“The Show Must go On”: 1980s Music Videos, Moral Panics, and AIDS

The 1980s was a time of flourishing popular music as well as sizable profits for the cultural industries in Western Europe and USA.It hosted adolescents wearing puffy pants and shoulder pads, listening to portable cassette players, and casually watching MTV, but the period's legacy is somewhat obscured in clouds of hairspray and shimmering pastel colours.Nonetheless, despite shallow fads, famous artists would occasionally address political issues such as The Cold War, apartheid in South Africa, or famine in Ethiopia.This was done through arguments and charity, but foremost by musical means, including videos with social messages.When objecting against the nuclear arms race, protesting constitutional racism, or raising funds for charity, sympathies were easily won.However, when popular musicians used sexual references, controversies arose.While some artists engaged in humanitarianism, others caused moral panics, and some did both.During the mid-1980s, public debates about sex and youth cultures were highly polemic, either emphasising freedom of expression and the democratic right to information or calling for censorship and legal retribution.Conservative organisations such as the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC), initiated trials against a selection of artists, claiming their songs caused immorality, and even death, among its adolescent listeners.The debates hardened during the AIDS-crisis, and homosexual men were particularly shamed.However, several popular artists publicly questioned such allegations.They took part in the democratic process by participation in debates, television appearances, and by arranging music festivals.Moreover, they produced music videos, which allowed them to reach out to audiences in ways that their opponents could not.The aim of this article is to analyse this clash as part of a participatory democracy, where both sides used different resources and approaches to push their respective perspectives through, and where the music video became a crucial means for political activism.In order to follow this development, this article will address four overlapping historical phases from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, when relationships between music videos, sexuality, and moral panics were particularly tense and always transforming, in Western Europe and USA.First, a historical introduction provides examples of genderbending music videos from before the outbreak of moral panics (1978)(1979)(1980)(1981)(1982)(1983)(1984).Selected examples show a variety of contemporary genres, but apart from being popular, the videos have been selected because of sexual themes in lyrics and as portrayed in the videos.The second phase involves the early