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Prince's legendary Purple Rain album had sold 11 million Americans by May 1985. Among them was young Karenna Gore. At home, Karenna's mother was shocked to hear Prince perform on the album's fifth track: “I knew a girl named Nikki / I guess you could say she was a sex fiend / I met her in a hotel lobby/ masturbating with a magazine.”

“I was astonished,” said Karenna's mother, Tipper Gore. “The vulgar lyrics humiliated both of us. At first, I was stunned – then I got mad!”

Parents becoming disturbed by their children's musical enthusiasms is nothing new, but Tipper was not just any Tennessee mother– she was the wife of rising Democrat politician Senator Al Gore. Determined to do something, Tipper reached across the Democrat-Republican divide to Susan Baker, wife of James Baker, the finance chief under Ronald Reagan. They recruited two more women and co-founded the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC). As all four women had husbands with strong connections to government, the US media nicknamed the committee “the Washington wives.”

Putting Parental Advisory stickers on albums surely backfired as they became the ones kids wanted to buy

The PMRC arranged a US Senate hearing for September 1985, its aim to strengthen parental controls over recorded music. Even before hearings began the PMRC had significant traction: financial support came from Beach Boys vocalist Mike Love and Joseph Coors, owner of Coors beer, both active Reagan supporters, and the committee gained considerable media coverage, garnering support from the likes of Jerry Falwell, US televangelist and co-founder of the Moral Majority. The campaign arrived at a favorable time. While video nasties served as folk devils in the UK, in the US Ronald Reagan's emphasis on “family values” had empowered the conservative Christians: with the growing fame of MTV, the music video channel, musicians were now drawing increasing ire from Christian organizations.

“Initially, I wasn't very concerned to the PMRC,” says Blackie Lawless, leader of Wasp, one of the bands singled out by the organization. “Then it developed a huge impact, gained momentum of its own.”

The US had experienced periodic instances of music-related public outcries before. The mid-1950s saw Elvis Presley damned by segregationists for making “jungle music”, while John Lennon's 1966 observation “The Beatles are more popular than Jesus” led to burnings of Beatles records. But there had not previously been a coordinated government attempt to censor music. As the Senate hearings commenced it became clear censorship was now on the agenda.

For the hearings the PMRC compiled a list of 15 contemporary songs – the “Filthy Fifteen” – that they deemed had “objectionable” qualities: sex, violence, references to drugs or alcohol, occult themes and bad language. Prince was connected to three of them, as an artist, writer and producer. The list also included Mary Jane Girls, Madonna and Cyndi Lauper, all listed for singing very coy, pro-female sexuality songs. Heavy metal bands (then the most popular genre in US music) dominated: AC/DC, Black Sabbath and Mötley Crüe, longtime targets of attacks by evangelical organizations, were included, along with newer acts Def Leppard, Judas Priest, Twisted Sister and Wasp, who suddenly found politicians and religious fundamentalists demanding their music and videos to be removed from radio and MTV.

“I had been following all of this building up on the news so I wasn't totally surprised,” says Judas Priest vocalist Rob Halford, “although being called ‘enemy of the people’ was a exaggeration.”

In the Senate hearings the PMRC asked the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) to create a form of music rating similar to that used by the Motion Picture Association for film classifications. Their agenda included calling for caution labels on album covers, requiring record shops to put albums with explicit covers under the counter, pressuring television stations not to broadcast explicit videos and, more ominously, reassessing “the contracts of musicians who performed violently or sexually in concert”.

It wasn't just the musicians on the Filthy Fifteen list who expressed opprobrium at the PMRC's campaign – experienced artists Frank Zappa and Alice Cooper, both of whom had provoked controversy early in their careers, objected about what they saw as the PMRC serving as a pretext for encroaching censorship.

Cooper was a seasoned participant of censorship battles in the UK. In the summer of 1972 his self-titled group's song School's Out became a hit in the UK, prompting calls for its banning. “I sent Mary Whitehouse flowers and Leo Abse a box of cigars,” Cooper laughs at the angry response from, respectively, the conservative activist and the Welsh Labour MP at the time.

The PMRC campaign 12 years later was more serious: for Cooper a troubling example of government interference. “It was like they were saying to kids: ‘You can't see something or hear something because you're not smart enough to deal with it,’” he says. “If something is really violent or horrible it should be a conversation between the parents and their kids, not the government and the kids.”

