Chapter Five

Parental Advisory—Explicit Content

Popular Occulture and (Re)Possessing the Suburban Home

In the fall of 1987, United States Surgeon General C. Everett Koop delivered the keynote address to the Parents’ Music Resource Center (PMRC) symposium.¹ Formed in 1985, the PMRC worked to raise awareness of the dangers of popular culture products for young audiences. Koop’s address to the group, “Raised on Rock ’n’ Roll: The Sound and the Fury,” emphasized, as a public health issue, the moral and social dangers of popular culture, particularly those posed by heavy metal music and pornography.² The surgeon general told his audience of concerned parents that these products led directly to premarital sex, violent behavior, and occult worship. Koop argued that hazardous products were no longer relegated to the periphery of American consumer culture but brought directly into the home by industries motivated by money rather than morals. At the dawn of the 1980s, MTV, and cable television more generally, supplied a wider variety of less regulated content into the home, particularly suburban homes where families could afford the luxury of cable service.³ Largely bypassing parental censors, these new outlets created a problem for a generation of parents raised with a more limited set of highly regulated media.⁴ “Now we have rock videos without control and frequently viewed without parents even being aware,” Koop lamented. “Many that I have seen are senseless violence with senseless pornography to the beat of rock music.”⁵ Consequently, Koop argued, music and music videos encouraged deviant and dangerous activity made all the more hazardous because parents were unaware of and unable to cope with the avalanche of material coming straight into the home.⁶

For Koop, and the concerned parents he was speaking to, the debate about media effects was not simply a political argument. Beginning in the early 1980s, murders and suicides allegedly caused by satanic and occult messages in popular products emerged in the news media and popular culture as visible threats to suburban American youth. Parents and culture critics located the origin of occult danger in role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) in which players supposedly conflated their real and game lives. For other tragedies, they blamed heavy metal bands for compelling listeners to act violently. In one case, an avowed worshipper of Satan and a “Knight of the Black Circle” blasted the music as he killed another Long Island teen in 1984, whereas in other instances, in 1985 and 1986, three young men who committed suicide were supposedly inspired by their favorite heavy metal artists, Judas Priest and Ozzy Osbourne.⁷

These initial cases highlighted not just the danger of occult products but their intrusion into suburban homes with dire effects on a family unit already understood to be in crisis. These families had imagined their homes as sanctuaries from dangerous influences like those seen in public places such as the shopping mall and the arcade.

This approach contrasted with the ways politicians and other culture warriors addressed black families, black popular culture, and urban life in the same era, betraying their largely suburban concerns. The so-called “problem of the black family,” articulated in the Moynihan Report (1965) and concretized in public policy and popular culture, was simply viewed differently by the culture warriors of the 1980s. They sought to protect or redeem suburban families in the face of a supposed onslaught of pornography, violence, and occultism. In contrast, politicians and culture critics often saw the black family as a lost cause and black popular culture as something to defend consumers against.⁸ As Tricia Rose explains in in the context of hip hop: “Hip hop’s violence is criticized at a heightened level and on different grounds from the vast array of violent images in American culture.… While heavy metal and other nonblack musical forms that contain substantial levels of violent imagery are likewise challenged by anti-violence critics, the operative assumption is that the music and its violence-peddling creators will negatively influence otherwise innocent listeners.”⁹

When the problems facing urban families of color were addressed, it was largely as a regulatory function of the state through the Wars on Poverty and Crime.¹⁰ Law enforcement, family services, and other state agencies did not empower black families, in practice or rhetoric, as they did white suburbanites. They subjected them to the power of the state or punitively left them initially to “benign neglect” and later to “personal responsibility.”¹¹ From the framing of rap as a social problem to the scourges of “black on black” crime, the “culture of dependency,” and “welfare queens,” along with the continued demonization of black mothers, politicians and culture warriors did not imagine the city or its inhabitants, largely people of color, as redeemable and therefore part of the moral restoration they sought in late-twentieth-century America.¹² Their approach to white, suburban families was far different. Rather than excoriation, President Ronald Reagan and other culture warriors extolled their virtues and empowered them to act without state interference. Historian of welfare policy and the family Marissa Chappell succinctly notes: “The ‘traditional family’ that antiwelfare conservatives like those in the Reagan administration celebrated, then, was race- and class-specific,” meaning, they venerated the white suburban middle class.¹³

This difference can be seen in the suburban focus of culture warriors and concerned parents in response to the incidents noted above and the social trends they represented. Those events and trends fused the occult and morality concerns of the broader culture wars of the 1980s and ’90s with fears about the decline of the white, suburban nuclear family as these groups sought to “resurrect” a nostalgic vision of home and family centered in the suburbs.¹⁴

These groups battled the liberalization of cultural mores in the aftermath of the upheavals of the 1960s by promoting a particular vision of Judeo-Christian ideology to ameliorate perceived moral crises such as abortion, divorce, homosexuality, and pornography.¹⁵ As historian of the family Robert Self argues, “In the second half of the 1970s, conservative evangelicals created a furor over the state of the American family without precedent in the twentieth century.… [E]vangelicals, led by right-wing fundamentalists, raised the specter of family breakdown as national ruination.”¹⁶ Groups such as James Dobson’s Focus on the Family, Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition, Randall Terry’s Operation Rescue, and Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority used direct-mail literature and televised preaching (on expanding satellite and cable networks) to raise consciousness and spur action.¹⁷ Christian evangelicals not only participated in full-throated critiques of popular culture as deleterious to young consumers but also buttressed personal and family action, not government intervention, as the key to protecting youth.

Concerned suburban parents, then, found common cause with a vast, diverse movement that voiced moral concerns about the content of all manner of popular media. Together, the various components of this movement identified these cultural dangers as the causes of tragic outcomes for teens in the 1980s and ’90s and promoted family action as the proper response. In doing so, concerned suburban parents and culture warriors echoed the broader conservative ethos of the era that endorsed family values. President Reagan promoted this view in 1985: “Let’s give our children back their childhood. Let’s give them the support all children need—the support of traditional values like family, faith, hope, charity, and freedom.”¹⁸ The culture wars, then, helped to make social ills and family tragedies more visible and to make them appear the consequences of dangerous media, just as Reagan and other culture warriors reinforced the idea that families, not government, must address those threats in an era of moral crisis that played out in suburban homes.¹⁹

In their legal battles, advisory literature for parents, congressional testimony, and media appearances, concerned parents marked occult, sexual, and violent hazards posed by cultural texts as real and imminent, produced and distributed by an amoral culture industry, and linked conclusively to violent, transgressive behavior among vulnerable suburban audiences. Working within the broad parameters of the culture wars, concerned parents carved out a pragmatic cultural politics mostly devoid of the ideological attachments of culture warriors on the right such as Bob Larson and Jerry Falwell, or those on the left such as the American Civil Liberties Union. Through their focus on pragmatic, local solutions in defense of the American family’s sanctuary—the suburban home—they were able to craft a powerful, conservative cultural critique, while trying to position themselves as being outside traditional politics or ideological constraints. As with their responses to environmental threats and crime, organizations like the PMRC and others emphasized parental empowerment rather than solutions achieved via legislation or the courts (even though their efforts were often abetted by the government). Further, in focusing on their particularly suburban concerns, they addressed a household under siege, rather than one beyond redemption or part of an already desecrated moral landscape in the city.²⁰ Frightened by the increasing visibility of suicide, substance abuse, and other social ills in suburban locales unaccustomed to the visibility of social disorder, parents for the most part located the causes and solutions to these problems not in the realms of medicine, science, education, or public policy but in proper consumer culture choices—including those available at the nearest shopping mall.

