The moment MTV killed heavy metal, according to Ronnie James Dio
Like a fart in an elevator, the world didn’t know how to react to heavy metal. The main reason for that was that it was simply too fascinating to ignore. The movement was fuelled, in part, by an irrational cultural hysteria. Somewhere in amongst that was our innate penchant for the curious, a quest to fulfil our deep desire to be interested.
This lust to escape the humdrum is 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, genuinely. It was when Gene Simmons from Kiss was accused of having a cow’s tongue, once again, genuinely. 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.
At the heart of this was the new medium of MTV. The channel made music a visual splurge. However, according to Ronnie James Dio, it also helped to murder the most booming genre of the age. “MTV killed heavy metal music,” the Rainbow singer told Headbanger’s Ball. “You had to have a video, which is very true, if you didn’t, you were doomed. And I think all of us hated that.”
Suddenly, there was a strain on bands to be more than musical. Many of the heavy metal groups certainly knew how to put on a show on stage, but looking cool between clips of a scantily clad Madonna and a breakdancing crew is a whole other ball game. “The ones who didn’t grow up in the video era hated it, because then we had to become something that was competing with something we didn’t like,” he continued. “We suddenly had the hair bands coming out.”
Heavy metal, once a brooding world of curiosity for outsiders, suddenly had to shun the mysticism that had made it so explosive in the first place and sell itself in a safe commercial way. It went from the Satanic Panic to the approved-for-broadcast version in a very quick step. For Dio, this, ironically, sent it down a more troubling path. He commented: “It was only about how they looked like and how many parties they’ve got to have and how many 14-year-old girls they could pull after the show. The music was rubbish.”
But there was no differentiation between the perverse posers playing the game and the musical paragons like Dio. This muddied the waters of metal into something far more insidious than it ever had been, ironically bringing elements of the satanic panic fears to life. “They destroyed what the rest of us created,” Dio said. Singling out one band in particular: “There should be a [sign] saying: ‘Poison killed everything’.”
The band became a staple of the MTV era, and the rest is history. “Honestly, those kind of bands did do that, I think. These ‘things’ that come out and wear make-up, you know. What’s that all about? That’s not metal,” Dio solemnly decreed. “Sorry, it’s just not. It became more the Bon Jovi world, than the Led Zeppelin world, and, suddenly, no one knows what it is anymore. When I began, when I did the things that I did, luckily with the people I did it with, it was one form of music, it was hard rock music.”
At that stage, it channelled the heaviness of the world in a fitting advancement. It was the hauntological funeral procession of the flowery 1960s and our dreams of a liberated utopia. But by the time MTV came around, it had entered the system it had once bandied against. “Suddenly, you are not what you were,” Dio says.
