Studies

Arts and Culture

Rock: Revolution and Satanism
Orlando Fedeli

  
 
 
Introduction:
The power of music
 
“Rock is a basic way to express passions which, in big audiences, may assume characteristics if cult or even adoration, contrary to Christianism.”
 (Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI)
 
 
It is a lot common to find parents who do not care about their sons and daughters spending hours listening to high volume Rock for they consider “there’s no problem in it”. They, when young, used to listen to romantic songs or jazz music. They would play then to their kids when they were children. Now those kids are grown-ups and unconsciously took in the consequences of the musical and educational principles they have received: just listen to rock.
From sugar-coated romanticism to frantic rock, passing through the intermediate step of sensuous jazz, there is a coherent logic the soul goes through, even if that should happen unconsciously.
Rock itself registers, faster though, the same steps in its way. Beginning with sentimental lyrics and songs, it soon reached the frenzy and evil cliffs. Not by chance does the song that is considered “official hymn” of rock – Stairway to Heaven - goes through these phases: sentimental, sensuous, and frantic. (There were other reasons to label this song as “hymn” of rock which we will later examine.)
It is also common to find youngsters who, when acknowledge the lyrics of songs they listen, say they do not understand the lyrics and only care about the beat or, a lot rarer, by the melody.
They do not notice the song has deep effects in the human soul. It is evident that when they hear or read such statement they place a doubt upon it. However they recognize rock fires them and make them cheerfully excited. They must also recognize that there is music that goes best to terror films, which incline the soul to fear the unknown. There are others that are well-matched with love and sentimental scenes. They will not be able to deny that certain songs produce melancholy and sadness, others awake happiness, and others produce enthusiasm.    
Music, therefore, is creator of states of soul, which give birth to correlated ideas in our minds. Those who allow music to create in their soul melancholy and sadness states will naturally tend to sadness and melancholy, for this reason, melancholic, sad and pessimistic ideas.
It is then crystal clear that a song, for its own, creates states of spirit and gives rise to ideas.
They did have reasons, thus, Greek philosophers when attributing to music an important role in education and upbringing of youngsters. Aristotle would prevent that “through rhythm and melody a great range of feelings arise” and that “music may help in character development” and “one may tell apart the musical genres by their echoes in the character”. One genre, for instance, would lead up to melancholy, others suggest failure one one’s self-domain, enthusiasm or any other disposition above mentioned. (Aristotle. Apud W. Matt, Le Rock’n’Roll: instrument de Revolution et de Subversion Culturelle. Quebec: St Raphael, 1981, p. 6).
Plato is even clearer. In the dialogue Republic he warns that music may shape or unshape characters the deeper and more dangerous the more unwarned one is. Most people do not notice that music has the power to change hearts of men, and thus, little by little, shapes their mentalities. Changing their mentalities, music ends up changing customs, which determines the changes of laws and institutions themselves. So Plato would say that it is possible to conquer or revolutionize a city by changing its music.
 
“All musical innovation is full of dangers to the whole city” (…) “one may not change the musical modes without changing, at the same time, the fundamental laws of State”” (Plato, Republic, Book III).
 
