this PMRC is a satire page, much like Fearless Iranians From Hell, and that it was resurrected just to make a point against censorship in metal. Well, that was unnecessary: we already have many boycotts on bands who have “racist”, “homophobic” etc idelogies/lyrics, and that’s more relevant because it is actually happening, not someone pretending to be the ghost of a long dead organisation who lost all of its credibility after being unable to tame the untameable.
DMU will be relevant as long as it keeps on the topic of underground metal. Those #metalgate related articles are getting pretty repetitive.
I agree. I never hear about #metalgate things aside from deathmetal.org
I miss having reviews of classic metal albums. Give me a long detailed review of some 1990 album, any album!
There are only so many.
Vital Remains, Dark Heresy, Invocator, and, yes, Malevolent Creation.
I disagree. Our standards are higher than ever before and we’re actively fighting back against the degradation of metal instead of unwittingly becoming a clubhouse.
Agreed. The #metalgate shit was never relevant to anyone besides rightwing bloggers (Brett Stevens and shiteating hipster Nicholas “Chief Skull” Pell), save it for Amerika.org or Takimag.com … bring us Sadistic Metal Reviews and good METAL-oriented material, you’ve become the Bizarro variant of an SJW who won’t stop flogging a dead horse…
Please tell me which of the articles about how metalheads should stop saying the word “faggot” or we’re all bad was not flogging a dead horse.