Together, family values conservatives and commonsense-oriented concerned parents articulated the notion that teen suicide and occultism could be prevented by keeping adolescents from playing D&D or listening to Marilyn Manson. This view was part of the broader conservative cultural politics of the Reagan revolution. Reagan himself explicitly articulated a new vision of social reform in 1982 when he said his administration would be “reducing the role of the Federal Government in all its many dimensions” in order to “leave to private initiative all the functions that individuals can perform privately.”²¹ Accordingly, spending on social welfare programs occupied a smaller share of federal spending and gross domestic product in 1985 than in 1981, with those most in need left without, while suburban parents were left to their own devices in addressing their particular fears.²² Initiatives addressing pressing social issues were handled through advocacy and consciousness raising rather than through structural solutions that policymaking and budget earmarks could have achieved for a broader swath of citizens. Most famously, First Lady Nancy Reagan undertook the “Just Say No” to drugs campaign, which was emblematic of the Reagan administration’s approach. To eliminate demand and destroy the illicit drug markets, she encouraged kids simply to refuse drugs.²³ President Reagan seconded this call: “By educating our children about the dangers of drugs, we’re going to dry up the drug market and kick the dope peddlers right out of this country. Every time Nancy and I meet this country’s wonderful young people, we feel more confident that we are going to win this battle.”²⁴ Yet “Just Say No” did nearly nothing to address why kids took drugs or how they entered their communities.²⁵ In addition to the rhetoric, the 1986 federal budget called for reduced spending on treatment and education while increasing the enforcement allocation to $1.8 billion; the stepped-up policing that resulted disproportionately impacted urban communities of color and did not effectively lessen demand for or use of drugs.²⁶ By promoting privatism and voluntary citizen activism, the Reagan administration empowered concerned parents, mostly white and suburban, who traced the danger facing their kids to popular culture in the home. This orientation also marginalized solutions that could have helped more youths in danger from depression, drug abuse, suicide, and teen pregnancy, further undermined the idea of effective state social policy, and eventually became the central rationale for federal spending that empowered religious groups and individual families to address social issues, as seen in George W. Bush’s faith-based initiatives.²⁷

In that cultural climate, the suburban home, once thought to be a safe haven from the perils of public space (as previous chapters show), was actually itself the site of danger from a new “environmental” threat.²⁸ This perspective enabled suburbanites to fashion the home and the suburb as desanctified spaces that corporations and government could not or would not protect. By positing the home and its inhabitants as also under siege from dangerous popular culture products, these movements, and the parents they inculcated, produced volumes of material that valorized and buttressed suburban power and cultural authority. This productive victimization allowed many suburbanites to reassert power over the home while cementing their concerns in debates about morality and culture as dominant. And, like strategies in fighting crime and environmental hazard during the same period, this approach to emerging threats was central to suburban identity, values, and power. The claims of victimization—in this case, the breaching of the home with dangerous products and immoral influences—and the authority derived from that victimization were part and parcel of the idea of the suburb at the end of the twentieth century.

Satan in the Suburbs

In 1984, New York City newspapers reported that Ricky Kasso and James Troiano allegedly murdered their friend Gary Lauwers and mutilated his body as part of a satanic sacrifice in Northport on the north shore of Long Island. According to law enforcement, Kasso tortured Lauwers after a botched drug deal and forced him to repeatedly say, “I love Satan.”²⁹ Just a day after the murder, lead detective Lieutenant Robert Dunn further underlined the occult associations of the murder. “This was a sacrificial killing,” Dunn insisted. “They built a roaring fire in a field near the woods. They cut the sleeves out of his shirt and burned them and they took his socks off and burned them. I don’t know what this is supposed to mean, but this is what they did. It’s pure Satanism.”³⁰ News media portrayed the population of the serene, middle-class community of Northport as stunned by the murder.³¹ One resident said, “There are exotic things that happen in Manhattan, but they don’t happen in Northport,” while another claimed, “We’ve never seen any bad disturbances, nothing like this. It’s shocking—the three boys are from the town itself.”³² Bad things happened—just not in Northport. In the era of the culture wars, something more nefarious must have been to blame.

To explain how a safe community of tree-lined streets could be home to such a horrific crime, police contended that members of a satanic cult called Knights of the Black Circle had for nearly three years been using and selling drugs while listening to the supposedly dark influences of heavy metal in the Aztakea Woods. The television newsmagazine 20/20 claimed the murder was linked to satanism and rock music and symbolized a growing number of teen satanists who were committing heinous acts like sacrificing hundreds of dogs.³³ Local news reports indicated that despite hailing from good homes with significant advantages, the members of the alleged cult had fallen into lives of drug abuse while “hanging out” listening to heavy metal.³⁴ These articles highlighted the teens’ love of heavy metal as setting them apart from their college-bound peers and putting them on a course for drug abuse and Satan worship. Later, as the legal case against James Troiano concluded with a not-guilty verdict, police and the news media acknowledged that the murder had been about nothing more than drug deals and drug abuse.³⁵ Yet the associations of the murder with heavy metal and satanism persisted rather than there being a sustained public discussion about why these privileged young men bought, sold, and used drugs.

By the time of Lauwers’s murder in 1984, satanism and the occult had already emerged as a national news topic following the high-profile Charles Manson family murders in the late 1960s and films like The Exorcist (1973), The Omen (1976), and The Amityville Horror (1979), among dozens of other occult-themed movies. Further, the era saw the flowering of various other pagan or satanist cults, including Jim Jones’s People’s Temple, as Americans searched for meaning through “psychic self-improvement” in various “therapeutic” programs, religions, and belief systems.³⁶ As Americans searched for meaning in and beyond mainline religions, politically active evangelical Christians identified this shift as a sign of increasing satanic and occult influence. Engaged in a war against these forces and the cultural shifts that enabled them, early Christian televangelists and conservative culture critics fueled fear of cults and satanism that they alleged were secretly infiltrating seemingly safe communities.³⁷ By the early 1980s, occult fears had been stoked to such an extent that even mainstream corporations found themselves accused of hiding satanic imagery in their logos. Consumer products megalith Procter & Gamble (P&G) had to defend its trademark—a man in the moon surrounded by thirteen stars—against rumors that it was a secret symbol of Satan—a story reported as being repeated mostly at church on Sunday.³⁸ By the spring of 1982, P&G was fielding some twelve thousand queries each month about its relationship to the devil.³⁹ As it turned out, persons affiliated with competing companies had spread most of the rumors. Yet the allusion to devil worship had great cultural currency. It seemed not only possible but likely that a mainstream brand like Procter & Gamble—associated with deodorant, diapers, and food—could be run by satanists trying to recruit its customers.

The emergence of heavy metal as a mainstream music genre in the 1980s inflamed culture warriors’ concerns about the occult.⁴⁰ These associations dogged the genre from its development and grew as it fragmented into numerous subgenres, including death metal, black metal, and grindcore, that explicitly traded in dark imagery.⁴¹ Some artists, such as W.A.S.P. and Slayer, capitalized on these associations by using occult imagery and referring explicitly to devil worship. Others, like Judas Priest or even hard rock bands like KISS, were assailed as demonic because of their dark clothing, stage theatrics, and vaguely religious imagery.⁴² By the 1980s, driven in large part by Christian evangelicals, the broad understanding of heavy metal was as gloomy, disturbing, and a marker of the infiltration of occultism into American popular culture, available to any consumer with eight dollars for an album.⁴³ Identifying an album or other product as satanic or occultural communicated something more broadly about moral degradation for a postwar US population bred to understand the nation as divinely blessed and morally centered.⁴⁴ The problem was not that satanism existed but that it was available at the mall to corrupt young minds and erode the moral fabric of America.

In April 1985, during their introductory news conference, the PMRC gave voice to the burgeoning notion of heavy metal as promoting the occult. The organization pointed to two songs of its “filthy fifteen” as representing the pervasive occult influence in popular music and hoped for an “O” rating for records with occult themes.⁴⁵ Two years later, ABCs popular newsmagazine 20/20 fueled the controversy by also suggesting causal links between suicide and metal fandom.⁴⁶ In the cultural environment of the 1980s, police, parents, and the news media found occultism and its most fearful strain, satanism, a more believable cause of murder than such far likelier causes as the boys’ health and home environment.

In the Northport case, the boys’ known love of heavy metal intersected with the broader fears of occult worship. In the months preceding the crime, Ricky Kasso was cited for stealing a skull and hand from a Northport cemetery crypt—apparent evidence of a Satanic ritual.⁴⁷ In the woods where these rituals purportedly took place, reporters and police found graffiti honoring the teens’ favorite artists—Ozzy Osbourne, Black Sabbath, and AC/DC; hence the name of the alleged cult, Knights of the Black Circle (vinyl records). After expressing disbelief at the depravity of the crime, lead detective Robert Dunn insisted that rock videos glorifying satanic rituals were an important influence on the killers.⁴⁸ To police and the news media, the depravity of the murder itself (in which Gary Lauwers’s body was mutilated and partially burned) and their love of heavy metal could only mean that Satan was at work. By 1984, Satan had come to the suburbs.

