ABSTRACT
Newspaper journalists and television commentators overwhelmingly depicted metal as a phenomenon of deviancy posing a threat to the moral fabric of society. The situation was exacerbated by a series of teenage suicides and the murder of a young girl at an Istanbul cemetery, which triggered a subsequent number of panics over metal and Satanism. The moral panic over metal and Satanism in Turkey built up over several years before sending its first shockwaves of moral concern through the country. The issue of metal and Satanism first surfaced in autumn 1990, when Sabah, one of the country's leading dailies, published a photo report on a metal concert in Istanbul. This chapter uses four different categories of moral subversiveness namely: Religious Subversiveness, Sexual Subversiveness, Political Subversiveness and Social Subversiveness. The series of teenage suicides which, according to the Turkish mass media, were inspired by metal music and Satanism commenced with the joint self-murder of a teenage couple in June 1998.