As the Senate hearings began, Zappa travelled to Washington DC. There he was accompanied by pop-folk singer John Denver – who, like Zappa, volunteered as a witness despite not featuring on the Filthy Fifteen list – and Twisted Sister's vocalist Dee Snider, who was listed. The trio testified during the hearings as to why music censorship was a bad idea. Zappa, dressed conservatively in suit and tie, provided the memorable image of the hearings as he debated with the PMRC and their supporters, saying that “the PMRC proposal is an ill-conceived piece of nonsense which does not provide any real benefits to children [and] violates the civil liberties of people who are not children”.

Denver, in turn, noted how his song Rocky Mountain High had been misinterpreted by those who considered it a tribute to taking drugs (when it was a celebration of Colorado's natural beauty) while Snider claimed the PMRC misconstrued the lyric to Twisted Sister's Under the Blade – it did not concern sadomasochism (as Gore claimed), but surgery.

Judas Priest's Halford did not attend the hearings, but says that the PMRC misinterpreted his lyrics, too. The committee claimed the song Eat Me Alive was about the forced performance of oral sex at gunpoint. Today Halford says it was in fact about gay S&M sex, although in 1985 he said nothing. The Brum rock god remained private until 1998.

The Wasp song on the list, Animal (Fuck Like a Beast), was, says Lawless, simply a direct celebration of passionate sex. Not discreet but not offensive, either. “Originally I was going to attend the Senate hearings and speak,” he says, “but EMI – our record label – requested that we didn't go. They felt it was a good idea. Frank, John and Dee all did a excellent job in speaking on artists' behalf, not that it had a significant impact.”

The three may have spoken persuasively but US record labels gave in before the hearings ended: the RIAA agreed to put Parental Advisory stickers on any album containing “controversial” content. This led to certain retailers – including Walmart (then the US's largest record retailer) – declining to stock albums carrying the stickers. “At the time the hard right pressured Walmart so they had no choice,” says Halford. “I would imagine that sales took a hit for every label.”

Lawless, on the other hand, claims that the PMRC Senate hearings endangered not only his career but his life. “In the US there was an segment of society who thought: ‘The world would be better off without these people,’ and we began getting death threats. I was twice fired upon – not in concert, thankfully, although once while we were playing someone threw a heavy glass jar and it hit me right on the top of my head and split my scalp open.”

Musicians responded to the PMRC in song: Judas Priest's Parental Guidance and Alice Cooper's Freedom both condemned the organization, while on Wasp's Live … In the Raw album Lawless dedicates the song Harder, Faster to the Washington wives: “They can suck me, suck me, eat me raw!”

The Senate hearings expanded discussion around censorship in the US while prompting lawsuits against “offensive” musicians. San Franciscan punk band Dead Kennedys became involved in a court case not for their songs, but due to an insert of HR Giger's artwork Penis Landscape inside the cover of 1985's Frankenchrist album: a parent offended by their teenage daughter's purchase of the album took legal action against the band. On 7 March 1990, Dead Kennedys vocalist Jello Biafra argued with Tipper Gore on the Oprah Winfrey show, with Biafra claiming Gore's defence of being “a liberal Democrat” was undermined by her PMRC support, noting how the committee had encouraged the Christian right.

Both Cooper and Lawless contend that that Tipper's motivation behind the PMRC was to help build support for her husband's 1987 campaign to win the Democratic presidential nomination (Al Gore would be defeated, but later become Bill Clinton's vice-president, before being defeated by George Bush in contentious fashion in the 2000 presidential election). “Just as McCarthy used the red scare to gain more power, this was a campaign to establish a political base through suggesting musicians were bringing sexual perversion and the occult into children's bedrooms,” says Lawless.

Rap would soon overtake rock as the US's most popular youth music and gangsta rap's rhymes would attract even more outrage. In 1989, NWA and 2 Live Crew generated huge controversy – the former for rhymes that, among other things, celebrated shooting LAPD officers, the latter over the explicit sexual content on their album As Nasty As They Wanna Be. After a federal judge decided the album to be obscene – an first-time verdict for a US music recording – Bible belt states began prosecuting stores that sold the album, and that hosted their performances. The US court of appeals would ultimately overturn the obscenity ruling, but by then the controversy had helped both outfits sell millions of albums – though the myriad legal battles would break up both groups.

“I found the whole thing patronising and stupid,” says Cooper. “And putting Parental Advisory stickers on albums surely had the opposite effect as they became the ones kids wanted to buy.”

Despite the PMRC closing down in the mid 1990s, its legacy can be seen in the Parental Advisory stickers that continue to be employed on many US albums. In the internet age where seemingly anything, no matter how offensive, is just a click away, the committee's attempts to censor popular music now seems outdated. Still, there are echoes of their crusade today in the attempts to censor comedians such as Jimmy Kimmel over his comments on the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.

“We are in risky times around the world,” says Halford. “I've lived long enough to witness history repeat itself.”