I asked the students to consider the case of the Satanic-cult hysteria of the 1980s and 1990s. Those of you who are roughly my age probably remember that the way I do: a mix of high paranoia and low comedy, something like the Red Scare without the real existential threat — there was, in fact, a worldwide Communist apparatus, complete with gulags and nuclear weapons, but there wasn’t a national network of Satanists running American record labels and daycares. Tipper Gore et al. fretted that the nation’s children were being led into drug abuse, suicide, and occultism by the likes of AC/DC, Cyndi Lauper, and the unusually literate (by 1980s-rock standards) stylings of Twisted Sister, whose couplets — “You are so condescending / Your gall is never-ending” — turned out to fit the times rather nicely.

There was a more serious side to those times, too. Members of the band Judas Priest were dragged into court over allegations that their music contributed to the suicides of two Nevada teenagers. As with the Salem witch trials and modern-day non-judicial investigations of sexual assaults and hate crimes on college campuses, spectral evidence played a prominent role: Counsel for the plaintiffs argued that the psychological masterminds behind “Hell Bent for Leather” and other hits of the 1980s had inserted subliminal messages into their recordings. Ozzy Osbourne faced a similar lawsuit in the death of a California youth whose parents insisted that his song “Suicide Solution” (which is in fact a cautionary account of alcoholism — “suicide is slow with liquor” etc. — that should have warmed the heart of any teetotaling Southern Baptist) was responsible for their son’s suicide.

In retrospect, the social psychology at work is embarrassingly obvious: The divorce tsunami that peaked in the late 1970s left a great many American parents partly or entirely estranged from their children. The resulting guilt and anxiety sent an entire generation of parents — and the professional scolds and political opportunists whose livelihood greatly benefits from national moral panics — searching for a villain. Ozzy Osbourne, addled dope that he is, is not in fact much of a villain, but he plays one on stage, and he and his ilk served nicely in the role of great social boogeymen of the era.