bury me — r&v / in every universe
Nov 10, 2024 23:44:56 GMT -5
Post by lucius branwen / 10 — fox on Nov 10, 2024 23:44:56 GMT -5
There's a congressional hearing that makes it into the news in September. Five hours long. The Parents Music Resource Center drops a list called Filthy Fifteen, movement spearheaded by Tipper Gore, Washington wife and concerned mother, after she bought her eleven year old daughter a Prince album without reading the lyrics first. It's Darling Nikki that started this list.
It makes it to the senate in 1985, after the moral panic's been simmering for a decade. Rock music is poisoning the minds of young Americans, heavy metal is the sound of the occult. The televangelists are saying Satan's recruiting the youth through the entertainment industry. We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. Their youth pastor tells their group of blasé teens that they have to resist MTV.
They made a movie about that in 1982, Rock: It's Your Decision, about a suburban teen trying to choose between his rock records and God.
He chooses God.
But the hearing is on the news in the evening again, background hum while they're doing homework on the dining table. They're listening to their parents discuss how horrible it all is, how immoral it all is, how the children need to be saved.
Except the kids have started making mixtapes of the fifteen by now. Passed around in the school halls. Thank you, Tipper Gore, for a new tape.
At the senate, Susan Baker gives her opening speech. She's warning everyone that teen pregnancies and teenage suicide rates are at epidemic proportions today. It's the music, it's a factor in all this. John McCollum was listening to Suicide Solution when he ended his life in 1984. A year later, a month from now, his parents will end up filing a lawsuit against Ozzy Osborne.
He was a perfectly normal kid, his parents will say. He was perfectly happy. No sign of anything amiss at all. It must be the music.
September turns the weather mild. School gets busier. Mat asks what their plans are after graduation, one afternoon when it's just the two of them, and they don't have much to say. They know they have to stay in Indiana. But IU's a good school. But there's a couple of other colleges close to home. They haven't looked at any other pamphlets.
They go to class, go to track. Church on Sundays. A perfectly normal kid, their own parents would probably say about them. The month is almost over.
They do find out about the betting pool.
Right before October. During their study group with Arcadia, while going through the calculus worksheet of the week. It's so stupid, she sighs loudly. Antigone and Roe better not get back together. No way, not after prom.
Something drops from their chest to stomach. They stare blankly at the open pages of the textbook.
No way, she says.
He got rid of the initials.
But the truth is, if it isn't Antigone, it would be Laney wouldn't it. It would be someone else. It will always be someone else.
Arcadia changes the subject, idly marking up the sheet with notes, starts talking about how she wants to go to school on a coast. She has cousins there on either side. She doesn't want to be stuck in the Midwest. Because half their class will probably be in Kinsey forever, spit out another farmer to struggle through the crisis, another employee at the dying local store, or maybe a cog in the conveyor belt at one of the plants coughing up smoke between the cornfields of nowhere.
They have to get out now or they never will.
And what about them. People keep asking. Mat wants to know, now Arcadia wants to know.
They shrug the question off, running their fingers on the edge of the book.
If they were asked a year ago, they might have an answer. Before it was some summer day, and they were sitting on the curb outside Roe's apartment, their life suddenly ending on the asphalt.
They're still thinking about that betting pool. They shut their textbook, lean back in the chair.
In the end, he'll get back with Antigone. Or Laney. Irene. Or anyone else. And it's how it should be. How they should be. And they want to go lie on the interstate and scream.
It's fine. They're okay.
They feel light-headed. They're exhausted. But they have practice after school because there's a race happening soon. And they're fine, and so they go.
The leaves are falling thickly now, little storms of yellow and orange every time the wind blows. The sun comes through wan between the clouds in the late afternoon. It's cold enough for a sweater even when running. They feel strangely clammy.
Practice doesn't go very well. Twenty minutes in, Emerson ends up lapping them twice. The whole cross-country team passes them on the warm up. The air drags like knives down their throat.
There's a weird moment when they feel like they're suddenly detached from their body, blood rushing to their ears as they run. The dizziness blurs their vision, the feeling crashes down on them so fast without warning. They blink, and they're kneeling on the track, palms stinging from the scrape of the fall.
A scuffle of shoes. Emerson's backtracked towards them, the coach is walking up to ask what's the matter, what's wrong.
Well, Susan Baker would probably say it's the band, it's the music. This is what they get for listening to Judas Priest, to Black Sabbath. All that heavy metal.
During the hearing, Dee Snider rolled up in shades to defend Twisted Sister's music, ripped Tipper Gore to shreds, and became kind of a hero of rock in the process. But even then, the PMRC eventually gets their way. RIAA will agree to put warning labels in November, and albums with the first kind of Parental Advisory stickers will hit the shelves in 1987.
The breeze makes them shiver. It's very cold. Slowly, they touch a hand to their forehead, the faint metallic tang of blood in the air. It feels like they're burning because they are.
I think I'm sick, they answer.