To Plato, musical education is the most powerful, because it allows introducing in the child’s soul, since his early infancy, love to beauty and virtue. The musically well-educated person would soon notice beauty and harmony. And as there is no love without hatred, he would hate what is ugly and evil. Plato asks. “Would not (someone) praise what is good, receive it with delight and, taking it in the soul, nourish from it and make himself a good man at the same time, hate and keep away the ugly since child, even before he may reason? And then when the age of reason comes, the person who was brought up this way will welcome it as an old friend. (Plato, Republic, Book III).
Musically well-educated, Plato continues, the youngsters will grow up in a fine land, not missing any exhilaration of beauty that get to their eyes or ears, coming from every part, as if the living aura would bring them form the purest regions, inducing our citizens, since childhood, to imitate the idea of beautiful, love it and adjust with it. (Plato, idem, ibidem).
Therefore, Plato concludes, one should not allow artists to exhibit “ways of addition, intemperance, wickedness or immorality in sculpture and other creator arts (…) We will not allow our guardians to grow up surrounded by images of moral depravity, feeding, so to speak, from an evil herb that would be born here and there, in small quantities, day after day, without anyone to notice it, a huge source of corruption in their souls. “ (Plato, idem, ibidem).  
Plato insists in the insinuating power of music to act without being notices, so that it may destroy or revolutionize a society “for it is there where illegality insinuates more easily, without being noticed (…) as a way of leisure, at first sight not harmful. 
Not, by principle, causing any harm, but this spirit of license after meeting a shelter begins introducing itself unnoticed in uses and customs; and from there it continues, empowered, to agreements among citizens, and after the agreements, invades laws and constitutions and, with more lack of prudence, until when, oh Socrates, transform all public and private life”. (Plato, Republic, Book III).
It is so true this analysis by the Greek philosopher that it may be perfectly applied to that has happened to our society customs. It looks like one is mentioning a contemporary author describing what happens in our time.
Therefore music may have a positive upbringing effect or may be destructive.
Of course, as it is easier to destroy that to constroy, the effects of weed music are faster and more efficient that those of good music. Aesthetic and moral corruption, although step by step, goes faster to the deepest cliffs than virtue in its rise to the pinnacle of heroism and saintity.
In this work of deforming and corruption also done though music, in the XX century, we must point out the role of liberalism that considers all by their positive side and that, thus, judges that nothing should be prohibited. Liberalism is “institutionalized tolerance” not only in certain “tolerant” homes but in society itself. Liberalism is the system of “tolerance”. Therefore liberal parents allow their kids to listen to all, without any restriction whatsoever. Well, as one listens to all, one accepts all, and by accepting all, one approves all” (in Walter Matt, op. cit. pp. 22-23, footnote 17, making a parody of St Augustine).
The acceptance of evilness, living together with it leads to liberalism, at the end, to approve all vice, all crime, all absurd, and all monstrosities. That was how modern art helped deforming the XX century. That is how Rock dominated world youthfulness of our time. If 50 years ago one had told that the grandchildren of Sinatra’s fans would be Black Sabbath or Possessed enthusiasts, no one would have believed. But as the fall has happened step by step, until the abysm, all liberalism has approved.
Because:
 
"Vice is a monster of so frightful mein
As to be hated needs but to be seen
Yet seen too oft, familiar with his face
We first endure, then pity, then embrace".(Alexander Pope)
 
 

