47. Metal AF: Music, Satanic Panic, Hype & Hauntings

Description

Between roughly 1980 and 1995, the United States experienced one of the largest collective delusions in its modern history. A significant share of the public, along with police departments, prosecutors, social workers, and clergy, came to believe that an organized network of Satanic cults was ritually abusing children, sacrificing infants, and operating in plain sight through churches, daycares, and rock-and-roll records. No credible evidence for such a network has ever been found. The trials, convictions, and shattered lives, however, were entirely real.The era was shaped by the lingering shadow of the Manson Family and the Jonestown massacre, the rapid expansion of televangelism, the political ascent of the Christian Right, and an unprecedented entry of mothers into the workforce that placed millions of American children, for the first time, into institutional daycare. Into this anxious moment came the therapeutic vogue of recovered memory, Geraldo Rivera's 1988 NBC special Devil Worship: Exposing Satan's Underground, and a daytime talk-show ecosystem that elevated occult conspiracy to the status of public health crisis.We then turn to the role of popular music. Heavy metal became the panic's most visible scapegoat. Ozzy Osbourne was sued over the lyrics of "Suicide Solution." Judas Priest was tried in a Reno courtroom over allegations of subliminal backmasking. The acronym "Knights in Satan's Service" was retroactively imposed on KISS. In 1985, the Parents Music Resource Center, co-founded by Tipper Gore, led Senate hearings that produced the Parental Advisory label still in use today.We trace the panic's intellectual foundation to three books. Michelle Remembers (1980), co-authored by psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder and his patient and future wife Michelle Smith, introduced the template of recovered Satanic ritual abuse and has since been thoroughly discredited. Satan's Underground by Lauren Stratford was exposed as fabrication by the evangelical magazine Cornerstone in 1989. Mike Warnke's The Satan Seller, mark