I'd say Elvis Presley was hugely controversial; while he was in reality just stealing music from the black community he was still making it accessible to the white world, where most people were listening to those ****ty bands that just stood there and had 4 people sing and look pretty.

Mayhem was pretty bad too. I forget who, but one of their members shot himself in the head with a shotgun. I'm not sure how much of the story is true and how much is urban legend bull****, but I do know a picture of his dead body with part of his head shot off ended up on some album they released or something. I think they did a lot of other wierd **** as well.

Also, when they first came out, I believe I recall hearing about Black Sabbath being banned from certain cities in the deep south over here because people thought they were actually satanists. They stirred up a lot of controversy in their early years.

i was just watching an Iron Maiden doc and thinking about how much my parents and other people freaked the F out about metal in the 80's.... to them, listening to The Number Of The Beast was the same as sacrificing a goat on the altar of a church. lol.
Bruce D. was basically saying how funny Brits found that, since in the U.K. it was just seen for what it was... marketing hype and crafting an image to sell records, whereas, many in the U.S. took the image as reality and truly believed there were 'dark forces' at work.

Growing up in the South sucked in many ways but it gave me an early window into the extreme ignorance and hypocrisy that people can descend into when free thought and reasoned debate are absent. In other words.. wherever religious dogma takes over completely.

I always felt I was unshockable until I read about Mayhem and the whole Norwegian black metal scene.... since they were indeed, actually 'for real'

Crazy stuff

Yeah I always thought it was pretty hilarious when people reacted like that. In fact, growing up in a non-religious household I thought the entire concept of satanism was pretty funny to begin with so seeing people freak out about fake satanism was hysterical.

back in the days when i had to ask my parents to buy me music... i would always hold up a copy of Maiden's "killers" and ask them to buy it for me.

after that, they would pretty much buy me whatever I wanted. lol.

so i made it work in my favor.

i had it pretty bad though, b/c my parents were even 'afraid' of motley crue.
/facepalm

lol. Well they did encourage smoking in the boys room!

:laughing:
:yeah:

plus they taught millions of teenage girls how to improperly apply eyeliner

Well, I did a skim over the thread and didn't see these two, one of which I experienced first-hand and saw the related picketing etc, and the other one is something I've read and come to understand as controversial based on the ideals of the period.

The first is Marilyn Manson, who I saw in Indianapolis in High School and I remember sizeable crowds of picketers waving banners and defending their religion against this apparent poster child for the antiChrist or some bullsh*t because he supposedly ripped up bibles and was generally abrasive toward religion, although I think it always was and still is a calculated act.

The second is Ray Charles, who combined gospel music with sexual content and night club context.

Of course, there's always Black Sabbath.

Of course. I was always amazed that those picketer-types weren't able to see that it was very clearly just an act. Also the idea that Christians somehow need to defend their religion in a country that's 85% Christian is always funny to me.

Laissez-fair. If they didn't do what they do, we'd have little to talk about.

Yeah, the irony is that they wound up basically working as volunteers for Marilyn Manson's PR team.