Three decades after W.A.S.P., Vanity, Judas Priest, Prince, Madonna and others shocked Tipper Gore and her committee, Rolling Stone takes a critical look at 1985’s worst of the worst.

In the past year, Tove Lo’s hit “Talking Body” found her singing, “We fuck for life,” Big Sean got on the radio with “I Don’t Fuck With You” and Macklemore’s “Thrift Shop,” in which he raps about purchasing a blanket with the sole intention of ejaculating on it, continues to get airplay. So what is today’s litmus test for obscenity?

Thirty years ago, a committee known as the Parents Music Resource Center made a playlist of what it deemed the most offensive music at the time, including songs by megastars like Madonna and Prince and culty underground metal groups like Venom and Mercyful Fate. The list, dubbed the “Filthy 15,” was to serve as an example of how the PMRC thought albums should be “rated,” in a way similar to the MPAA. But instead of issuing general “PG” and “R” designations, the committee — on which former Second Lady Tipper Gore famously served — suggested content-based ratings: “X” for profane or sexually explicit lyrics, “O” for occult references, “D/A” for lyrics about drugs and alcohol and “V” for violent content.

Ultimately, the Record Industry Association of America convinced labels to affix potentially offensive albums with the warning stickers the world has grown to love: “Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics.” At the time, record-stickering became such a talking point that the Senate’s Committee on Commerce held a hearing on the “Contents of Music and the Lyrics of Records,” at which Frank Zappa, John Denver and Twisted Sister’s Dee Snider testified. The musicians were worried that stickering would lead to record stores refusing to carry albums, a fact that came true with Walmart.

The 30th anniversary of the hearing is this weekend, so Rolling Stone has revisited each of the so-called Filthy 15 songs to see what was so objectionable about them in the first place, and to find out what became of the music industry’s onetime pariahs. Many of the artists, including Judas Priest, W.A.S.P., Vanity, Mary Jane Girls and Black Sabbath, were eager to offer their thoughts on what it all means now.

Twisted Sister, “We’re Not Gonna Take It”

Proposed PMRC Rating: Violent

Explicit Lyrics: “We’ll fight the powers that be … /We’re not gonna take it

Twisted Sister Then: At the time of the record-labeling Senate hearing, androgynous headbangers Twisted Sister were at their commercial peak. After slugging it out in Long Island since the early Seventies, the group scored major hits with “We’re Not Gonna Take It” and “I Wanna Rock,” two songs off their third album, 1984’s Stay Hungry. By the time of the hearing, the record had already gone double-platinum, thanks to humorous videos for those songs. Along with Frank Zappa and John Denver, the group’s frontman, Dee Snider, was one of the three musicians who spoke at the hearing.

What They Said Then: “On this list is our song ‘We’re Not Gonna Take It,’ upon which has been bestowed a ‘V’ rating, indicating violent lyrical content,” Dee Snider said during testimony at the Senate hearing. “You will note from the lyrics before you that there is absolutely no violence of any type either sung about or implied anywhere in the song. Now, it strikes me that the PMRC may have confused our video presentation for this song … with the lyrics, with the meaning of the lyrics. It is no secret that the videos often depict story lines completely unrelated to the lyrics of the song they accompany. The video ‘We’re Not Gonna Take It’ was simply meant to be a cartoon with human actors playing variations on the Road Runner–Wile E. Coyote theme. Each stunt was selected from my extensive personal collection of cartoons.

After the PMRC: Although Snider told the Senate he expected to be “well retired” by 1994 and spending more time with his children, Twisted Sister released two more albums before disbanding in 1989. Before the outfit regrouped in 1997, Snider formed a band called Widowmaker and began writing his first movie, 1998’s Strangeland, which he also starred in. He has continued to act since then, appearing in the Broadway production Rock of Ages in 2010. Since Twisted Sister reunited, the group re-recorded many of their hits for an album called Still Hungry and holiday songs for A Twisted Christmas. The group’s drummer, A.J. Pero, died while sleeping on a tour bus in March of this year, and the group has planned a farewell tour — dubbed “Forty and Fuck It” — for 2016 with former Dream Theater drummer Mike Portnoy behind the kit.

What They Say Now: “Everything I represented, stood for and said back then, I have lived and stand by today,” Snider tells Rolling Stone. “I stand by every word. As a parent, I monitored what my kids listened to. When my kids wanted to listen to Eminem, I listened to the album and talked about it with my kids and used it as a forum for discussion. And I practice self-censorship. When my own family got into Tenacious D, the first album, including my little daughter who was only eight, and I made a special tape for her without ‘Fuck Her Gently’ on it ’cause she wasn’t ready for ‘Fuck Her Gently.’ But she clearly listened [to] ‘Wonderboy’ and the other songs her brothers were listening to. This is hands-on parenting and everything I stood for.

Phil Collen of Def Leppard says: “Dee Snider basically stood up for our rights as artists. He is an extremely intelligent and cool guy. This obviously upset those people with closed minds who in their ignorance expected him to turn up in his stage attire expecting him not to be able to tell the difference between entertainment and real life. His inclusion in this period of our history is momentous and really means a lot to all of us as artists.

Read about the rest of the artists on Rolling Stone