It was sometime around 3 a.m. and I’d been watching MTV (or, to be really precise, I’d had my TV switched to MTV; there’s a slight but crucial difference). I’d reached that rock video saturation point where I knew I couldn’t go round one more time with Quiet Riot terrorizing those sorry suburban kids whose idea of a party all night is pizza and Trivial Pursuit and I couldn’t face watching Madonna breath and undulate for at least another 24 hours. I flicked around the remote and, failing to come up with either Mothra or an old Robert Mitchum movie, I settled on CBS’s all-night news show Nightwatch. They were conducting a head to head debate between an individual named John Douglas, a spokesperson for a clean-up TV organization, Morality in Media, on one side and the TV critic of The Wall Street Journal on the other.

Douglas seemed fundamentally upset by the idea that people who weren’t married were depicted going to bed with each other in prime time. He appeared to want to censor just about everything from The A Team to All My Children and, as a general principle, reduce most of network TV to the level of Little House On The Prarie. I was about to change the channel again when the discussion turned to rock videos. At the very mention of the words, the man from Morality in Media started to look as though his shirt collar had suddenly become too tight. He clearly considered the rock video to be a work of the devil and beyond all toleration. He talked about whips, chains, blood and mutilation. The crime was made heinous by the fact that this dangerous garbage was watched by little children.

Right or wrong, John Douglas and those like him aren’t alone in their concern over exactly what MTV and other cable rock outlets might be pumping out at the Youth Of America. Newspapers, magazines and TV shows have lately been expressing various degrees of alarm and even hysteria over what exactly our rock ’n’ roll kids are absorbing when they hunker down in front of the TV. Clearly, any parents who were raised on A Hard Days Night and Woodstock but missed out on everything between Ziggy Stardust and Judas Priest is going to be a trifle concerned should they happen to catch, say, Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It,” particularly the sequence in which Dee Snider hurls dad out the window. You and I know it’s all really good clean fun but Pops may feel actively threatened. Crosby, Stills & Nash just got stoned, they didn’t want to push daddy through a wall.

What we are dealing with here is actually culture shock. There are folks out there for whom tuning by accident into a mess of full fantasy rock videos is like being jerked from suburban Peoria and dumped down in Times Square with absolutely no preparation. Despite the billions of records that have been sold over the years and the millions of concerts that have been stayed, rock music has been a fairly private affair, at least in the matter of content. In this, it was rather akin to slash movies. On this level, the world of rock ’n’ roll could be looked at as a closed community in which all manner of weirdness has traditionally been received with amused tolerance. Just as nobody would expect ABC to turn The Terminator into an action adventure series, nobody would equally believe that Motley Crue are the stuff from which sitcoms are made. Unfortunately, the arrival of the rock video on broadcast and cable TV has done almost that. What was once confined to the rock joint, the concert stadium, or the stereo in the kid’s bedroom is now right there in the family living room, and this is why the would-be censors have their knickers in a twist.

In the current reactionary climate, this may well be rather bad news. Since the psychedelic explosion of the mid-’60s, rock music has gone along its merry way, from Brian Jones to Nick Cave, little hampered by overt censorship. In the late ’60s, industry mogul Mike Curb tried and failed to drive drug songs from the airwaves. British politicians were equally unsuccessful in keeping Alice Cooper out of the country. The Sex Pistols had their run-ins with rednecks and right-wingers but, in their own haphazard manner, they ultimately prevailed. The crazy Christians decided that Jimmy Page was the Agent of Satan but only the equally mad believed it. If your band was too strange for the major labels, there were always the independents. If your record was too bizarre for the radio playlist, it could still sell on word of mouth. One way or another, even the Dead Kennedys’ “Too Drunk To Fuck” would find its way to the audience.

The irony in all this is that MTV, the country’s major source of TV rock ’n’ roll, is, by standards of contemporary popular music, already fairly chintzy about what it plays and doesn’t play. With a format that is already overwhelmingly white teen and excludes many kinds of music, MTV has decreed that a number of videos be edited and or reshot before they’d be put into rotation. The sex-in-the-surf sequence was removed from David Bowie’s "China Girl” and Anita Morris’s routine in the Stones’ “She Was Hot” was forcibly snipped before it could be let loose on the air. (Indeed, a videocasette mail order house that advertises regularly on MTV itself stresses the fact that many of the tapes it offers are uncensored versions.)

The real danger in all this, however, is that the rock video seems to have awoken the New Right, the Moral Majority, and the rest to the inquities of rock ’n’ roll. Pressure groups of all kinds seem to be coagulating across the nation. Mothers Against Motley Crue, Decent Folk Against Twisted Sister; in some cities, Culture Club concerts have been picketed by Christians who fear that Boy George is a part of a conspiracy to homosexualize the U.S.A. Lord knows what they’ll make of limey gay pacifist Frankie Goes To Hollywood when they finally catch up with them.

The temptation, the face of this kind of foolishness, is simply to ignore it, to dismiss the would-be censors and guardians of oldfashioned morality as the reactionary end of the lunatic fringe and hope that, in time, they’ll get bored and go away. Here in 1985, though, there’s a certain unease about that. There are people in the current Administration that I used to dismiss as the lunatic fringe and, baby, look at them now.