Photo courtesy of Musik Animal
Musicians dating back to the 1950s claim that they coined the term “heavy metal,” yet we don’t exactly know where the genre earned its name. Upon the rise of 1990s “grunge” culture, it has transformed into a genre with hundreds of sub-genres like sludge, thrash, doom, hair, celtic and power. While these sub-genres are all distinctive, they share the quality of inducing a level of fear or skepticism in the general public. Metal is commonly assumed to encourage satanism and violence, but this is not the intention behind the music. This narrative was established in response to the rising crime following satanic panic, in which many Americans came to fear satanism and anything that aligned with it.
Following the release of their 1970 debut album, Black Sabbath was considered the first heavy metal band to kickstart a new genre that incorporates themes of satanism. The cover displays a woman in all black and a velvet cloak, similar to those worn in the satanic horror films released at this time. The cover image wasn’t enough evidence to call them a band of brooding Satanists. It was the gatefold vinyl’s inner sleeve displaying an upside-down cross with a dark poem that sparked outrage from Christians and everyday viewers.
Keith Macmillan, the album’s designer, told The Rolling Stone that the design “was not intended to be anti-Christian or satanic … the inverted cross is often referred to as St. Peter’s Cross.”
Macmillan’s artistic liberty permanently labeled Black Sabbath as satanists, allowing heavy metal to be blamed for everything from cults to murder. Following the 1969 Manson family murders, violence was on everyone’s minds as the peace and love era came to a crashing end.
The Beatles were out, and Sabbath was in. It wasn’t until the 1980s that the U.S. began to emerge with its own heavy metal bands. Mötley Crüe, Metallica, Ratt and Slayer were charting on Billboard’s Hot 100 hits. So, while the genre was loved by those with a pension for hard rock, why was it simultaneously being protested?
As metal grew in popularity, the satanic panic was taking off following the release of the 1980 book “Michelle Remembers,” which heavily depicts satanic cults. The New York Times’s Alan Yuhas detailed how the rise of satanic panic led to people reporting their local daycares for torturing children, which was often blamed on the music that the accused listened to.
In 1984, New York teen Ricky Kasso killed Gary Lauwers in a drug-fueled episode. The New York Times wrote that Kasso was a self-proclaimed satanist who killed Lauwers in the name of the cult he was attempting to form. After the murders, it was discovered that Kasso was an avid listener of heavy metal, even being arrested while wearing an AC/DC shirt. His parents reported that before the murder, doctors refused to admit him into psychiatric care.
Up until the early 2000s, other wrongful death lawsuits were enacted against countless heavy metal bands who took the brunt of the blame for listeners who committed crimes. The 1999 Columbine massacre was blamed on Marilyn Manson, despite the mental health crisis being the root cause of the culprits’ actions.
The only association that heavy metal has with violence is that those with violent tendencies sway toward the macabre, like metal artists. As mental health was a much more taboo topic from the 1970s to the early 2000s, people needed something to blame violence on instead of addressing a dire problem. It’s easier to say that parents need to stop their children from listening to metal than to solve a worldwide crisis that would utilize both time and money. Studies by Ehud Bodner and Mosh Bensimon find that heavy metal is beneficial to listeners’ mental health, but it can worsen existing symptoms for those with mental health problems. This is also true for other external factors, like video games and television.
Despite the mental health crisis finally being properly addressed, the stigma behind metal hasn’t disappeared. Fans are commonly deemed as violent people prone to committing crimes, as metal’s past reputation still negatively alters people’s views.
