Tipper Gore

Tipper Gore is the wife of former U.S. vice president Albert Gore Jr. and the cofounder the Parents Music Resource Center. In order to increase parental awareness of the nature of the music purchased by and for their children, the center pressured the music industry to provide parental advisory stickers on any music deemed to have explicit lyrics. In this essay, Gore speaks out against what she perceives as the denigrating content of rap lyrics and how such material has a detrimental effect on the predominantly young consumers of contemporary music.

WORDS LIKE "BITCH" AND "NIGGER" ARE DANgerous. Racial and sexual epithets, whether screamed across a street or camouflaged by the rhythms of a song, turn people into objects less than human-easier to degrade, easier to violate, easier to destroy. These words and epithets are becoming...