Heavy metal music is the work of Satan himself, and parents should be extremely fearful of it, for it will most assuredly corrupt their innocent children. That, by and large, is the ludicrous message delivered by the media time and again in “10 Unintentionally Funny News Reports On Metal,” an eye-opening new supercut from Loudwire. The seven-minute montage intersperses excerpts from local news shows of the 1980s and 1990s with clips from religious programs of the era, but the message stays pretty much the same throughout. Heavy metal music is treated as a public threat, essentially equated with drug abuse. One might have thought that anti-rock hysteria died out in the 1950s or ’60s, but this supercut shows that it just mutated into something infinitely more ridiculous over the decades.
A particular highlight of “10 Unintentionally Funny News Reports On Metal” is a segment hosted by Stone Phillips, best known today for his stint anchoring Dateline NBC. Here, Phillips has been dispatched to a high school in Teaneck, New Jersey, where he delivers a somber report about the school’s “so-called tough kids, hoods, or burnouts, some into drinking or drugs, others who aren’t into much of anything at all… except heavy metal music.” Cut to a group of said tough kids, practicing guitar licks in a room bedecked with heavy metal posters. Then, in an outdoor setting, a 17-year old student named Michael Chaloub, looking like the textbook Reagan era metalhead with his Iron Maiden T-shirt, mullet, and mustache, delivers this soliloquy about the high school experience and its impenetrable cliques:
They got preps in here. They got the nerds. And they got, you know, guys like us. The preps, they’re the ones who always wear, like, they’re in friggin’ Hawaii or something. They wear those 10,000, like, multi-color shirts. You know, like those idiots over there. And they go play Frisbee in the middle of the field.
Given those unappetizing options, it’s little wonder young, misguided Michael sought solace in heavy metal music. It’s enough to make a news anchor sigh deeply and shake his head in disbelief before throwing it to the weather guy for the five-day forecast.