If gangsta rap is L.A.’s most famous musical export of the last three decades, it has come with a Mephistophelian curse.

It’s possible to chart the eras of Cale’s vast career by his succession of iconic haircuts: the chic, chin-length pageboy of his Velvet Underground days; the greasy bed head of his proto-punk ’70s; an asymmetric art-crop as the ’80s became the ’90s; and the feathery, birdlike style in which he now wears his distinguished, white-gray locks, set off by a playfully Mephistophelian soul patch.

“Much of their personality stems from Mr. Moloney,” the critic John S. Wilson wrote in The Times in 1971, “who has a charming, disarming gift of gab with which he deftly mingles wry humor and flashing barbs of comment, punctuated by a marvelously Mephistophelian eyebrow.”

Sharon Stone leans into her Mephistophelian role as record exec.

The opera adds a Mephistophelian figure who tempts Tom Rakewell from the straight and narrow with riches and women — for a price.