I - Music: Symbols – Ideas and Morality
 
To confirm what we have said – that the music renders ideas – we want to quote a well-known specialist, conductor Koelreutter, who declared, during a comment about “Chacone” of Bach, at Cultura FM radio station from Sao Paulo, in August 1993: “Music conveys spiritual manifestations. Music is a language, and, as a language, it is a transmission means. It transmits something: a message, a piece of information and so on. I would say then that music is, among other things, a language, and it is capable of conveying spiritual manifestations.”
Every art uses symbols to express ideas. Music is a kind of art, and expresses its ideas through sounding symbols.
Well, every symbol, besides being objective, is ambiguous. The serpent is a devil’s symbol, but it was also Christ’s symbol when Moses raised his brass serpent statuette on a piece of wood in order to heal the Jews bit by snakes in the desert. It is both symbol of wicked cleverness and saintly prudence. (“Be ye therefore wise as serpents and simple as doves”).The dove is a symbol of simplicity, and stupidity as well, says the Scriptures. (Sophonias III, 1).
If the created things do have ambiguous symbols, the very word, even though it should be objective, it could also have its own meaning altered. Because of this, although literacy be the most objective art, a great deal of interpretations are given to the clearest texts! The sounding or musical symbols are the most ambiguous and least clear of all. Music is, therefore, the most subjective of all arts. Due to this the subjectivist Romanticism considered music as the easiest one to be made romantic.
On the other hand, music could be considered, at the same time, both the highest and the lowest art. The highest because it can create a certain mood to the soul which words have difficulty to express. Music is the art closer to the ineffable, which means, God.
However, besides reaching the summit of the ineffable, the music is also the lowest art, in the sense that it reaches even those that have no culture (the savages), those that have not reached the use of reasoning (the babies are lull and calmed by lullaby songs), those that have lost the reason (it is said that crazy people calm down when listening to classic music). It is even known that the very animals are influenced by music. And this is the only art that can reach them, for the rhythm and the melodic sounds (proportional) resounds favorably in their nervous systems. [We have read somewhere that one made experiments with cows in stables. When Vivaldi was played they would delivere more milk. When Rock was played, they would hold their milk. We were also informed that Rock’n’Roll used to make sharks fuming inside their great aquariums, while classical music would make them at ease. The same thing was observed with crazy people. A priest told us that when someone played Rock and Roll to the African savages, they would ask them why they were summoning the evil spirits…]
If music modifies the moods of people, and if it is the most ambiguous of all arts, it is logical and natural that their authors have looked forward to making more objective what they wanted to say with it, by writing lyrics for their songs. One of the uses of lyrics in a song is this: to fix more objectively and more clearly what was insinuated by the ambiguous musical symbols. Because of this it is essential to have lyrics in order to more objectively understand a song. When someone claims – particularly regarding Rock’n’Roll – that he or she enjoys the song but gives no importance to the lyrics, maybe because he or she does not understand it, this person is not preserved from the effects of the ideas expressed by the lyrics of the song, because melody says vaguely what the lyrics expresses. In the same way, he who drinks poison, despite not knowing or understanding its formula, will die anyway. He dies without understanding, but he dies. He, who refuses to recognize the malevolent effects of the drugs in the brain, and use them, suffers in the same way the ingested drugs’ woeful effects. This is also true to those that listen Rock just because of its “melody” or because of the rhythm, for they have their mentality transformed, and, without having understood or approved the lyrics of Rock songs, they end up having the same ideas that their lyrics expresses, in such a way that the musical symbols talk and teach the same thing said and taught by the lyrics of the songs. A sad song must have sad lyrics. A military song must have heroic lyrics. As it is rebel music it will make the youth a rebel, even if he does not understand that the lyrics tell him to revolt against his parents, teachers and authority.
A devilish music will make the listener that listens it with pleasure a Satanist. Even if he doesn’t understand that the lyrics commands him to worship the devil, he will proffer blasphemy against God in the first opportunity that he will have.
Let’s consider another aspect of the question. The subjectivist Liberalism that dominates the world nowadays does not accepts objective beauty as truth. Everything is a matter of personal taste. “Beauty is something that I think is beauty”, everyone says. This mentality is the result of the liberal subjectivism before the truth.
To subjectivist liberalism there is neither objective truth nor objective good. Just every people’s opinion is worthwhile, not the right and objective concept that says what the things are. Hence this the liberalism has created the reign of the “I think”. Nowadays everyone thinks “that something is wrong or right, good or bad, fair or unfair”. In the XX century (and in the XXI century as well) – like in the asylums – everyone is free to think what they want about themselves, about the others, about everything. They can even believe they are Napoleon, that the sun is dark, that the fire does not burn, and that the truth does not exist, or that the Rock and Roll is beautiful.
Consequently, to the liberalism there is no objective beauty, and the personal taste rules. Then things cannot be objectively beautiful. The beauty would depend on everyone’s taste and, because of this, something could be, at the same time, beautiful and ugly. It is beautiful to someone and ugly to someone else.
Evidently such madnesses contradict everything claimed by philosophy and the good sense. They even deny the fundamental principles of the human thinking: the identity principle (the being is what it is); and the principle of non contradiction (something cannot be and not be, at the same time, under the same aspect). If something is beautiful, then it cannot be ugly.
The Greeks were the first people to show that the material beauty is mathematical, for it depends on proportional measures. Something is materially beauty when its many measures form a proportion a/b=c/d.
And a proportion does not depend on anybody’s opinion. Either it is right or wrong. Either it is proportional or not. Due to this, something is beautiful (has proportions) or not, no matter people’s taste. He, who likes something not proportional has a bad taste. And bad taste does not produce beauty.
Later, the great scholastic philosophers explained what beauty is on its own.
 
“Beauty is the resplendence of form over the proportional and determined parts of the matter”. (Saint Albert Magnus)
 
“Beauty is the good clearly known”. (Saint Thomas Aquinas)
 
Beauty is the brilliance of truth, medieval people used to say. "Splendor veritatis, pulchitudo".
Music aims at – as every art – leading men to understand a truth and love the good that this truth claims. Therefore, music – as every art – conveys ideas and makes one loves something.
Music conveys ideas in three ways:
a)    through its sounding symbols;
b)    through the mood that it induces, which will produce ideas;
c)    through the song’s lyrics, which are there to express more objectively and clearly what the sounds symbolize.
 
