The young people of Malaysia are in danger. The menace that is awaiting them isn't the prospect of unemployment, inflation or a ravaged natural environment. It's something far spookier: The Prince of Darkness himself is here, so lock up your sons and daughters. El Diablo has come to take them away, and he's utilising a form of music called Black Metal.

Someone once described the social-conservative ethos of the British Daily Mail paper as being akin to 'worrying yourself sick with the thought that someone, somewhere is having fun'. Multiply this worry several times over, and you will start to get an inkling of the moral panic that is currently gripping our guardians.

Malaysian students, especially Malays, are now being accused of practicing 'rites' of blood-soaked sympathy for the Devil in these Black Metal concerts. These 'followers' paint upside-down crucifixes on various parts of their anatomy and communicate with strange hand-gestures while clambering down the stairway to hell. For all you know, they are also the type to not rewind their rented videos before returning them to the store.

We've seen this sort of panic before, of course. Heavy-metal music in the 1980s was blamed for bringing in drugs, delinquency, the aesthetic evil of skinny Malay guys with long hair and skin-tight leather trousers, and free sex.

Rap music in the early 1990s was excoriated for encouraging the young and the restless to wear baseball caps backwards, talk like African-Americans and have free sex.

Punk music slightly later in the decade was scolded for stopping our students from going forth and finding a cure for cancer by instead dyeing and spiking their hair, spitting at authority and going wild in the free-sex department.

Cross-generational finger-wagging

The latest entry in this Hit Parade is in with a bullet because it can accommodate not only dubious fashion sense and cross-generational finger-wagging but the serious matter of theology - in addition of course to that old standby, free sex.

(The fact that our young people have, over the decades, needed the instigation of various musical genres before getting down on it is, or should be, the bigger worry. Will they stop getting the urge to merge if they'd just turn off the radio? Have they no imagination of their own?)

I've never been to a Black Metal gig so I probably shouldn't talk. But the musical genre itself has been interpreted in such an elastic manner that even the songs of poor old Kurt Cobain have been thrown into the brew.

Rock music, with its decorum-busting, Dionysian catharsis and mock-dangerous posturing, has always been ample fodder for conservatives anyway. Here's a news flash: It's meant to sound offensive. Each generation will like to think that it's more shocking than the previous one.

The sight of middle-aged commentators (who have blended in and blander-ed out with the rest of respectable society) now ransacking lyrics for anti-religious tendencies in such an earnest manner is a sight that seems wistfully sad.

Even the most dogged press pundit has to concede that some of the lyrics can't be deciphered. The Devil may have the best tunes, but the words set to them are willfully obscure. Lyrics, more than any other form of writing, can't be read like solemn manifestos.

There are these pesky little things called metaphors, playfulness and hyperbole which operate in written work whose literary merit exceeds that of a telephone book.

Red herring

You don't even have to look at music: The much-feted soccer team that recently came and conquered are nicknamed The Red Devils; how would a fan feel if some clueless commentator ascribes dastardly motives to his desire to watch these guys kick a ball around?

Part of the charge against these kids is that they appear to be autonomous. Why, they are so vile that they are able to organise their own gigs with no support from mainstream institutions! They even know how to use the Internet to communicate with people from far-away countries! Such self-sufficiency can't possibly bode well.

It's ironic that Malays who have, in their own micro and quaint way, done their bit to reject the oft-criticised lifestyle of bureaucratic dependency and subsidies, are now being attacked. The way that they can do their own thing is cited as proof that they shouldn't be doing it at all. Independence per se breeds suspicion.

At the moment there have been no reports of actual crimes being committed. All we have are the 'testimonies' of 'reformed cult members' who talk of stepping on the Holy Book.

Seeing the blocked faces of these kids on the front pages of our newspapers reminded me of Arthur Miller's 'The Crucible', recently staged in Kuala Lumpur by the Rep 16:21 ensemble.

At the time of its staging, the main potential for contemporary Malaysian socio-political relevance was its portrait of a cowed and hypocritical judiciary. Now Miller's allegorical story of witch-hunting involving frightened children turning against each other can be read all too literally.

I suppose I can take the anti-Black Metal campaign a mite more seriously if the timing hadn't been too convenient for comfort. But at a time when students are being detained under the ISA for daring to express views that differ from those professed at the recent Umno general assembly, and when the government itself is hell-bent on proving its religious credentials against the intransigent orthodoxies of the dominant opposition party, rounding up and detaining scores of kids in shopping malls just because they happen to be wearing black T-shirts with symbols even they probably didn't give any thought to seems too propitious.

Add to that the fact that these kids are under voting age and thus officially not important, could Black Metal be nothing more than a red herring?