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Really, I think there was a subtle racism behind the whole goddamn thing. Trent Reznor was like the token white guy put on blast for using explicit language, and they lucked out because (as much as I love him) the guy is a total libertarian nut job about "rights" and he was happy to take his bitching to the floor of the senate.
It was basically a strategic attack on hip hop, the one genre that used profanity almost as a rule, and which was built around a culture that necessarily had high exposure to drugs and violence. By the early-mid '90s, rap without profanity was pretty much not a thing.
Anyway, whatever. I've always thought the actual look of the PAEL sticker seemed almost engineered to be enticing. It probably was. Slapping that sticker on a record almost guaranteed that young people would want to know why it was there. In the long run, it's probably helped record sales more than hindered them.
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