It's become a standard part of the grunge origin story that “Man in the Box” was the first national hit to come from the region that would soon re-define American music and popular culture in its own image. They were both participating in a heated cultural moment when it felt like pop music was under direct threat of censorship by an ascendant cadre of cultural conservatives. “Our lyrics are all positive-we don’t use bad language or sing about drugs and sex,” he said, “but I just want the freedom to write about what I want.” Wearing blue-tinted aviators with his hair teased several inches above his head-the glam-metal look of the moment-Staley wasn’t nearly as high-profile as Twisted Sister’s Dee Snider, but his brief take echoed Snider’s PMRC testimony. At one point, the host gave the floor to an 18-year-old audience member named Layne Staley, who at the time was fronting a local glam-metal band called Sleze, and offered a personal take on the manufactured controversy.
A few weeks after the notorious 1985 Parents Music Resource Center hearings, where the so-called “porn rock” lyrics of musicians like W.A.S.P., Prince, and Cyndi Lauper were debated before a Senate committee, the Seattle talk show “Town Meeting” devoted an episode to the issue of “obscene” pop lyrics.
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