By Emma Weidmann | Arts and Life Editor
If you’re like me, sometimes you just want to sit back and listen to music without paying particular attention to the lyrics. There’s nothing like the way you can just get lost in the sound as the words fly right over your head.
And they do fly right over your head, right? Well, not so fast.
In the ‘80s, a group called the Parents Music Resource Center, co-founded by second lady Tipper Gore, advocated for a rating system for explicit music. It proposed a system that would label records by the type of “filth” they included — X for profanity and sexual language, D/A for drugs and alcohol, V for violence and O for the occult.
If you thought, “Well, it seems like they didn’t succeed in censoring music,” you’d be wrong. The “Parental Advisory” sticker that’s on all your favorite rap and rock albums is there because of Tipper Gore and the Parents Music Resource Center.
Their point was that explicit music was corrupting children’s minds, turning them into criminals, atheists and sexual deviants. And while I take a way, way less intense stance on the issue, you can’t deny the influence of lyrical content on a developing mind — and its influence even well into your 20s.
The concept of subliminal messaging isn’t a new one, and it predates even Tipper Gore and the infamous congressional showdown between herself and Dee Snider of the rock band Twisted Sister.
It was The Beatles who invented “back masking” — the practice of laying a track onto a vinyl record that, when played forward, would sound like gibberish and, when played backward, would form actual words. On the “White Album,” “Revolution 9” has been said to contain some spooky lyrics when spun in reverse.
Alright, you may not buy into subliminal messaging. Maybe you think that if you can’t make out the words, then they can’t be understood and internalized. But what about when the lyrics are clear as day? Most music now doesn’t use subliminal messaging, and it isn’t even subtle about the deviance — and, frankly, the grotesqueness — it advocates for.
OK, not to get all Tipper Gore on your music taste, but seriously, some music these days just cannot be serious. Take Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s iconic hit “WAP.” Those lyrics are unmistakably sexual, as overt as they can get.
Additionally, Doja Cat has been under fire in recent weeks for satanic imagery and lyrics in her song and music video, “Paint The Town Red.” Covered in red paint, wearing pentagrams on her arm warmers, chilling with the grim reaper and popping out her own eye, Doja Cat doesn’t exactly shy away from what she’s trying to show you.
With lyrics like “she the devil,” the point becomes, well, clearer.
And take one of my favorite bands, one I’ve listened to since the ripe age of about 12 or 13: The 1975. The band makes music packed full of references to deep drug addiction, suicide and sexual content. Did that make me a heroin-addicted middle schooler? Well, no. I wasn’t taking smoke breaks after fifth-period English.
But it was the simple fact that I had always led a clean lifestyle — and, frankly, would have been too scared to have it any other way — that kept me practically uninfluenced. But there were other ways in which the music influenced me. Firmly in my teenage angst era, I would not say The 1975 brought my mood up at all. I would say initially, the music met me where I was, and then it dragged me down.
It was comforting to know that somebody understood the world-ending moodiness and woe of being 13, but after a while, I just got to wallowing in it, embracing the grunginess and Matty Healy-esque nihilism like an old friend.
Don’t get me wrong, I still love that band. But boy, did it just make me sadder.
So, it begs the question: Do you have to listen to clean music in order to keep your head out of the muck, or does simple awareness of the lyrics take their power away?
It seems to me that reading the lyrics and being cognizant of the power of words is the elixir to their influence. You need to be critical of the media you are ingesting, especially when you listen to music. The repetition that occurs when you play that one song over and over can only serve to solidify or normalize certain ideas in your brain.
Doja Cat can’t make you satanic. Cardi B won’t give you a dirty mind. The 1975 won’t give you a drug addiction. Not really, not unless you let it. But it just might normalize blasphemy or drug use. You might come out on the other side having less of a problem with those things.
I’m not telling you to delete anything from your playlist. And after all, popular music will never cater to our pure ideals of clean lyrics, morality and modesty. So, listen away, but don’t let it worm into your ears without a second thought.