This capacity of transmitting ideas leaded all the historical movements express themselves through music. The French Revolution, for example, expressed its ideals through the “Marseillese”
And one cannot claim that what we affirm is pure theory. Rock leaders themselves confess this.
Let us see some testimonies.
The famous – and specialized in this theme – Rolling Stone Magazine asserted:
“We understand that music was the glue that stuck in a generation and that through music ideas were communicated ideas about relations, social values, political ethics and the way we wanted to conduct our lives”. ( O Estado de S. Paulo, Section 2, year VII, # 1940, 1-VI-92 – underlined ours).
Mick Jagger, leader of the Rolling Stones declared:
“We always work to guide the thoughts and the will of people, and the majority of the bands does the same thing”. (Apud Father Jean Paul Regimbal and another ones. Le Rock’n’Roll viol de conscience par les messages subliminax. Quebec: Editions St. Raphael Sherbrooke, 1983, p.18. The underlined is ours).
The Beatles said:
“Our music is capable of causing an emotional instability, a pathological behavior, even the revolt and the revolution”.
Jimmy Hendrix, a famous rock star that died because of drugs, asserted that Rock music has a deeper effect yet:
“It is possible to hypnotize people through music; and, when we reach the weakest point of people, we can preach everything we want to say to their sub-consciousness….”(apud Luc Adrian. “Hard Rock, la danza del Diablo” in Jesus Cristus magazine. # 26 March/April 1993, p.8).
Graham Nash, by his turn, confirms what we have said with these words:
“Pop music is a means of communication that shapes up the thinking of those who listen to it. I also believe that the musicians, through music, enjoy a fantastic advantage. We can rule the world… we have the necessary power at our disposal”. (Apud Pe. J. P. Regimbal, op.cit., p.18).
Moreover music renders ideas, it changes the mood of the listeners, and leads them to act in a certain way. Because of this there are songs that, stimulating them, leads people that listens to it to fight against the bad tendencies present in every man. There are other ones, however, that create certain moods that tend to the vice. It is so real that there are sensual songs, as there are sounds and songs that incite joy or terror.
Consequently, music can either take someone to the vice and to the sin or place him in the virtue path.
The truly beauty must lead towards good and towards virtue. And how could it be different, once the beauty is the good clearly known?? How could it be different, if in God, Truth and Beauty are the same thing?
Fairly enough then, Plato has said that the child taught to love good music would tend to practice the virtues, for beauty and virtue are like two sisters that love one each other and that like being together.
One of the greatest Romanticism sins was to refuse to accept the existence of the objective truth and wish for an art that just wanted to please. Romanticism has separated beauty from truth, as it accepted the separation between beauty and morality, made by the Renascence. To romantics, beautiful is just what pleases. Just pleases what is beautiful. There is nothing to do with good and truth.
But that what simple pleases, divorced from the truth and from the good, is the sin. All vices please. What makes it a vice is to be against reason and against the good of virtue.
Romanticism, simply looking for the pleasant, constitutes itself a sin.
Educated by liberalism and romanticism to go for the pleasant, the XX century men moved from the purely sentimental pleasure to the sensual pleasure, to at last dive open and confessedly into sexualism, and, from it, into frustration, boredom, mystery, horror and Satanism.
The Rock’n’Roll also followed this pathway, from sentimentalism to the sexualism, up to Satanism. In fact, the first Rock songs were sentimental. Afterwards, there was the worship of the devil.
That Rock not only infuses ideas but also excites to sin, its most famous leaders recognize in an open and scandalous fashion.
The Rolling Stones manager cynically declares:
“The pop music is sex; teenagers must be overloaded with it. (Apud Walter Matt, op. cit. p.15).
And Sara Davidson confess: “Sexuality, such is what Rock language deep inside” (idem, op. cit. p.16)
And Mick Jagger: “Rock music is sex and it is necessary to crush youths with it. My auditory I can seduce exactly as a striptease actor does”. (Apud Mons. R. Williamson. Semper magazine, #2, p.23).
And Alice Cooper: “My public want to be treated by me as a sexual criminal treats his victim…The relationship between me and my listeners is highly sexual. To dominate a public this way is a powerful and pleasant experience”.
In fact, we can see in Rock festivals and concerts a kind of orgiastic show, with libidinous and sexual acts, nudism, frenzy, vices, everything explicitly and cynically done in public.
The lyrics of Rock songs are cynically pornographic. In them we can find brutal four-letter words, obscene images, incitation to sin. The Guns’n’Roses songs and those of Jimmy Hendrix, just to quote a few examples, are plenty of this kind of this sordidness.
The lyrics not only incite to sex, but they preach shamelessly the use of drugs. It is known that a great number of Rock stars is drug addicted, and that a great number of them died from drugs effects. It is outrageous to notice that no anti-drugs campaign accuses any one rock singer and rhythm of being addiction promoters or suppliers of victims to the drug dealing.
Let us take the song “Mr. Brownstone” by Guns’n’Roses as an example. (Mr. Brownstone is the code for heroine drug in rock lingo. And it is exactly explained in a footnote of the magazine Letras Traduzidas Guns’n’Roses in an special album published in Brazil by Abril Press, SãoPaulo, March 1991, year 7, #2, p.15).
We can read the following verses in “Mr. Brownstone” (Mr. Heroine) song:
 
