When I was younger, I was a serious music snob. While the other girls were listening to Ke$ha, I reveled in my individuality by enjoying bands such as Slipknot, Black Sabbath and Static-X. While my tastes in music haven’t changed too much over the years, I have added onto them. Alongside the teenage emo music resides some of the classics — Guns N’ Roses, Skid Row and even some pop. However, my loyalty will always remain with heavy metal.

Picture the tiniest and most cramped venue. I used to go to see heavy metal bands there and would eventually make my way out onto the patio to sit on the railing and listen to the alcoholic chatter of college students who had more of a right to be there than I did. 

These music choices or desired hangouts are not typical of a preteen female, but the difference in music preference says nothing of who I am as a person.

People have had problems with the heavy metal genre for about as long as it’s been around, usually for its glorification of violence and perceived satanic imagery. Moral guardians crusaded to censor the genre, leading to the creation of the Parents Music Resource Center, which sought to place parental labels on music with explicit content. After its introduction in 1985, it was heavily combated by heavy hitters in the music industry such as Twisted Sister’s Dee Snider and Frank Zappa. 

They argued that parents should regulate what their children see and experience on their own terms by instilling the values they want in them. The argument stood that what is scary to one person is not to another, and one group of people does not have the moral authority to brand an entire genre as damaging, while another group has an entirely different view. 

Despite the protests of musicians, Parental Advisory stickers were placed on albums with supposedly objectionable content, and people who believed it was other people’s jobs to dictate their children’s morals slept a little better at night. They no longer had to live in fear of having actual conversations with their children about their beliefs. A sticker was slapped onto albums, making them taboo and undesirable and doing the same to the listener by association. 

This furor toward the censorship of music was at least partially stimulated by the Oct. 26, 1984, suicide of a 19-year-old man named John Daniel McCollum. McCollum shot himself while listening to Ozzy Osbourne’s album “Blizzard of Ozz,” and his parents pinned the sole blame on the song “Suicide Solution,” which, while perhaps misleadingly named, is about alcohol and what it can do to someone’s life. 

McCollum’s parents claimed that McCollum was a perfectly normal child who only turned to suicide after hearing Osbourne’s music and began to harbor a fascination with the singer. While he later expressed sympathy with the young man and with his parents, Ozzy stated that McCollum “must have been pretty messed up before he ever heard an Ozzy record.”

While the death was certainly tragic, suicide is rarely, if ever, the result of one sole influence. Making the jump to blaming the music for the tragedy is a stretch at best.

For example, when the Columbine shooting occurred, much of the public was more than ready to accept that the two teenagers responsible were avid, even obsessed fans of Marilyn Manson. He shouldered the blame for the deaths of the students through accusations that his music was immoral and dangerous. This continued on, even after it was shown that neither of the boys were fans of Manson’s music.

This is a prime example of scapegoating and shows that people need to consider things that are perhaps strange or different to them as something other than bad or damaging. In these cases of music being “blamed” for violence, other factors should have been taken into consideration. Rather than parents claiming music corrupted their child, perhaps some further reflection on the parents’ relationship with their child and how much they actually knew about their son or daughter would reveal the true motivation. While I certainly don’t blame Columbine on the parents of the two boys, the answer cannot be found in music.