Satanic Panic: The heavy metal bands cancelled by cultural hysteria
Rational fears do not always fuel cultural hysteria. Somewhere in amongst it all is our penchant for the curious, a quest to fulfil our deep desire to be interested. It’s why crime dramas often uncover huge conspiracies amid the fictional murders. It’s why unsolved mystery videos are littered with comments suggesting wildly elaborate theories while the simplest solution is discarded just because it doesn’t pique our fancy for fantasy. It is why heavy metal bands get cancelled merely for making art. In many ways, this was what was truly behind the satanic panic in the early 1980s and the bands that weirdly bore the brunt of it.
This was an era where vigilante parents turfed up the grounds around a preschool in search of secret tunnels. It was when Gene Simmons from Kiss was accused of having a cow’s tongue. It was when nice guy Rob Halford of Judas Priest was slandered for coding suicidal messages in his music, to which he very shrewdly pointed out, “why would I want to kill off our fanbase? If I was coding messages, then surely it would be to urge fans to buy more of our singles.” A fair point if I ever heard one, but this was a time when sense and sensibility went truly out of the window.
The 1980s were a time of rapid change. More parents were in the workplace, which meant more kids were in daycare. This was furthered by initial economic struggles, which meant parents were spending more time away from their children too. There was naturally a sense of guilt associated with this. This guilt was picked up on by the ever-present evangelic side of religious America, who amplified their approach to attack secularisation.
Culture had its hand to play too. Censorship was going to war with the assimilation of sex, violence and darkness in the mainstream, and artists were putting up a wry fight. Those at the top were children of the 1960s, filled with liberal ideals. Bestsellers like Michelle Remembers spoke of satanic cults, and this coincided with the rise of heavy metal, filled with its pagan imagery. We were filled with an influx of pop culture and the development of youth culture realms like MTV. We were spending more time at home with technology, searching for something interesting.
These factors collided to form a hotbed of fuel. A spark came along and lit the fire after a child abduction story hit the headlines. In truth, the statistics show that this was not overly remarkable. However, the widespread coverage on top of everything else created an atmosphere where further dominos could fall. All of a sudden, you had a slew of false accusations also feeding into the trending story, amplifying it beyond the truth, and a ripple effect resulted. Child abduction and abuse cases were all over the headlines, whether true or not, putting parents on high alert.
What else did parents not understand about their child’s world and its new-fangled threats? Well, this new scary-looking music, for starters. The music was scary by design. It was a symbol of the way pop culture was developing. Heavy metal was almost an amalgamation of everything that came before. David Bowie and glam rock had made music more theatrical and performative, Black Sabbath had made it heavier, punk had more it more pointed and carefree. The result was devilish heavy metal.
The permutations of the music that Kiss and co heralded grew gradually darker. Certain facets of the music were condemnable. Certain bands were goading the public with gruesome bait. However, while in the past these would’ve been sequestered away from the mainstream and dismissed as simple provocative fads fated to grow up or go away, conservatives covered the whole heavy metal scene with the blanket of condemnable satanism. However, the issue with blanket terms is that when one isolated extreme event occurs, it tars everything under the shrouded quilt with the same denigrating brush.
Take, for instance, the dark tales of the uber-niche Norwegian black metal scene. In truth, ‘The Black Circle’ would only contain a few bands and a small cluster of people for a short period, but it would have lasting reverberations. One such echoing incident occurred in 1991 when Per Yngve Ohlin, the frontman of the band Mayhem who went by the nickname of ‘Dead’, turned a shotgun on himself in a shared house and committed suicide. When discovered by Mayhem guitarist Euronymous, rather than immediately call the police, the musician inhumanely took graphic photographs (that later appeared on a bootleg sleeve for the band) and collected parts of his skull to make into a necklace to distribute around the scene.
This was a world away from America and an incident so extreme that it can barely be reconciled even amid the tiny fraction of members in the so-called ‘Black Circle’. Nevertheless, it was pointed at as proof in an increasingly divided America that satanism was rife in pop culture. Thus, even a band like Kiss, essentially writing pop songs with occasional lewd lyrics that ran through the power chord mill, were whisked up into the notion that the occult overtones of rock were anything but performative.
It was almost natural that reason went out of the window. If you were being bombarded with tales of teen suicide spates, child abuse claims, and mass abductions, then you’d struggle to reconcile with reason. You would panic. And amid blind hysteria, facts and logic get lost. None of it was true at all to any large extent, least of all the lore that weird cults were driving it. And amid this natural response was the need to make it interesting. Thus, culture was dragged into the clown court, and heavy metal’s indecipherable appeal to adults was indicative of a sinking America.
The weird offshoot was that Gene Simmons had not only mutilated a cow but actually grafted a bovine tongue into his beastly mouth. Judas Priest were telling their own cash cow to kill itself, and Ozzy Osbourne, well, he really was biting heads off of bats. The whole thing might sound utterly incredulous (because it is!). Still, the changing pop culture and inability to rationalise extreme events as isolated incidents in the face of a media bombardment meant that some very wild things were believed and entered the cultural discourse forevermore.