We been dancin’ with Mr. Brownstone (heroine)...
...I used ta do a little but a little wouldn’t do,
So the little got more and more
 
And “My Michelle”, song from the same band says:

Your daddy works in porno
Now that mommy’s not around
 She used to love her heroine
But now she’s underground   
 So you stay out late at night
And you do your coke for free
 
In the song "New York City", The Beatles’ band leader, John Lennon, says to the youngsters:
Stand on the corner
Just me and Yoko Ono  
We was waiting for Jerry to land Up 
come a man with the guitar in his hand    
Singing “have a marijuana if you can”                        
His name was Davis Peel   
And we found he was real 
He sang “The pope smokes dope everyday”
 
 It is well known that the song "Bridge over trouble water" sung by Elvis Presley referred to the usage of drugs talking about one “silver girl”, one expression added to the rock lingo to designate the hypodermic needle used to inject cocaine in the vein.
 
The Rolling Stones used to call cocaine “brown sugar”, and they even refer to “Sister Morphine” and “Cousin Cocain”. The syringe used to drug oneself is called “Silver Lady”. (Acc. Father Jean Paul Regimbal. Le Rock’n Roll viol de conscience par les messages subliminaux. Quebec:Editions St. Raphael Sherbrooke, 1983, p.7).
There is no doubt then that the Rock is one of the causes of the current degeneration of the youngsters all around the world.
 
“Nobody can say that the Rock’n’ Roll influence was wealth and positive! It is like one magic flute player, perverted, conducting an entire generation to its self-destruction” (Pat Boonem, The roots of Rock’n’Roll).
 
Rock’n’Roll, therefore, spread ideas, steers immoral behavior and preaches rebellion. That is why it is a real revolutionary action that made a deeper effect than any other else totalitarian ideology, from Nazism to Communism.
 
“I feel myself spiritualized in scene. Take us as politicians of eroticism. I am interested in all that concerns upheaval, disorder, chaos, and above all, in the what has no sense” (Jim Morrison, singer and rock band leader found dead in a bathtub, probably by overdose).
 
 
 
