My son’s school sent out an email about “the Momo challenge”, allegedly an online phenomenon in which a disturbing character called Momo entices children to commit increasingly dangerous acts, culminating in self-harm. The fact that there have been no confirmed cases of this actually happening did not deter the sender of the email. The sculpture of Momo that inspired the story is really creepy, but the Momo Challenge has all the hallmarks of good old fashioned moral panic.
That got me thinking about moral panics of yesteryear. I remember my parents having a Very Serious Talk with me about my fondness for D&D. To their credit, they quickly realized it was harmless and brought joy to their awkward, introverted son, and they never worried about it again. But I do remember the craziness around it in the 80s, and ISTR Geraldo Rivera interviewing Gary Gygax on some news show.
The Satanic Panic is, of course, one of the canonical examples of a moral panic. The world was just lousy with Satanists in the 80s, going around sacrificing children and playing D&D.
As Billy Joel can attest “Heavy Metal suicide” was another thing we all had to worry about. Terrifyingly, the heavy metal bands were encouraging kids to kill themselves through subliminal messages and/or backmasking. The only actual instance of backmasking I’m aware of is in “Fire on High”, by ELO. I’m not aware of anyone snuffing themselves over it. I can’t remember who it was, but some band member quipped (paraphrasing), “If subliminal messages worked, we wouldn’t tell our fans to kill themselves. We’d tell them to buy more records.”
I’m not sure where to draw the line between an urban legend and a full blown moral panic. Maybe it becomes a moral panic when it’s featured on major news outlets and community/political leaders take action on it. I remember hearing in the 80s about men lurking in the bathrooms of department stores and cutting the penises off young boys. I only heard of that from other kids, so I suppose it stayed at the level of urban legend. Had the news been rife with stories of it, and had department stores assigned staff to monitor the restrooms, I guess that would have pushed it into Moral Panic territory.
Backmasking, FWIW, is real. When I was a teen my friends and I would find records rumored to have backward messages in them, and play them backwards. I heard several; not just the audio equivalent of pareidolia, but actual, discernible words that were put there on purpose. Of course, it was all either tongue-in-cheek, artistry, or something in between; nothing telling me to worship Satan or kill myself or anything like that.
This was the 80’s, right in the heart of the Satanic Panic, and I was in the thick of it. I loved heavy metal, and of course the Christian Right was convinced that it was going to lead me on the path to perdition. I remember when AC/DC came to my town of Springfield, IL, you’d think the Prairie Capital Convention Center would have invited Old Scratch himself to give a performance, to hear it from the local evangelical community.
Another moral panic I remember is butt-chugging - teenagers supposedly soaking tampons in vodka and sticking them up their butts (or vaginas). Of course, the physics are impossible, and even if you could get an alcohol-soaked tampon up the browneye or vajayjay, do it once and you won’t do it again.
The whole “day care child abuse scandals” which gripped the country about the same time as the Satanic panic. Suddenly day care workers were doing unspeakable things to the children, with no real evidence whatsoever. My favorite was a child telling the therapist he had been forced to eat peanut butter off of his day care worker’s body. When the police found a jar of peanut butter at the day care, that proved it was real! The worker went to prison, but eventually the whole thing was found to be a crock of…peanut butter.
I remember my grandmother taking away my daughter’s Power Rangers because they were “of the devil”. Of course, Grandma raised me and I did a lot to put her fur up about things involving Satan.
Huh, Grandma wasn’t alone: POWER RANGERS THE DEMONIC TRUTH 2017 - YouTube
I remember being a tween during one wave of the LSD tattoo rumors. Instead of frightening us, we all started intensely searching for those mythical LSD Fantasia tattoos.
The poison Halloween candy and razor blades in apples thing is still going strong, I think. There was at least one case where it happened, but it was a father trying to get a scapegoat to kill his kids. Also when we adopted a black cat, the well meaning but naive volunteer told us to make him an indoor cat because people might sacrifice him on Halloween :dubious: If anything, that cat is an agent of some lesser Satan anyway, if we did let him outside it would be a sacrifice of small critters.
Of course people did it, but I’ll guess the number of songs with this increased immediately after the panic. The Judas Priest thing was the parents’ lawyers trying to find an angle.
It’s amazing what kids will say when you have an authority figure who they want to tell them they’re doing the right thing. Dissociative identity disorder is also sometimes accused of therapists leading patients to fit the therapists’ narrative.
I recall talking about ‘Paul is dead’ backward masking with some friends when it first was being talked about and of course the dumb guy asks “How do you play a record backwards, is there a reverse switch?” I think someone told him there was only on the really good turntables. Years later when Spinal Tap came out and the guy talked about his amp going up to 11 I remembered this guy and all dumb things he did.
There are differences in turntables. Some are “Automatic”, which means you hit a button and it cues up/plays the record.
Others have separate controls for the spinning motor and the tone arm. These turntables are what will work. You merely do not turn on the motor. Set the tone arm on the disc manually, and spin either direction.
Most vinyl people today would eschew such a practice. It can or will ruin your needle or cartridge.
Never having done it, I assume you physically force it backwards with the needle down and speakers powered. Which probably means hurting the motor in your player.
I’m too young for that one, and nobody ever claimed you could play a CD backwards. I mean, you could extract the data and reverse the waveform, but it seems like it’s not the same.
Cheap record players had a switch you’d slide to change between 33 rpm and 45 rpm (and 78). If you left the lever between the numbers, the turntable would not be connected to the motor and would turn freely. It was than a simple matter to let down the tone arm and manually turn the turntable in the wrong direction.
The lever can be seen in the front left of this picture.
At the time the only options we knew of were to disconnect the belt to the turntable and spin it backward by hand or own recording studio grade equipment which none of us ever would. Spinning it backwards would wear down the records so we would never do something like that with our precious albums.
I can guess that dumbass tried it himself on his own cheap turntable, this was a guy who managed to warp some records and decided he could flatten them by leaving them out in the sun. Hint: that will warp them more.
Of course we thought we were wonderful experts on stereo equipment but it wouldn’t be that long before everything changed. One of my friends was planning to eventually spend $10,000 on a quality music system one day. By the time he was earning real money you could buy the quality equipment he imagined for a few hundred dollars. But I had lost interest by that time.
Basically teen girls would have parties where they would all put on different brightly colored lipstick and give boys they invited to the party blowjobs. The boy with the most different color lipstick on his penis won, but you would think any male participant in that game would already consider themselves a winner.
