It’s become a real badge of honour to have that sticker on your CD now… It came out of this puritanical drive in America against rock and gangsta rap but completely backfired because bands would add in extra swearing just to get the sticker. Kids would want to buy that album because it had the label on and it made your CD seem cool. After all, isn’t music partly about annoying your parents?
— Dan Stubbs, news editor of music weekly NME, speaking to BBC News about the folly of the Parental Advisory Explicit Content sticker, developed by the Parents Music Resource Council in the 1990s.