Credit: The New York Public Library

Whether it’s jazz, comics, television, pop music, or video games, everything that young people like will cause a moral panic surrounding it to some degree.

Not to get all ‘Old Man Yells at Cloud’ about everything, but sometimes this is for a good reason. Take social media, for example. It’s not just that young people are addicted to posting, but it sure as hell is being targeted at them, and the more hell you can raise about that, the better.

You might say that the previously mentioned mediums are all forms of art, compared to social media, which is just a money-making scheme. However, the people behind social media will tell you that they represent the way that people socialise now. They say it brings people together who would never have met otherwise, and not all of them are lying, but most of them are.

What’s more, for all the misguided uproar surrounding the previous artistic mediums I mentioned, let’s not kid ourselves that there weren’t people in those industries acting in bad faith. The television, pop music and video game industries weren’t exactly havens of ethical business practices, just as they sure as hell aren’t today. They were filled with people, quite simply, looking to make a buck out of getting kids addicted to stuff without a thought for the safety of their audience.

With this in mind, it makes it all the more frustrating that so much of the furore surrounding new and exciting media is blatant and unabashed lying. Jazz music is a perfect example of this.

Not only was this kind of music labelled a corrupting influence on the youth, turning them to drink, drugs and libidinous behaviour, it was also labelled a public health crisis. It’s true, people thought that listening to too much jazz music, with all its jerking, stop-start rhythms, would cause people lasting physical damage if they tried to keep up.

Remarkably, people bought it. Few things prove this like a case from Cincinnati, Ohio, in the 1920s. The New York Times reported that a Salvation Army branch in the city had forced the closure of a nearby jazz club, on the grounds that it was opposite the Catherine Booth Home for Girls, a medical facility for expectant mothers. The suit the Christian charity brought forward alleged that the music playing from the club would imprint “jazz emotions” on the babies before they were even born.

To be clear, they’re saying that like it would be a bad thing.

It took time, effort and hard work, but eventually, jazz music proved to be a vital artistic medium and not a societal ill in the way that so many (closet racist) people believed it was. You’d think that would make people less likely to get caught up in moral panics going forward. This would allows us to actually This would allow us to actually make actual critiques of the industries that shape the lives of our kids and us to this day.

Unfortunately, people would rather buy into blatant lies than actually think for a second.