Bothered about Dungeons & Dragons

Developing alongside fears of the occult in heavy metal was a new threat from Dungeons & Dragons, a fantasy role-playing game (RPG) invented in 1974 that reached a peak of popularity in the 1980s. In the game, players create characters and are led on adventures by a dungeon master who creates an adventure campaign for the players to complete.⁴⁹ With its focus on imaginary worlds, magical spells, and mystical imagery, the game and its imitators became targets for parents who feared children would be inextricably absorbed in an occult fantasy. Spurred by incidents of players “becoming” their game characters in real life, and subsequent portrayals in news and popular culture, concerned parents insisted that the game’s occult powers compelled players to act out the game with deadly consequences. Conservative culture critic Thomas Radecki summed up these fears in 1985: “There is no doubt in my mind that the game Dungeons & Dragons is causing young men to kill themselves and others.”⁵⁰ Played in suburban basements and bedrooms, games like D&D represented another moral and possibly mortal threat that gave suburbanites further impetus to police the boundaries of their homes.

Radecki and others held to such beliefs because of the well-publicized deaths of role-playing game enthusiasts such as James Dallas Egbert that reinforced culture warriors’ suspicion about popular occulture. A child prodigy and avid D&D player, Egbert vanished while attending Michigan State University as a fifteen-year-old freshman in 1979. Upon his disappearance, his parents and university authorities feared that he had attempted to live out his fantasy life in a network of dangerous steam tunnels beneath the campus. He had indeed ventured into the steam tunnels but not at the behest of any dungeon master or to fulfill a wish. Pressure to succeed in his courses and difficulty fitting in with his older colleagues had triggered depression. He fled to Louisiana to start over away from college and his family, but eventually killed himself there in 1980. Egbert’s story was emblematic of an increasing focus on occult products as the cause of suicide, rather than the more likely reason that he suffered from untreated clinical depression, a mode of thinking about social ills that would become policy during the Reagan-Bush years.

When his parents hired private investigator William Dear to find James, they emphasized that their son had often played D&D. Dear then offered that Egbert had entered the tunnels as part of a role-playing game.⁵¹ This theory was picked up by the Michigan State University campus newspaper, the State News, and eventually by the national news media. After doubts began to emerge about the D&D theory, newspapers still continued to suggest it as the cause of Egbert’s disappearance. Even three years after his death, the Washington Post still connected his disappearance to role-playing games: “Although D&D has been in existence for a decade, it was not until 1979 that the game caught the attention of the nation in a spectacular way: a Michigan State University student disappeared for almost a month in a 10-mile network of steam tunnels under the campus where he and some friends would act out rounds of the game in an atypical fashion (it is normally played indoors with paper and pencils). This rather bizarre example of fantasy role-playing seemed all the more weird a year later when the student, James Egbert, committed suicide.”⁵² Despite the reporter’s efforts to demystify the dangers of D&D, players were consistently linked to narratives of suicide and danger brought on by occult influences in the games they played, rather than to complex, personal causes of depression and suicide. Such causal linkages suggested that the way to protect young suburbanites was to police their consumption of media.

A novel, Rona Jaffe’s Mazes and Monsters, and movie, based on Egbert’s “story,” reinforced and widely reproduced the notion that his suicide was caused by his addictive love of D&D.⁵³ Aired on CBS in 1982 (and ironically coproduced by Procter & Gamble), the movie tracked Robbie Wheeling as he transferred to fictional Grant College to start over after becoming addicted to the game Mazes and Monsters. By all appearances, Robbie is a normal college student. He attends classes and has a girlfriend. Yet, slowly, he is drawn back into playing the game because of its demonic hold on its players. Playing day and night with the game’s dark forces, Robbie can no longer distinguish it from his real life. He hallucinates that he has become his game character, a cleric. To achieve his character’s final goal of getting to the “great hall,” Robbie believes he must jump from the top of the World Trade Center. Even though his friends are able to stop him, the end of the film shows Robbie living out the rest of his life in an institution, precluding what would have been the promising middle-class life that his parents had envisioned for him and that likely would have been his if not for the harmful influence of Mazes and Monsters.

The story of Robbie/Egbert served as a cautionary tale about role-playing games and occult worship. It provided a vivid and explicit explanation for self-destructive behavior free of any sense of the psychological complexity of hallucinations and suicide attempts. In the first chapter of her novel, Jaffe directly addresses concerned parents and not her presumed audience of teen readers. “Perhaps what was most disturbing about this case was something that was on every parent’s mind,” she writes. “These players, the ones who had gone too far and the one who had disappeared, could be anybody’s kids; bright young college students … given the American Dream and rejecting it to live in a fantasy world of invented terrors.”⁵⁴ Jaffe evidently believed that basing her novel on a supposedly true story about an average suburban kid lent her cautionary retelling greater credibility. It was not simply an author’s fantastical creation but a story about a real young man seduced by the occult to act dangerously. Both the book and the film advanced the argument that role-playing games are based on occult fantasies designed to be all-consuming adventures that shut out “real life” and derail otherwise normal lives. Mazes and Monsters brought the fears of the occult and role-playing games straight into suburban households, casting doubt on the games many teens loved and justifying parents’ fears and desires about making their homes safe.

Just after Mazes and Monsters aired, another “true” story attested to the sinister occult influence of Dungeons & Dragons. In 1983, L. “Bink” Pulling III, a Norfolk, Virginia, teenager, committed suicide supposedly on the orders of his dungeon master. Although his story received news coverage, it was the organization created by his parents that exemplified the cultural politics of concerned suburban parents of the 1980s. Bothered About Dungeons & Dragons (BADD) was created to raise consciousness about the dangers of D&D so that other parents could protect their children from Bink’s fate.⁵⁵ In their introductory letter to the public, Pat Pulling and her husband wrote, “We are concerned with violent forms of entertainment such as: violent occult-related rock music, role-playing games that utilize occult mythology and the worship of occult gods in role playing situations like Dungeons & Dragons, teen Satanism involving murder and suicide.”⁵⁶ The Pullings believed their organization was “influential in the restoration of respect for human life” in that it acted as “a referral system for people who need help regarding entertainment violence issues.”⁵⁷ Rather than lobbying or otherwise prevailing upon government to regulate these products, the Pullings made BADD an information clearinghouse for publications that highlighted the scourge of the occult, including booklets on witchcraft and satanism and an educational video on the dangers of Dungeons & Dragons.⁵⁸ Within the broader framework of Christian culture warriors’ concerns about the erosion of family values and the Reagan-era politics of personal responsibility, BADD emphasized parental knowledge and involvement in the hope of restoring “traditional values” in the home, rather than medicalization and treatment for teens suffering from depression and suicidal thoughts. In assuming both the inundation of the home with new pop culture products and the ability of concerned parents to police those choices, the organization’s members made clear the limited, suburban scope of their activism.

In 1985, role-playing games and their supposed occult associations were thrust further into the spotlight on the highly rated CBS newsmagazine 60 Minutes. In his introduction to the segment, correspondent Ed Bradley connected the game directly to dangerous activities among its teen audiences. “D&D. It’s popular with kids from grammar school on up. Not so with adults who think it’s been connected to a number of suicides and murders.”⁵⁹ The program then cuts to teenagers hunched over a table in a basement as Bradley informs the audience that the game is filled with goblins, thieves, and spirits. He then lists the murders and suicides of teenage D&D players: “Timothy Greiss, twenty-one, shotgun suicide. The detective report noted the D&D game became a reality. Irving ‘Bink’ Pulling, sixteen. A suicide. Daniel and Stephen Irwin, sixteen and twelve. A murder and a suicide. Police said they were obsessed with the game. James Alan Kirby, fourteen years old, charged with killing his junior high school principal and wounding three other people. Police are blaming D&D.” No effort is made to explain or contextualize these tragic acts beyond the victims’ associations with the game. Instead, what Bradley’s comments reflected was the seeming consensus that role-playing games were central to teen social issues like alcohol abuse, depression, murder, and suicide. As in the Egbert case, news and law enforcement in the cases Bradley highlighted offered D&D as a simple and lone cause. Ed Bradley seemed to concur, noting that a Connecticut town would hold a discussion among its citizens to specifically address the dangers of D&D after the suicide of a thirteen-year-old boy there. Given the opportunity to defend themselves, Dieter Stern, head of public relations for game makers Gary Gygax and TSR Inc., suggested that aberrant behavior could be caused by any number of factors.⁶⁰ However, the last word in the segment went to Pat Pulling, who recounted the suicide of her son and the ways in which the game endangered its players. The viewer was thus left with the sense that Satan was in the basement waiting to kill your children and that the only remedy was to avoid buying or playing the game. Such suburban solutions to social ills brought to life the Reagan era’s ethic of privatism and family responsibility for social problems whereby proper consumer culture choices lead to a healthy and moral life.