II – Rock and Revolution

 
Politicians of eroticism, heralds of clutter and chaos, advocates of meaningless action. Rebels against wisdom and the law. Apostles of irrationality and despair. That is how rock movement leaders confess themselves.
Some people fool themselves when judging that Rock was only a musical revolution. It was much more. It was a cultural revolution whose reaching goes from fashion to religion, from taste to social behavior.
In this late XXth century, a century which watched the birth, the triumph and the surprisingly fast and unpredictable collapse of so many revolutionary ideologies, from Nazism to Communism – a revolution keeps itself alive and working and shows out as triumphant. It has imposed a new "art", a new fashion. It wants the abolition of all laws, rules or social norms. It imposes itself towards the liberal society willing to make it libertarian. It demands permissivism. Against all that is refined and aristocratic, it shows preference for what is dirty, prosaic, lowly, vulgar or rude. It makes the marking out of obscenity and depravation. Being radically immoral, it demands drugs liberation, besides free and public sex. It defends perversions and tares. It wishes the absurd and praises the abolition of rationality. In that which modern art has failed, rock has succeded; it considers the ugly, the disgusting and the monstruous as admirable things.
Worse than the totalitarian ideologies that offered the insane hope of building an utopic or chiliastic paradise on earth, in which there would be no miseries or harms, the rock revolution promisses only frustration, despair, insanity and hell. And, in spite of all this, it triumphs.
"The mixture of rythms and musical genres, of sounds and traditions, the music goes faster than men; it managed to accomplish this century's real revolution (...). It is, at the same time, the mirror and the instrument of an unparalleled cultural and political change in history." (Le Nouvel Observateur number. 1441, 18-24, june 1992, article of Elizabeth Schemla - La Révolution Musique, page 4) [the translation is ours]
The exponents of the Rock movement themselves proclaim to have done more than a simple innovation in music: they have unchained a revolutionary avalanche.
"It is needed that we rise up on the streets because this is the time of violent revolution" (Rolling Stones).
"Rock marked the beginning of the revolution. We have founded a new political life with a psychodelic life style. Our way of living, our acid (drug), our "freaky" clothes, our Rock music, that is where the real revolution is". (Jerry Rubin)
The unfortunately well-known The Beatles’ band leader, John Lennon, has declared:
"I don't like listening to people saying that the Rolling Stones are revolutionary and we, The Beatles, are not. If the Stones were, or are, then so are the Beatles". (Apud Mons. R. Williamson. Revista Semper, #2, p.23).
" Rock is more than music, it is the energetic center of a new culture and of a youth living under a Revolution".
A similar opinion was expressed by the well-known conductor Leonard Bernstein:
"We must face Rock’n’Roll music as being, at the same time, a symptom and a generating factor of the revolution among today's youths" (Leonard Bernstein, Rock’n’Roll, the Devil's Diversion).
Rock is truly the symptom and the generating factor of the revolution (L. Bernstein), it is "the mirror and the instrument of an unparalleled cultural and political change in history" (Elizabeth Schemla, in Le Nouvel Observateur).
Take note of the correspondence of these opinions:
a) Rock is the symptom and the mirror of the mentality born in the liberalism;
b) It is the generating factor and tool of the revolution.
Indeed it is the mirror and the symptom, because it expresses the libertarian, equalitarian, irrational and anarchical tendencies that liberalism and romantism put as an ideal to pursue.
The liberalism and its artistic expression, the Romanticism, sowed the false ideals which fruits Rock cultivates and harvests.
The liberalism wanted the man to be absolutely free of all law coercions, regulaments, discipline and even rules of etiquette. The parents that had this liberal and romantic mentality, raised accordingly their kids, who coherently took these ideas to their logical consequences. The young rock player or adept, completely revolted, radically anarchical, absolutely free, turn the libertarian ideal of his ancestors into reality.
Romanticism defended the feeling on top of the reason, which it considered to be deceitful. It denied, along with liberalism, the existence of objective truth and it put the feeling as being the supreme value. Naturally, this led it to look for stronger and stronger feelings. In rock, sensualism, sowed by Romantiscim, gets to its maximum degree. Rock wishes for enjoyment of any pleasure, in its highest degree, without any sort of control. It longs for drugs to be it a source of pleasure or as a means to anihilate and destroy reason and the rational vision of the world.
What Plato had once said about the power of music on his dialogue "The Republic", we have seen it come true on our century.
It is, hence, natural that the lyrics of rock songs show their revolutionary ideas expressed through the sound symbols explicitly.
For instance, check what John Lennon's song, “Imagine”, says:
 
Imagine there's no heaven,
It's easy if you try,
No hell below us,
(...)
Imagine there's no countries,
It isnt hard to do,
Nothing to kill or die for,
No religion too,
Imagine all the people
living life in peace...
(...)
Imagine no possesions,
A brotherhood of man,
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world...
 
What this song preaches is the communist utopia through the abolition of the fences and the boundaries, that is, by the destruction of the native land and of the properties. Evidently this communist world which John Lennon dreamed could not have religion, nor Heaven, nor Hell. In it there would be no reason to die for, which means to have no reason to live for.
In the song “Angela”, Lennon demands equality as being the highest value, denied by today's men:
 
They gave you sunshine
They gave you sea
They gave you everything but the jailhouse key
They gave you coffee
They gave you tea
They gave you everything but equality.
 
