First, the part that deserves more attention than any headline gave it: a man is dead. Georgi Kuzev, 37 years old, was beaten at the foot of Youth Hill in Plovdiv in early August and died in hospital. Five teenagers, three boys and two girls, have been charged. That is a tragedy and a court case, and both deserve seriousness.
Here is what the Bulgarian tabloid press found serious instead. Four of the five suspects wore metal band merchandise to their court hearing: Powerwolf, Mayhem, Pantera, Sepultura. One paper promptly ran the headline “Satanic black metal brings together teenage killers from Plovdiv.” Never mind that investigators have established no connection between the suspects’ taste in music and the crime. Never mind that the satanic-group allegations remain exactly that, allegations. A Powerwolf shirt was visible in a courtroom, and forty years of tabloid muscle memory did the rest.
Watch the video above. Dee Snider, 1985, testifying before the United States Senate, calmly dismantling the claim that his music corrupted the youth. We wrote about that circus before: the PMRC lost the argument, the bands sold more records, and the moral panic looks quaint now. But quaint is the wrong word for what the panic did in between. In 1990 Judas Priest sat through a trial over subliminal messages. In 1994 three teenagers in West Memphis were convicted of murder with their black clothes and metal fandom treated as evidence, and it took eighteen years to get them out. The t-shirt-as-proof reflex is not harmless lazy journalism. It has put people in prison.
And the science has been in for decades. We covered that too: listening to heavy music does not make people violent, and the research keeps saying so in every language it is asked. Bulgaria has courts to determine what happened on Youth Hill and why. That work is hard, slow and necessary. Blaming the loudest shirt in the room is none of those things. It is a way of not asking real questions: about violence among teenagers, about how five kids end up charged with killing a man, about everything that is actually difficult here.
A man died. Five families are destroyed. And a newspaper looked at all of that and saw a black metal story. The eighties never ended. They just changed language.
If you are in Bulgaria and you wear these shirts: we see you, and you are not on trial. The music was never the crime. It never is.
