W.A.S.P.'s LAWLESS: Parents Don't Want To Take Any Responsibility For Their Children

In a recent interview with the Las Vegas Mercury, W.A.S.P. frontman Blackie Lawless spoke about having his music slammed by the Parents' Music Resource Center (PMRC) during the mid-'80s due to the songs' "objectionable" lyrics.

"As the story goes, [PMRC founding member] Tipper [Gore] was walking down the hall in her house and her 12-year-old son had [W.A.S.P.'s] 'Fuck Like a Beast' playing on his stereo, and she lost her mind," Lawless said. "I don't know if that's true, but that's the story I've been told.

"You wanna talk about sensationalism?" Blackie asked. "This was an organization that was seeking a platform that would help serve its own political interests. They didn't give a damn about censorship. I've spent the better part of my career trying to get people to understand that. This really is not what you think it is. They come to you like the wolf in sheep's clothing and then use you to create a frenzy — not unlike what McCarthy did with the communists and Bob Dole did with rap. This is nothing new.

"You don't have to be Nostradamus to see what's going on with young people these days," Lawless continued. "Parents just don't get involved with their kids as much as they used to. Are you going to tell me that these parents at Columbine didn't know that anything was going on with their kids? Hey, my mother knew what I was doing 24 hours a day, seven days a week. But parents now, they don't want to take any responsibility for their children. They bring something into this world, and then when something goes wrong, they want to blame everybody else for it."