Figure 5.1. A mid-1980s pamphlet about the myriad dangers posed by the supposedly occult influences of Dungeons & Dragons. Internet Archive.

Parents versus Heavy Metal

In the midst of parental campaigns against the influences of the occult in popular culture, three young men, supposedly under the subliminal sway of heavy metal, killed themselves. On October 27, 1984, nineteen-year-old John McCollum shot himself in the head while allegedly listening to Ozzy Osbourne.61 Just over a year later, on December 23, 1985, James Vance, twenty, and Raymond Belknap, eighteen, went to a church playground and committed suicide with a shotgun, reportedly at the subliminal urging of their favorite band Judas Priest.⁶² The parents of McCollum, Vance, and Belknap filed wrongful death suits against these artists and their record labels, arguing that Judas Priest and Ozzy Osbourne encouraged their sons to shoot themselves. These lawsuits and their portrayal in the news media provided evidence for the fears of popular occulture and legitimized the sense that the music could unduly influence its substantially teen audience with tragic implications. Further, the lawsuits marginalized the emotional distress that likely led to these tragedies and distracted attention away from exploring the causes of a general rise in the teen suicide rate in the 1980s.⁶³ This framework for understanding teen mental health prioritized and empowered suburban parents who could police their homes and, if needed, afford the medical care for their children; at the same time it buttressed the political argument for defunding of social programs beyond the wars on crime and drugs. Lastly, the failure of these parents to win their cases helped demonstrate why groups like the PMRC helped suburban parents turn inward for solutions and rely on the privileges of class, race, and location rather than seek unlikely redress through government or the courts.

Figure 5.2. The authors of a pamphlet about Dungeons & Dragons speciously argue that D&D and other fantasy and role-playing games are causing teen suicides.

Jack McCollum sued CBS Records and Ozzy Osbourne, alleging that his son’s suicide was encouraged by Osbourne’s song “Suicide Solution.”64 Osbourne claimed that the song was antisuicide, as he had written it about the alcohol-related death of his friend AC/DC singer Bon Scott. James McKenna, the lawyer retained by the parents of James Vance and Raymond Belknap to represent them in their suit against Judas Priest, argued that “the suggestive lyrics combined with the continuous beat and rhythmic nonchanging intonation of the music combined to induce … the plaintiff into believing the answer to life was death.”⁶⁵ In both cases, the parents saw the music of heavy metal artists as Trojan horses, sneaking into their homes under the guise of legitimate entertainment and tricking their sons into killing themselves to fulfill the wishes of these supposedly satanic artists. In each instance, the plaintiffs alleged that coded messages could be found by playing the records backward. In the Osbourne case, the plaintiffs alleged that masked lyrics on “Suicide Solution” encouraged listeners to grab a gun and shoot themselves, while lawyers in the Judas Priest case claimed the band attempted to control their audience’s minds through similarly hidden messages.⁶⁶ What became clear was that no subliminal or masked messages appeared on the records. Judas Priest singer Rob Halford joked that if his band had a secret message, it would be to buy more records. In the ruling opinion of the Osbourne case, Judge H. Walter Croskey found that Osbourne’s song did not contain the “call to action” the law required to hold him liable.⁶⁷ However, the judge implied that he agreed with what culture critics and concerned parents had claimed about heavy metal: “An alarming number of (primarily) heavy metal and mainstream stars sing about suicide as one way to deal with problems; some almost seem to promote it.”⁶⁸

Even though the bands ultimately won the cases, news coverage and even Judge Croskey’s opinion echoed and extended the common sense that heavy metal was intimately linked to the promotion of suicide, especially through secret, possibly satanic messages.⁶⁹ In each case, critics contended that secret messages could be decoded only by true fans through multiple periods of close listening.⁷⁰ Rock critic Jon Pareles argued that masking lyrics was understood as dangerous because “it reaches teen-agers and seems to exclude parents—it’s a great noisy unknown.”⁷¹ His argument bolstered parents’ demand for printed lyric sheets and legitimated their fears of satanic coded messages entering the home without their knowledge.⁷²

Moreover, to the extent that the courts failed to endorse parents’ claims, these cases reinforced for them the futility of structural solutions to cultural problems in an era when parents were encouraged to see themselves, alone, as household saviors. Had the victims’ families won their lawsuits, more court cases and legislation might have followed to deal with dangerous pop music.⁷³ Record companies and artists might even have felt compelled to censor themselves preemptively to avoid litigation or arrest. The outcome of these cases, however, demonstrated that the law could not be used to stop the distribution of these records or hold their makers accountable. Indeed, this failure to find heavy metal artists legally culpable for their fans’ suicides, combined with the conservative climate of social reform in the 1980s, left concerned parents with little recourse but to find their own private solutions—policing popular culture themselves. Instead, many parents, lacking state-sponsored solutions or the time to police their children’s cultural choices, were left behind.

For example, to address a spike in teen suicide, President Reagan declared June 1985 “Youth Suicide Prevention Month” but made no specific policy proposals to stem the tide of self-inflicted teen deaths.⁷⁴ Rather, he called for voluntarism and family responsibility, making clear what parents must do in the face of the threat from suicide.⁷⁵ Just two years later, a suicide epidemic would sweep across the nation, with parents, police, and government officials still looking to heavy metal as the cause and stricter parental oversight proffered as the solution.

Heavy Metal Burnouts and Suburban Suicide

On March 11, 1987, four Bergenfield, New Jersey, teenagers committed suicide by locking themselves in a closed garage with the car’s engine running, thus consummating their pact to end their lives together. The news media claimed that the four dead teens had self-identified as “burnouts” or, more generally, teens with little ambition, and were drawn together by their hopelessness and love of heavy metal music.⁷⁶ With so little ambition, their love of metal led them to embrace hopelessness and commit suicide. Newsweek framed its story of “deeply troubled young people” and their many problems within their obsession with heavy metal.⁷⁷ The New York Times contrasted a “a quiet town, boring even,” with teens who embraced the sentiment expressed in the title of an AC/DC live album found at the scene of the suicides: If You Want Blood, You’ve Got It.⁷⁸

Within a week of the Bergenfield suicides, two young women in Alsip, Illinois, both fans of Metallica, killed themselves by inhaling carbon monoxide fumes in a closed garage. The Associated Press contended that the Bergenfield and Alsip suicides were not merely coincidental. The Illinois girls had been thinking about killing themselves for some time but decided to do it when they heard about the Bergenfield teens.⁷⁹ Newsweek argued that the Bergenfield suicide pact “triggered fears of a new and virulent form of the clusters of copycat teenage suicides that have plagued communities from Putnam County, N.Y., to Plano, Texas, in recent years.”⁸⁰ Other presumed copycats included a fourteen-year-old boy who posted news clippings about the six other suicides on his bedroom wall, a teen couple in Bergenfield who attempted to use the same garage as the others had a week earlier, and an Illinois girl found dead in her car.⁸¹ With so many incidents occurring, news organizations tried to explain the complex causes of teen suicides by pointing to lack of family and school support, and drug and alcohol abuse, among other causes.⁸² Despite such responsible reporting, the broad understanding of the cause of the suburban suicide “epidemic” of the late eighties was that alienation and depression were promoted and exacerbated by the occult influences of heavy metal.

