You must not have been around for what the 80's/early 90's had churned out. Any number of songs from 2 Live Crew and Too Short make WAP seem tame by comparison.
Despite the moral panic at the time surrounding those groups/artists, we still managed to survive and grow as a country, and especially with regards to free speech.
1. 2 Live Crew and Too Short weren't Billboard #1 artists, they were (perfectly fine) marginal hip hop artists who helped knock down the door on profanity in lyrics.
2. Almost every pop song in the 80s and 90s had no profanity, the ratio was probably 99/1 or higher.
3. As a dad of 4 I can attest that profanity in the top 40 pop charts is waaaaaaaaay up, WAP style songs are mainstream, and I've had to teach my 5 year old to say "radio edit" to Alexa.
I did an informal study, at the end of last year Amazon Music had a "top 100 songs of 2021" playlist, I listened to them all and 44 of them had lyrics I would consider inappropriate for a 5 year old.
I'm not a prude and I'm not making value judgments, but the floodgates have opened on profanity and explicit lyrics, at least in part because of the decline of radio's monopoly, the rise of streaming, the overall fracturing of the monoculture, and the Internet's rewarding of clickbait / extreme behavior.
Over time, the code lost its value and as of ten years ago, no comic company is following it anymore. Good riddance.
Y'all are a bunch of prudes and artists and the leading edge of culture are using that shock people experience in their art and have been for a long damn time. There's this burned in mythos that sex is bad which was brought in by Christianity and despite the goalposts of what is vulgar and what is acceptable there continues to be the undercurrent of "this is awful because it's too explicitly sexual" even though what was too much has shifted from exposed ankles to whatever people are offended by today. Hopefully we're close to running out of things to be offended by and people will just be comfortable with people expressing their sexuality as normal... but I doubt it.
I think the difference here is that it's easy to imagine what is more vulgar than The Simpsons, or more vulgar than Elvis dancing.
I'm struggling to come up with what is more vulgar than some of the stuff that is produced for the mainstream today, without being just pornography.
And the Simpsons stopped getting heat once Bevis and Butthead went on the air and became the new target.
I refer you to Jimmy Swaggart in 1986
>he views rock as “pornography and degenerative filth which denigrates all the values we hold sacred and is destructive to youth.”
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-08-03-ca-1235-s...
This is where The New Pornographers got their name
I know every generation feels like things are on the decline, but I can't help but think some of them had a point. There's some incredibly trashy, low-brow, and downright racy entertainment being consumed today that never would have been acceptable decades ago. Or at the very least, it was still being produced back then but you had to go looking for it and it wasn't mainstream.
It's easy for us to look back at the moral panic elders had about Elvis and the Beatles but part of me wonders if they were on to something because we went from "I wanna hold your hand" to Cardi-B's WAP. (It's vulgar, looking it up is an exercise for the reader).