Notice how the "innocent" leader of the Beatles incites the liberals' children against family and school:
 
We are born in a prison,
Raised in a prison
Send to a prison called school,
We cry in a prison,
We love in a prison,
We dream in a prison, like fools. (...)


We work in a prison (...)
We live in a prison
Among judges and wardens (...)
Mirror becomes a razor when it's broken
 
How many liberal and democratic parents allowed their sons to listen to The Beatles' songs, just because "they are not that bad"! However, they would be surprised if they were to pay attention to what the song "Only People" has to say:
 
Only people know just how to talk to people
Only people know just how to change the world
Only people realize the power of people
Well, a million heads are better than one
So come on, get it on! "
 
Would they be astonished? But aren't in these verses the ideals of the 89's revolution? But isn't in it all the language of the Liberation Theology, which the democrats condemn?
In "Bring on the Lucie", Lennon sings:
 
We don't care what flag you're waving,
We don't even wanna know your name,
We don't care where you're from or where you're going,
All we know is that you came.
You're making all our decisions,
We have just one request of you -
That while you're thinking things over,
It's something you just better do:
Free the people now,
Do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it now
and 666 is your name."
 
The scandalous rebel Jim Morrison, on his turn, sang the close triumph of the young-made Revolution of rock based upon the democratic criterion of the number in his song "Five to one":
:
The old get old
And the young get stronger
May take a week
And it may take longer
They got the guns
But we got the numbers
Gonna win, yeah
We're takin' over
Come on!


One may understand now how truthful is the confession of the anarchist Jerry Rubin in his best-seller "Do it".
" Rock'n’Roll marked the beginning of the revolution..."
"We see sex, Rock’n’Roll and drugs as being part of a communist conspiracy to take over America... We combine youth, music, sex, drugs and rebellion, all this we make it coincide with treason, as a way to make a coherent whole, an inexpugnable front" (Apud. Mons. R. Williamson, Revista Semper # 2, p.23).
The hatred towards authority and the love towards rebellion preached on the Rock songs have as their first victims the parents and teachers of young rock adepts. At home, they rebel against the authority of the "old ones". In the school (prison), they subvert all order, defying teachers and directors. How many familiar tragedies did not have their roots on rock records that the parents allowed their kids – spoiled and "innocent" – to listen. In São Paulo, there was a case of a young one who killed the whole family after listening to rock in the highest volume his sound system could bear.
Take a look now at what the song "The end" of the Jim Morrison's The Doors band, a rebel against his father's authority, preaches:
 
(...)
Ride the snake, ride the snake (...)
The killer awoke before dawn, he put his boots on
He took a face from the ancient gallery
And he walked on down the hall
He went into the room where his sister lived, and...
then he paid a visit to his brother, and then he
He walked on down the hall, and
And he came to a door...and he looked inside
Father, yes son, I want to kill you
Mother...I want to...
 
In Brazil, a band called Garotos Podres (which means Rotten Boys in Portuguese), les bien auto nommés, roars in the song “Anarchy”:
 
One day you will find out
that everyone hates you and want you dead,
because you represent danger to the power
Anarchy
Anarchy
Anarchy
They don't want you to live,
destroy the system
before it destroys you etc...
(The free translation is ours).
 
Therefore the revolution which Rock unchains on the souls – as its heralds recognize – is what aims to destroy all authority in the family, in the school and in the society. Rock is, hence, anarchical.
 
 
 