Following the 1987 rash of teen suicides, the ABC newsmagazine 20/20 ran a special edition of the show on the growing popularity of heavy metal among suburban high school kids.⁸³ The show consisted of multiple segments that surveyed the perspectives of fans, heavy metal artists, and critics. Despite the attempt at balance, the episode traded in hyperbolic, provocative language and imagery that further underscored the dire threats from heavy metal and the occult, as portrayed by the PMRC, “experts,” and other news outlets. In her introduction to the show, host Barbara Walters claimed that heavy metal was a form of music associated with “ghoulish images, violent theatrics, and even suicide” that deserved attention. She asked, “Is there a message that may be too loud for us to hear?” suggesting that part of the danger of heavy metal was its coded messages intended for true fans that were inaccessible to parents. Correspondent Stone Phillips’s voice-over suggested that what teens were really hearing were “lyrics obsessed with sex, Satanism, and even suicide. This is not mainstream rock and roll.” As he spoke, images of explicit heavy metal album covers and performances were shown; Philips ended by asking if this music “may even be killing its audience.” By juxtaposing musings about heavy metal lyrics with provocative visual content and citing a connection between heavy metal fandom and the suicides of the Bergenfield, New Jersey, teens (avid listeners of AC/DC) and the Alsip, Illinois, teens (fans of Metallica), Walters and Phillips strongly implied there were messages embedded in the music—intended only for the hard core teenage audience—that were mortally dangerous to this suburban audience.⁸⁴

In spreading the word about the dangers of heavy metal, 20/20 rooted the threat in the suburban community by specifically naming the Bergenfield suicides and visiting other suburban New Jersey teens. In a set of interviews with students at Teaneck High School in Teaneck, New Jersey—all of them self-proclaimed metalheads—most showed modest ambition and expressed little care about anything other than their favorite music.⁸⁵ The students interviewed voiced a love of the music, which provided the basis for such needs as companionship and community. Sociologist Donna Gaines, in her study of the Bergenfield teens, saw no causal link between heavy metal and the suicides. Instead, she argued, these teen metalheads were suburbia’s “dead-end kids,” whose failures and alienation, caused in large part by crumbling family and school support systems, led to a lack of career and educational opportunities.⁸⁶ Yet Stone Phillips focused on the music and its culture. In the following segment, despite some of the hopeful sentiments about heavy metal, with the help of experts, he provided step-by-step instructions on how to “de-metal” kids in order to protect them from its dangerous messages.⁸⁷ In this pivotal moment in the program, seemingly normal, if sullen, teens were subjected to a program of “de-metaling” because their parents believed there would be an inexorable march toward suicide without this intervention.

The show ended with the countervailing but moderate views of Tipper Gore and Iron Maiden lead singer Bruce Dickinson. Gore advocated for a system in which everyone could make their own assessment, while Dickinson suggested that metal may not be the worst or even most prominent influence in teen lives. This ending exemplified the process of creating and dealing with the problem of heavy metal and the occult. The show went to great lengths to explain and promote heavy metal’s many perils for young consumers but, ultimately, recommended what Tipper Gore, the PMRC, and other experts had been advocating all along: it was up to parents to be more informed and more in control. The episode promoted the danger of heavy metal and advocated parental involvement to protect suburban teens like those in Bergenfield and Teaneck. It is not difficult to imagine suburban parents, after watching the show, feeling empowered to police their children’s popular culture choices, even to de-metal their children’s music collection and wardrobe, fearing that otherwise they might kill themselves or join a cult. These narratives further heightened the sense of danger from the music, located the threat in the suburbs, raised the stakes for suburban parents to police their children’s popular culture choices, and helped justify new regimes of discipline in the home.

Prevention Begins at Home

One of the experts claiming to help parents de-metal their kids on the 20/20 episode was Darlyne Pettinicchio. With her partner Gregory Bodenhamer, Pettinicchio had founded the Back in Control Training Center in Orange County, California, in 1976. The two worked with kids on probation and with those addicted to drugs and alcohol.⁸⁸ In the mid-1980s, parents brought punk and heavy metal to their attention. By 1985, Bodenhamer and Pettinicchio were convinced that “punk and heavy metal—particularly metal—are public enemy No. 1,” United Press International reported.⁸⁹ To deal with this nationwide menace, they developed their de-metaling system to put parents, not metal bands, in control of their children’s lives. They found that recommending parents deprive their children of these music genres, along with the associated clothing styles and social groups, was the most effective way of defeating the perilous messages of punk and eventually heavy metal. “What we do,” Bodenhamer explained, “is train the parents to train the kids to obey the parents.”⁹⁰ If parents neglected to take action, he warned, their children might become violent and even dabble in satanism. Bodenhamer published his parenting prescriptions at the height of the hysteria over the influence of heavy metal. Back in Control: How to Get Your Children to Behave asserted that the exercise of parental power was the only thing capable of stopping children from misbehaving and protecting them from dangerous influences that filled the void of parental authority.⁹¹ The Back in Control system signaled the direction suburban parenting took in the ’80s. Bodenhamer and Pettinicchio focused on empowering individual parents to eliminate undue influence from popular culture products and thereby address the problem in their home even if the societal issue went beyond their front door.

To help suburban parents, the PMRC also offered ways to empower those who felt victimized by popular culture. Most prominently, the council brought its battle to Congress in a hearing before a Senate subcommittee of the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. There, PMRC members argued vigorously that “porn rock” endangered young consumers, yet they also advocated nonlegislative solutions using the hearings as way to raise consciousness about the dangers in popular culture. Following the hearings, they created a hotline for parents to receive information about what products were dangerous to children and produced a home video, Rising to the Challenge, to explain the threats from popular culture and how to combat them.⁹² Members also continued appearing frequently in the media, including newspapers and TV programs such as 20/20, 60 Minutes, and Nightwatch with Charlie Rose.⁹³ Near the end of the 1980s, many members began publishing their own parenting guides, with Tipper Gore’s Raising PG Kids in an X-Rated Society among the most prominent. In all of their efforts, PMRC leaders stressed the immediate threats that popular culture presented and the importance of parents defending their homes, because, as Tipper Gore argued, “in the hands of a few warped artists, their brand of rock music has become a Trojan horse, rolling explicit sex and violence into our homes.”⁹⁴ The Trojan horse metaphor was key to understanding concerned parents’ perspectives on and reactions to popular culture. The remedy, promoted by experts like Bodenhamer, the PMRC, and Tipper Gore, focused on individual, local action with parents actively vetting the popular culture choices their children made. Having failed to achieve a structural solution, concerned parents identified a suburban problem—pop culture products endangering the moral life of the home and the security of its borders—and suggested a suburban solution—local, private action that empowered parents in the home.⁹⁵

At the hearing in the fall of 1985, parents, artists, record label representatives, and politicians jockeyed to frame the debate on explicit content in music. Artists and label officials argued that the PMRC sought to undermine First Amendment rights through government regulation, while the PMRC and subcommittee members claimed that children and families were endangered by explicit content that called for industry self-regulation. PMRC president Susan Baker echoed this sentiment in her opening statement: “Some say there is no cause for concern. We believe there is. Teen pregnancies and teenage suicide rates are at epidemic proportions today.… There certainly are many causes for these ills in our society, but it is our contention that the pervasive messages aimed at children which promote and glorify suicide, rape, sadomasochism, and so on, have to be numbered among the contributing factors.”⁹⁶ Rather than take into account the more complex causes of teen social problems, the subcommittee and the PMRC identified the culture industries as the root cause of increasing rates of alcoholism, murder, pregnancy, and suicide among teens. This strategy followed directly from the philosophy of the Reagan administration and its supporters. As with the “Just Say No” campaign, President Reagan endorsed a voluntary program of citizen activism to prevent suicide. In June 1985, he called for “research and policies which strengthen the family unit and foster a sense of individual worth.”⁹⁷ Secretary of health and human services Otis R. Bowen said in 1986, “So often in the past, the nation has sought pocketbook remedies. I do not believe creating costly new bureaucracy and calling that the answer should be our goal.” He continued, “The role of the family has been given too little attention in recent years.”⁹⁸

Yet, even in the face of those threats, the PMRC went to great lengths to insist that it did not want formal government involvement.⁹⁹ Even the artists who opposed the PMRC and Reagan agreed with this analysis. By the end of his testimony, Frank Zappa essentially agreed to the PMRC’s proposal and with the opinion of Senator Al Gore that lyrics should be made available to consumers so they can make an informed choice.¹⁰⁰ Given the high stakes of these issues, such a solution made safety a privilege for families that could police popular culture effectively while offering little to those who could not. In that cultural climate, the structural deficiencies of urban education and welfare were beyond the purview of concerned parents who saw the issue as one of consumer protection and family choice.

