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How Tipper Gore Helped Danzig Become a Household Name

(Screenshot)
(Screenshot)

Happy Birthday, Tipper!

The former wife of ex-Sen./VPOTUS/Internet “creator” Al Gore turns 65 today, granting her the full rights and privileges — discount movie tickets, early-bird dinner specials, carte blanche to yell “Get Off My Lawn!” until her voice cracks — associated therewith.

Then again, she’s been acting like a fuddy-duddy for years now: 28, to be exact.

It was nearly three decades ago that she birthed the Parents Music Resource Center campaign — a nanny-state effort to purge the world of offensive music that actually helped a number of underground artists, including horror-core front man Glenn Danzig, gain more mainstream attention.

Tipper’s crusade to crack down on certain tunes by branding them with the now-ubiquitous “Parental Advisory” label galvanized the music community, leading to a standoff in the Senate between lawmakers and a united front led by Twisted Sister singer Dee Snider, country legend John Denver and sonic iconoclast Frank Zappa.

The movement so infuriated Danzig, he wound up penning his break out song “Mother” — a thunderous indictment of authoritarian short-sightedness which helped catapult Danzig from “Headbangers Ball” favorite to heavy rotation on regular radio — about it.

“Yeah, you know, Al Gore wanted to tell people what they could listen to and what they couldn’t, what they could record. It was basically coming down to the idea that he wouldn’t let anybody record any music that he didn’t think you should be doing. There was going to be an organization that would tell you what you could and couldn’t record. And certainly if you couldn’t record it, you couldn’t put it out. It was really fascist,” he recently told the Minneapolis’ City Pages in an interview in which he went on to denounce the current administration’s handling of the so-called war on terror.

Y’a interested in easing into Danzig’s back catalog?

Get a flavor for the furious rantings that have spewed forth from Danzig’s lips for decades with this toned-down cover of “Skulls,” arguably one of the man’s most sadistic ditties (“Bullet” gets our vote for angriest tune. EVER.), performed by Lemonheads singer Evan Dando.

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