Classic “Barbara Streisand Effect” in play.
…and then your friend founded The Onion… 
I did quote and say this before I read forward; @Jonathan nailed it too!
Let me guess, you had those writable CDs with the tribal-goth preprint on them?
I took this as intentional irony, but I could be wrong!
Ha!
No.
Plain, blank, silvery CD with the album title written on it in sharpie.
It may not the best example, but it still fits the description reasonably well. I am thinking of the trope of the happy workers/peasants living an idyllic life, which can be found in the beginning in this movie before the enemies invaded. As for agreeing on everything, all the soviet citizens seem to agree with each other throughout, and you can’t really expect the evil capitalists to be agreeable.
You left out my personal favorite - Yuri Norstein - whose work is almost like magic.
That is one of the most appalling things I’ve ever read! Your teachers should have been commending you for your creativity and entrepreneurial spirit! What exactly did they think instrumental EDM did to people?!
See, that’s the thing: They refused to listen to the CD for themselves, and also refused to drop the assumption that it was some kind of satanic metal music or something, based on the fact that I had heavy eyeshadow on the cover. No matter what anyone told them, they maintained that it must be some really soul-ruining stuff.
Literally judging a book by its cover.
(Disclaimer: Satanic metal also doesn’t do anything to people)
When I was about 10 years old, there was this rumor going around school that the band Kiss was so Satanic that listening to their music could stop your heart. I was terrified of Kiss.
The point being, I was 10 years old when I fell for this stuff. I would have assumed that your adult teachers would be a little more flexible-minded, but apparently I’d be wrong to assume this.
Right??
This was my thought process for a long time until the tail end of high school, where I realized that the faculty of the middle school were huge control freaks, and would make literally any idiotic statement, as long as that meant they could exert control.
I painted a target on my back by not wearing a neatly-tucked, business-casual polo with khaki pants on the cover. Also, my music caused conversations to start within school walls that were not strictly on the topic of classes or sports.
When I was in highschool, I was told there was apparently a raver/cybergoth fashion subculture growing in the middle school, but then later that year I heard rumors of crackdowns and confiscations, which effectively resulted in a complete ban of the aesthetic.
When I was a kid, there was a lot of talk about Dungeons & Dragons being Satanic. And a lot of stigma around heavy metal and hip hop.
At one point in my school system there was a panic about students who wore black t-shirts with band logos on them. The adults didn’t know who any of the bands were and couldn’t tell the difference. If it was a black t-shirt and it had a band logo on it, it was about something evil.
When I was in middle school in the 90s, there was a big scare about gangs. This was a small town with suburban vibes, with no major gang presence. We were always getting in trouble because anything we wrote or drew that the adults didn’t understand was interpreted as some sort of gang code. Total absurdity.
Oh, and Marilyn Manson. Can’t forget the absolute terror of Marilyn Manson.
Then when I was in high school, the Columbine shooting happened. I dressed as Edgar Allan Poe for an AP Lit presentation, and got sent the office for wearing a long black coat (because obviously wearing a long black coat means you intend to do violence). The ironic thing is that I had borrowed the coat from a teacher. Around that same time, the parents of the younger kids were probably in an uproar over witchcraft in Harry Potter books.
I imagine this sort of thing has been going on since the beginning of time, but there’s at least a strong continuity back to the 1950s when parents were scared of rock music, people of different skin colors socializing together, and boys with long hair.
I think it’s largely an American phenomenon. I don’t remember any paranoia around Heavy Metal or D&D when I was in high school in the 80s, or any concern about Harry Potter when I was a teaching assistant in the 2010s. In Britain Christianity is widely regarded as a quaint old relic and the Devil as a bit of a joke (and, by academics, for what it was, an early Christian attempt to discredit Pan, Bacchus and Dionysius.)
In Germany in the 80s came a “Sektenbeauftragter” into our school who was a priest and self-acclaimed sects expert and told us that all Heavy Metal listeners are Satanic.
So true: even the clergy are a little embarrassed by the whole affair (particularly the ones that pop up, sporadically, to address school assemblies) and educational authorities in secular Britain don’t give a fig for the fate of their children’s godless souls. In primary schools, what they are really concerned about (or at least they were in the 1980s when I was growing up) are more material and realistic threats such as being trampled to death by marauding cows whilst enjoying a delightful walk in the countryside, becoming entangled in submerged debris and drowning in lonely ponds, being flattened by trains whilst retrieving footballs from railway lines, being electrocuted whilst attempting to free kites caught at the top of electricity pylons, and particularly, crossing the road (a clear and present danger drilled in to us each day at school. Terribly dangerous roads over here; I believe road-crossing mortality amongst children in Britain is around 99.7%). All children of that generation are forever haunted by graphic government information films.
By the time young people progress to secondary school in hazardous Britain they’re frankly lucky just to be alive and any further extension of their lifespan has to be considered a bonus, even in a state of demonic possession contracted through listening to Metal or dabbling in RPGs.
There was a TV show called Mazes and Monsters in 1982 with a young Tom Hanks, who gets so wrapped up in a D&D-like game that he loses his mind and becomes dangerous.
And there was also that rumor about listening to Kiss stopping your heart, but that might have been a local phenomenon.
Was that rumor about regular listening or playing the record in reverse?
Well, I was 10, so it was a million years ago, but I think the rumor was just hearing it at all, because I remember being scared about whether you could hear Kiss without meaning to. I mean, what if an older, daring kid decided to play Kiss on a boom box and I overheard it? How would I know to protect myself if I didn’t even know what they sounded like? You can imagine how scary this was. We all believed it.
No joke!! Just watched a full length documentary on this phenomenon, and they included a ton of the ads, and wowzers!!! If you’re american and have no clue, I implore you, to look them up. In fact, here’s a good short primer made by a Brit:
Indeed. Witness the diabolical quotidian terrors of god forsaken Britain.
(Rather a good tagline actually; perhaps I’ll offer it to the UK tourist board?)
These look incredible. Thanks for sharing.
In the US we had movies in health class. Once a year the junior class got shown this notorious crisis first-aid film known as “the chainsaw movie”. It was actually legit information like “don’t move injured people unless there’s danger” like after a car accident; “don’t grab a power line touching someone being electrocuted” kind of stuff. But it included 70’s super-8 gory (probably sadly very realistic) re-enactments of car-wrecks and broken limbs and burns and blood splattered on everything including traumatizing scenes of how people in pain and panic react.
The notorious scene was a guy cutting limbs in a tree when the inevitable happens. That was essentially “if blood is spurting with the heartbeat, here’s how to apply a tourniquet.” (They did show the difference between standard bleeding where you don’t want to use a tourniquet and arterial gush, where you do.)
We also got the requisite film in driver’s ed about safe driving that did include terrifying stills from actual car wrecks to scare people into driving carefully.
And a horror writer was born.