Published in 1987, Tipper Gore’s Raising PG Kids in an X-Rated Society was the culmination of the PMRC movement that began in 1985. It outlined not only the problems in American culture but essential strategies for parents in dealing with a growing epidemic of explicit words and images in consumer products readily available to teens. In the book, Gore first emphasized the urgency of the problem and its epidemic proportion while suggesting the need for immediate action: “Children are now bombarded with explicit messages on a scale unlike anything our culture has ever seen.”¹⁰¹ In describing the dangerous cultural conditions of the 1980s for children as without precedent, particularly in comparison to her youth in the 1950s, she sought to compel her readers to act. Second, Gore focused on localism, indicating that the most important and effective actions were those undertaken by parents, and underscoring her message that prevention begins at home. Each chapter addressed one problem and ended with a prescription for parents to deal with that problem; Gore called these solutions “practical means for restoring individual choice and control,” a clear summary of ascendant neoliberal market logic in approaching social issues.¹⁰² As opposed to difficult-to-achieve legislative solutions or unrealistic goals like a sudden shift in the profit incentive for companies to sell these products, her book emphasized straightforward application of parental authority. Similarly, the book was aimed at parents to the exclusion of other audiences. Gore largely did not address the artists and corporations making this material, as activism and moral shaming had little effect, in her view. Instead, she strongly suggested that parents in the home were the only ones who need do anything about the undue influence of explicit popular culture, which was clearly not on the wane. “More than anything else,” she wrote, “I want this book to be a call to arms for American parents. I want to offer them the very real hope that we can reassert some control over the cultural environment in which our children are raised.”¹⁰³ Lastly, Gore highlighted not only the violent and sexual imagery in popular music, particularly heavy metal satanism, “the cult of the eighties,” but specifically pointed to those images causing epidemics of suicide and murder.¹⁰⁴

Figure 5.3. The cover of Tipper Gore’s parenting manual for a new era of moral endangerment from popular culture. From Tipper Gore, Raising PG Kids in an X-Rated Society (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1987).

Despite Gore’s insistence on what was essentially a market solution to the problem of dangerous media, the culture industries did not entirely escape Gore’s ire over what had befallen suburban middle-class children like hers—good kids corrupted by the immoral pursuit of profit. Gore chided both the culture industries and parents while emphasizing the primacy of parental action to protect children. “From The Exorcist to the Dungeons and Dragons, fantasy role-playing game,” she confessed, “Americans chased one occult fad after another.” But she stressed that parents needed to guide children’s choices because “not everyone can see through the show-biz Satanism purveyed by more and more bands.”105 Still, according to Gore and the PMRC, only so much help could be provided from those outside the home. Dangerous products existed and would continue to be produced, but they need not be brought into the home, Gore explained in a section titled, “Prevention Begins at Home”: “Parents, churches, synagogues, and schools can start by pointing out the dangers of negative media messages and by encouraging young people to adopt discriminating listening and viewing habits. Most important, parents should spend time with their children.”¹⁰⁶ Her assessments of the hazards to children and the prescriptions for action all revolved around monitoring and safeguarding the home, situating the suburban home as in danger from a constant stream of threats and should be restored as a zone of safety, moral purity, and parental autonomy.¹⁰⁷ To achieve that restoration, as with combatting environmental and criminal threats, vigilance was required, “because parenting involves the home, children, and twenty-four-hour relationships.”¹⁰⁸

In 1987, on the heels of Gore’s book and in the midst of two court cases in which heavy metal bands were accused of causing fans to kill themselves, the PMRC released a thirty-one-minute educational video for parents, Rising to the Challenge. The challenge, according to the video, was protecting children from dangerous messages embedded in rock-and-roll. The video detailed various threats to children—drug and alcohol abuse, suicide, graphic violence, fascination with the occult, and graphic and explicit sexuality—and, much like Raising PG Kids in an X-Rated Society, the film prioritized suicide and the occult over the hazards from violence and sex. Ironically, to educate parents, the PMRC was actually sending explicit material into homes where it could possibly be viewed by children. In fact, more than anything else the PMRC produced, this video thoroughly detailed the threats from popular music. It was not only more visceral in depicting the things the PMRC deplored, but it spent much more time presenting scientific data and evidence from experts to create apparent links between the seemingly vulgar products of the culture industry and teen violence, sadomasochistic sex, suicide, and Satan worship.

The video was rife with explicit imagery such as album covers, photos taken at concerts, and various promotional materials and graphic song lyrics, mostly from heavy metal bands like W.A.S.P. For example, it quotes lyrics from W.A.S.P.’s “Animal (Fuck like a Beast)” not only to demonstrate the inappropriateness of the lyrics for children but to embarrass parents with the song’s graphic descriptions of sadomasochistic sex, descriptions their children would presumably listen to at home without intervention. The lyrics, spoken in a voice-over, accompanied various images from the band’s videos, in which they simulated placing a woman in a meat grinder and the lead singer strutted around the stage wearing a codpiece with a saw blade in it. These images were intended not merely to make the case for album warning labels but to make clear the threat posed by popular music, specifically heavy metal, to the moral environment of the home through images and lyrics that dehumanized women. That dehumanization was of particular concern to the all-women panel that led the PMRC. From feminists like Tipper Gore to traditionalists like Susan Baker, they all agreed that these depictions of women had the power to degrade and undermine the authority of mothers in the home. The video highlighted images and lyrics that seemed so perverse that they required not just passive participation of parents in supporting PMRC initiatives like stickering, but active interest in their children’s lives and the knowledge of popular culture that gave them the moral authority to act.

To further instill fear, the video connected the rise in popularity of explicit music with concomitant rises in social ills like teen suicide and pregnancy. No actual scientific evidence supported a clear causal relationship, but the narrators of the video proposed that there almost had to be a relationship between the rise in teen suicide and the popularity of metal because heavy metal bands sang about dark themes at the same time that more teens were killing themselves. A number of self-declared authorities on the dangers of popular culture appear in the video to bolster the PMRC’s case by arguing that statistics showing the number of hours spent listening to music and watching MTV indicated the prominence of media in kids’ lives. Each section of the video included expert testimony on the topic under review, as well as additional germane “facts.” For example, during the segment on alcohol and drug abuse, the narrators say that the Beastie Boys’ album License to Ill contains ninety-five references to drugs and alcohol, mentions that could go unnoticed without a printed lyric sheet.¹⁰⁹ Indeed, this near fetishizing of numbers and statistics helped evade the obligation to prove actual causation. This technique of suggesting causal links promoted a more surreal and dangerous aura around popular music in the home and suggested the limitless ability of albums to do harm. To combat these threats, the video called for vigilance on all fronts, and, in the final segment, parents were given recommendations for immediate productive actions that could be taken. The video, like the efforts Tipper Gore and other concerned parents, made detailed claims of depravity and connected them to teen social crises, all in the service of empowering individual families to make better choices in the marketplace.

Pat Pulling, who believed her son had committed suicide at the behest of his dungeon master while playing Dungeons & Dragons, reemerged in 1989 with another parenting manual, The Devil’s Web: Who Is Stalking Your Children for Satan? In the book, she pivoted from simply bringing to light the dangers of Dungeons & Dragons to focusing on the larger menace of satanism and occultism, of which she argued role-playing games were a significant part.¹¹⁰ Pulling echoed the PMRC’s fears and the sentiments of her earlier pamphlet for BADD, “Dungeons and Dragons: Witchcraft, Suicide, Violence.”¹¹¹ “Young people,” Pulling claimed in The Devil’s Web, “still struggling through their formative years, are prime targets of sophisticated cult recruiters and are also vulnerable to the superficial lures of Satanism.”¹¹² It was not necessarily that heavy metal concerts or role-playing games were doing direct harm, but rather that they warmed teens to ideas about the occult as well as drug and alcohol abuse, which would then lead to an actual initiation to drug taking and violent acts. “The games themselves did not cause the molestation, but they were the vehicle by which the molestation was carried out.”¹¹³ Adding to a growing chorus, Pulling was warning parents that popular culture products in the home like heavy metal and role-playing games could lure innocent kids out of the home into cults obsessed with violence, sex, and anarchy. Through the end of the 1980s, her organization and her book helped maintain the visibility of the alleged dangers of popular occulture and helped to establish a rationale for parents to more actively defend their homes and children from “the ever-growing web of occultism that threatens to entrap America’s children,” dramatically depicted on the cover of her book.¹¹⁴

This is a cultural virus

In December 1993 and March 1994, the US Senate convened Governmental Affairs Committee meetings that further exemplified the home’s shift in status from moral stronghold to refuge threatened by popular culture products.¹¹⁵ Committee cochairs Senators Joseph I. Lieberman (D-CT) and Herbert Kohl (D-WI) arranged the hearings in order to investigate video game–related violence and provide evidence for their proposed legislation on video game ratings. Much like the hearings on “porn rock” in 1985, these proceedings did not lead to any federal regulations. Instead, they served to inform the public about morally degrading video game content, give parents relevant information they could use to protect young consumers, and shame video game makers into creating less “inappropriate” content and self-regulating through a ratings system to help consumers make informed choices. In his opening statement, Senator Lieberman linked the kidnapping and murder of a young girl at a slumber party to the violent and lascivious imagery in video games, particularly the “troubling realism” and strong overtones of “sexual violence” in a CD-ROM game called Night Trap. Subsequently, he described in detail the finishing moves known as fatalities in the game Mortal Kombat, and later played a video montage of those moves one after another, a succession that would not happen in the game as played. In light of this sexual and violent content, he argued, “a ratings system is the very least the video game industry can do,” and he encouraged game creators to “simply stop producing the worst of this junk.” Nothing less was at stake than “nurturing healthy children” as the crisis of the suburban family continued into the 1990s. As in the earlier debates over popular music, critics continued to figure the home as under siege from morally questionable material and to urge parents to better equip themselves to protect against that threat by educating themselves about the dangers, an effort facilitated by the culture industries’ self-regulatory ratings. This frame for understanding the relationship between popular culture and the social ills of young consumers was central to the public’s task of making sense of the final suburban tragedy of the twentieth century.

Figure 5.4. The haunting cover of Pat Pulling’s The Devil’s Web depicts dead-eyed children under the sway of the devil. From Pat Pulling, with Kathy Cawthon, The Devil’s Web: Who Is Stalking Your Children for Satan? (Lafayette, LA: Huntington House, 1989).

On April 20, 1999, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris entered Columbine High School and committed the deadliest school attack to that point in US history. In the frantic and near constant coverage by the now-dominant twenty-four-hour news cycle, anchors, experts, and others speculated about how and why this had tragedy occurred.116 Predominant among their explanations were the influences of neo-goth musician Marilyn Manson, violent video games like Doom, and a secret gang of teens obsessed with Nazis and the occult called the Trench Coat Mafia. And, explicitly or implicitly, the commentators also endorsed a family values cultural logic to blame the boys’ parents as well; similarly, 85 percent of respondents to a Gallup poll conducted after the attack faulted the Harris and Klebold families.¹¹⁷ These were unsurprising explanations in light of the “satanic panic” of the 1980s and the responses it generated, which consistently and fervently located the causes of suburban teen tragedies in popular culture and emphasized the need for parents to properly regulate media consumption to prevent these kind of calamities.

This time, it seemed, the stakes were even higher than in the 1980s, as Klebold and Harris carried out a well-planned attack using military tactics and weapons. Fearing copycats or, worse, an actual cult of Manson worshippers ready to strike again, politicians, law enforcement, news media, and parents blamed these dangerous cultural products and reaffirmed the call for parental empowerment and “family values,” even though Harris himself left behind quite different explanations of his motivations. He wrote on his webpage, “Surely you will try to blame it on the clothes I wear, the music I listen to, or the way I choose to present myself but no. Do not hide behind my choices. You need to face the fact that this comes as a result of YOUR CHOICES. Parents and Teachers, YOU FUCKED UP.”¹¹⁸ Harris clearly understood how the culture wars worked and yet was also visibly its product: he still endorsed some of its logic by pointing the finger for his behavior at the failures of parents and teachers, in much the same way hardcore punks located the roots of their anger and frustration in their home lives. The reaction to the massacre at Columbine, then, demonstrated the ways in which the productive victimization of parents in the 1980s was successful in normalizing this cultural and political logic for understanding and addressing teen social problems, a logic that elided nuanced explanations of teen behavior and pinned blame on the cultural products allowed into the home that were poisoning its inhabitants.

In just the first few days after the attack, articles constantly referenced “gothic” clothing, the music of Marilyn Manson, or violent video games in describing Harris and Klebold as outcasts.¹¹⁹ The Associated Press’s coverage of the massacre began typically: “They are called the ‘Trench Coat Mafia,’ a group of about 10 students who wear long black coats, keep to themselves and follow shock rocker Marilyn Manson.”¹²⁰ They were “loners, outcasts, and ‘satanic individuals’ ” and “called themselves the trench coat mafia.”¹²¹ In discussing a broader pattern of school shootings, Time created a graph outlining the shooters’ crimes, mental health status, and cultural influences such as Marilyn Manson and the video game Doom.¹²² The framing of the tragedy in these terms demonstrated how central the logic of culture critics like Tipper Gore had become, and, no matter how the portrayal was nuanced, that framing prepared the reader to understand the motives and actions of Klebold and Harris as the logical outcome of deranged cultural influences that poor parenting had allowed to reach them.

Others went further in spelling out the “connections” more directly between those influences and what happened at Columbine High School. USA Today explicitly used the logic of the 1980s culture wars to argue that those dangerous media persisted and were now aided by other sources, such as violent video games and internet chat rooms, while New York Post columnist Steve Dunleavy argued the “blind could see it coming” because “these kids loved Marilyn Manson and his sick jive of destruction and self-destruction.”¹²³ This thinking contributed to the widespread story of Cassie Bernal, who was reportedly killed for professing faith in God and being an evangelical Christian.¹²⁴ In fact, Bernal was not targeted, nor did the alleged incident preceding her death take place.¹²⁵ The narrative sprang from the cultural frame already central to making sense of teen tragedies—that the killers must be satanic outcasts exacting their revenge against their well-adjusted, God-fearing peers, a vengeance spurred on by the demonic exhortations of artists like Marilyn Manson.

Similarly, in the days after the attack, television news reporters and the experts they interviewed consistently cited the connections between the media consumed by Klebold and Harris and what happened at Columbine. In particular, cable and nightly news continually raised the specter of the dark influences of goth culture and artist Marilyn Manson as the origin of the shooters’ evil. On April 21, the ABC newsmagazine 20/20 aired a special report on the phenomenon of the “gothic movement,” which it called a “a growing, and, to many, troubling trend in suburban America.”¹²⁶ Correspondent Brian Ross interviewed Steve Rickard of the Denver Police Department, who discussed at length the emergence of suburban gangs of gothic teens like those who committed the massacre at Columbine. When Ross finally asked him where it all comes from, Rickard responded, “I think in this case, you can trace it back to Marilyn Manson.” Near the end of the segment, Ross linked the gothic subculture and its propensity for suburban violence to other incidents around the country, giving parents a sense of what to look for to prevent another attack.

Other experts, such as Los Angeles Unified School District psychologist Richard Lieberman, mixed their messages about teen boys.¹²⁷ He explained that kids in distress show a number of recognizable and consistent warning signs. However, he and a UCLA psychologist both emphasized that “children learn violence as a way of resolving problems. And music, movies and video games reinforce that view.” Video games, in particular, seemed to be the new ingredient leading to violent teen behavior. On CNN’s Inside Politics, James Fox, dean of the College of Criminal Justice at Northeastern University and a member of the President’s Advisory Committee on School Shootings, reasoned, “The difference between video games and other forms of entertainment around us is that it’s so active participation. Rather than just sitting on a couch and watching a massacre on television, which is passive, a kid can learn to enjoy killing cybernetically.”¹²⁸ Fox represented the view of many experts that participatory video game violence was qualitatively different from other games or forms of entertainment and that the Columbine massacre was the evidence.¹²⁹ In a direct parallel to the cases of suicide and other violence in the 1980s, law enforcement officers, culture warriors, and reporters saw the malign influence of popular culture as the cause. Instead of heavy metal and Dungeons & Dragons, they now spotlighted Manson and violent video games like those vilified by Joe Lieberman in 1993.¹³⁰ This framing served similar purposes. News programs like those just described strongly suggested a simple, private solution to the problem of suburban teen violence, a producer and the product of the conservative politics and culture of that moment.

Some attempted to leverage the massacre at Columbine to highlight the need for stricter gun laws. President of New Line Cinema Michael DeLuca, in defending media industries, fused parenting concerns with the access to guns: “Bad home, bad parenting, having guns in the home, parents fighting and drinking. Kids need direction and guidance.”¹³¹ Similarly, Marc Klaas, a father turned policy advocate whose daughter was kidnapped and murdered in 1994, argued on the Fox News show Hannity and Colmes, “This isn’t a kind of a situation that would have occurred in this country just twenty or thirty years ago, but now we live in a culture where we have somewhere between 200 million and 240 million guns adorning our cupboards, hiding in our drawers.”¹³² Yet Klaas also returned to the problem of popular culture as part of this dangerous mix: “We are a culture that waits in line for the latest Hollywood pyrotechnic extravaganza, where the hero goes away and blows away 30 or 40 people.” Despite their efforts and that of their congressional supporters, the Senate failed even to pass popular restrictions on gun show sales, instead looking to parents to solve the problem of school shootings and teen gun violence.¹³³

Yet the second part of Klaas’s comments are what most viewers, including politicians of both parties, took away about the causes of the Columbine massacre.¹³⁴ Demonstrating the centrality of this cultural logic, they raced to blame popular culture and reinforce the role of parents in battling these hazards. President Bill Clinton implored parents to “take this moment to ask what else they can do to shield our children from violent images and experiences that warp young perceptions and obscure the consequences.” His wife and future senator, secretary of state, and presidential nominee, Hilary Rodham Clinton, echoed this message: “We can no longer shut our eyes to the impact that the media is having on all of our children.”¹³⁵ Signifying the consensus on the dangers of popular culture and media, conservative Christian presidential candidate Gary Bauer repeated a similar sentiment, “We’ve got a culture right now out of Hollywood that glorifies death. It’s in the movies, it’s in the music our kids here. You know, if you’re a parent out there, and you haven’t actually sat down and listened to some of the music that talks about killing cops, and glorifies violence against women and so forth, you need to do that; you need to take a closer look at what your kids are listening to.”¹³⁶ Colorado governor Bill Owens succinctly summed up the conventional wisdom, “This is a cultural virus.”¹³⁷

In response to this virus, many called on the culture industries to take more responsibility for their products, and some even sued video game and film companies for helping contribute to the Columbine attack. As with the Judas Priest and AC/DC cases, however, the companies were not found culpable in the courts. Instead, critics unerringly called for a focus on the culture of the family to prevent further tragedies like these. In the aftermath, Vice President Al Gore lobbied internet service providers to give tools to parents to better police online activities.¹³⁸ Psychologist Michael Gurian exemplified the commonsense politics of increased parental involvement on CNN: “They [parents] need to make sure that they have a plan for the boy’s adolescence, and that that plan includes a lot of the parents, a lot of the grandmas, grandpas, extended family or a lot of other friends of the family, so that the boy has this sort of safety net around him, this community, so that when he starts pulling away from the parents, he’s got the safety net.” Later in the interview Gurian made clear why this kind of intervention was so important: “Starting with the drive-by shootings in the inner city, then it has moved to the rural areas, and, it is, you know, to outer cities, suburbia.”¹³⁹ Gurian’s urgency stemmed in large part from his belief that the crisis of the family was causing violence in the suburbs.

In the face of this view, parents, mental health experts, and other teens did attempt to contextualize the behavior of Klebold, Harris, and other teens drawn to video games, Marilyn Manson, and goth culture. One mother who hosted goth dance nights for teens said, quite simply, “They’re just trying to find their own identity, to fit in, experiment. They’re good kids, kids just like anybody’s kids. They are anybody’s kids.”¹⁴⁰ She reiterated the sense held by many that experimenting with dress and identity was a normal part of growing up. Hundreds of teens seemed to say a similar thing about Klebold and Harris. They were different in dress and demeanor but killed for their own reasons. Recent Columbine High School graduate Tasha E. Kelter exemplified this view in her college newspaper: “I’m not blaming the ‘jocks’ of Columbine High School, the kids’ parents or Marilyn Manson. I’m blaming Klebold and Harris. To do anything else would be absurd—that’s settled.”¹⁴¹ A student in Florida explained that she felt safe around goths because they “have their own group and are really nice.”¹⁴² Some mental health advocates, too, swatted away media explanations and looked toward the private and social lives of teens as the root causes.¹⁴³ Harold S. Koplewicz of the Child Study Center at New York University pleaded in the New York Times: “The true tragedy is that America refuses to recognize there are millions of teens and children with psychological illnesses, which are as real as physical illnesses.”¹⁴⁴ Marilyn Manson himself eschewed media appearances but did pen an editorial for Rolling Stone in May 1999 titled “Columbine: Whose Fault Is It?”¹⁴⁵ In addressing this question, he followed the line of thinking of others who looked beyond popular culture to explain Columbine. “Throw a rock and you’ll hit someone who’s guilty. We’re the people who sit back and tolerate children owning guns, and we’re the ones who tune in and watch the up-to-the-minute details of what they do with them.” Still, Manson, like Frank Zappa when he testified about porn rock in 1985, pointed not to artists like himself but to the larger culture of violence in America that must be addressed. However, these efforts did little to shape the view of Columbine or teen violence.

Instead, the aftermath of Columbine signified how news media and culture warriors drew a simple and misguided connection between violent video games and musical lyrics on one hand and the spate of teen violence during the 1990s on the other, a connection that continued the notion of the suburban home under siege and empowered parents as the best defense.¹⁴⁶ In his book Columbine, Dave Cullen provides the definitive explanation of what happened at Columbine High School and why making clear that so much of what the public thinks they know is wrong in just the way noted above. “We remember Columbine,” he writes, “as a pair of outcast Goths from the Trench Coat Mafia snapping and tearing through their high school hunting down jocks to settle a long-running feud. Almost none of that happened. No Goths, no outcasts, nobody snapping. No targets, no feud, and no Trench Coat Mafia.”¹⁴⁷ Yet politicians, culture critics, and parents continued to see incidents like this as a result of a cultural formula. Blaming the media and families buttressed culturally conservative politicians’ power and authority in American culture to insist on family values and cultural solutions, not social programs and regulatory measures for addressing things like school shootings, depression, and teen pregnancy. Columbine did call forth activists calling for those kinds of policy solutions. However, as John King of CNN noted, despite the push for gun control, “the president’s overriding message was that the cure to this recurring national nightmare would not be found in Washington.”¹⁴⁸

The dominant and enduring mode for understanding this tragedy and how to prevent another one was the conservative cultural politics of parental empowerment, family values, and eventually faith-based programs, not sweeping legislation. This was no more evident than in the values-centric campaign of George W. Bush. The suburban culture wars not only made possible Bush’s election but facilitated his faith-based agenda for schools coping with substance abuse, teen pregnancy, and suicide. His approach opened the door to a wider assault on government, expertise, and science that often exacerbated the problems it was seeking to solve. This worldview, and the limited set of government programs facilitating it, also reinforced the primacy of the suburban household in American culture. When understood in context, this frame, which focused on family solutions and market choices in response to social ills, involved the valorization and empowerment of white suburbanites and, at the same time, further marginalized those already on the edge of the frame for understanding American families.

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In many ways, the recommendations of parenting experts and the PMRC did not seem appropriate to the job of combating a threat promoted as ruining lives and destroying families. When the Columbine attacks occurred, it appeared those tactics had indeed failed, as the massacre seemed to represent the worst-case scenario feared by 1980s culture critics. This individualistic, piecemeal approach should have helped suburban parents just like those in Littleton to identify and address the dark influences of goth culture and Marilyn Manson (or, more productively, identify and act on their children’s possible disorders). Of course, as Dave Cullen and others have shown, that tragedy and others had almost nothing to do with the media and popular culture habits of teens, and placing blame also on parents elided the many structural failures that paved the way for the massacre.

However, the scourge of supposedly hazardous media entering the home culture was important in other ways for critics and parents. It helped many suburban parents reassert authority over their homes and restore a sense of sanctity that would not have been possible without the victimization these products effected by coming right in the front door. With nothing less than their children’s lives at stake, parents were empowered to re-regulate that space according to their own prerogatives with hardly any interference from the state or judgment from politicians. In adopting this private, family-centered approach to teen social problems, culture critics and the parents they empowered facilitated and were facilitated by the conservative attack on government and valorization of mythic family values. Indeed, the concerned parent and their fears of popular culture and new media outlets became essential to mainstream cultural politics as the United States headed into the twenty-first century. Politicians across the ideological spectrum leveraged the notion of a presumably innocent white suburban populace ruthlessly targeted by amoral culture industries to further valorize a nostalgic vision of family located in the suburban home. The consequences of this conventional political wisdom were experienced quite differently across race and gender lines, setting the terms of the culture wars for the new century as movements for equality like gay marriage and Black Lives Matter gathered steam. However, the legacy of the twentieth century meant they still faced stiff opposition from people who relied on nostalgic visions of a “traditional” suburban family and the innate innocence of its members, who must be protected or reformed. These were powerful visions that, in turn, politicians and culture critics used to marginalize and dehumanize those civil rights activists who did not fit that image.