III - The beat and its effects
                                                                                        
            To all this, rock’n’roll fans will respond, insisting, that none of this interests them. What they appreciate in rock, what they want to listen to - even if the lyricspreach submission and violence - is the beat. The beat is just what matters. And, according to them, the beat does not render ideas.
   Plato does not agree with this, because he affirms that there are soft and flabby beats that should be banished. (Plato, Republic III). Also the anarchist and rock musician Jerry Rubin does not accept that the beat would not transmit ideas. He wrote: Elvis [Presley] awoke our bodies, changing them completely. The animal Hard-Rock that keeps its secret in the powerful "beat" (this repetition of regular pulsations combined with offbeat rhythm is the basis of rock) would burningly get into our bodies; the entrancing beat brings about all the passions that were suppressed (...) Rock marked the beginning of the Revolution" (Apud Luc Adrian. “Hard Rock, la danza del diablo”, in Jesus Cristus Magazine, # 26. March/april 1993, p. 8).
   E. R. Dodds shows how the beat of the drum in the worship of Bacchus had an astonishing physical and psychological effect in the bacchants, who, influenced by the drum beat and by the sound of the flute, seemed insane. "A Delphic tradition recorded by Plutarch suggests that the beat, sometimes, produces a true personality disturbance (...) In many societies, maybe in all of them, there are people to whom, as noted by Mr. Aldous Heixley, "the ritual dances permit a religious experience that is more satisfactory and convincing than any other... It is with his muscles that many people easily grasp the knowledge of the divine" (E. R. Dodds. The Greeks and the irrational. Berkley: University of California Press, 1963, pp. 232- 233).
   ...according to a Muslim wise, "he, who knows the power of the dance, lives in God", however, the power of the dance is a dangerous one. Just like other forms of self-capitulation, it is easier to begin than to end with it. In the extraordinary insanity of dancing that invaded Europe from the XIV to the XVII century, people used to danced until they fell - as the dancer in Bacchal 136 or the dancer in the (greek) vase of Berlin (# 2471) who lies unconsciously, trampled by his friends".(E.R. Dodds, op. cit., pp. 271 to 272).
Frank Zapper, rock musician, states: "I figured that this music takes possession of the youth, because its strong beat corresponds to the great beats of the human body". (Mons. R. Williamson, op. cit., p. 27).
   Walter Matt writes: "The hammering of rock music aims intentionally at sexually exciting the listeners, above all the young ones, of course. As for this we can give a brief explanation. Rock music almost does not have a melody, and the lyrics almost do not have a sense – a good sense - (hélas, sometimes it has a horrible and astonishing senses). At last only the essencial thing remains: the beat, and our body is sensible to it. To the members of "American Psychiatric Association", Dr. Howard Hanson has declared:
   "First, even though we take all into account, the more the movement surpasses the pulse beat in velocity and goes up beyond the ordinary, the more emotional tension there is". (W. Matt, op. cit., p. 5)
   He cites, yet, the observations of Alice English Monsarrat, according to whom with the beat of rock (...) we can produce over whatever human organism a hysterical disintegration, as we can note in a person who intended to go, with anger, to two different directions at the same time (...). We have experience with that in psychiatry: it is precisely the conflict of emotions created by the action of two stimulants with different percussions that conducts them to our clinics, in large number, irretrievable pieces of humanity". (W. Matt, op. cit., p.6)
   Monsignor Richard Williamson concluded the same thing, when he explains the effects of the rock beat:
   "Directing, with care, the sequence of beats, says John Phillips, of "The Mamas and the Papas" band, we can induce hysteria inside the auditory. We know how to do it. Anyone knows how to do it. And to prove what they said, they caused a riot in a concert in Phoenix, Arizona!"(Mons. R . Williamson, in Semper, # 2. Revista da Fraternidade Sacerdotal São Pio X. Portugal, p.28).
                                                                                                                                      
At another quotation taken from Mons. Williamson, we are informed that : “As an example of the medical analysis of the process through which the beat can “break” the body, physicians observe that the autonomous nervous system of human body is bathed by the spinal-brain liquid, which possesses a pulsation directed in part by the pituitary gland, which governs all the body. This gland influences over almost every vital process of the body, directing, for example, the secretion of hormones of the endocrine gland of the body. So, if it gets mismanaged by the vibrations of the "beat" (rock beat), the pituitary gland will drag with it all the nervous system, which, because of that, gets shed. Well, from that we can imagine an abnormal secretion of sexual hormones, for example, what would explain the movements of rock dances. The beat and the dance constitutes the means to achieve the nervous system. ‘I have movies that demonstrate that the primitive beats of an old tribe in Kenya and a band inside a disco in London would both produce the same emotional trance’, said Dr. Willian Faragut from the Royal Society of Medicine (...).”
   "Besides, the "beat", by stimulating the secretion of epinephrine hormone, diminishes, in the blood, the calcium of great importance to drive the nervous system, and sugar, the only food of brain. So, the nerves get depleted and the brain disarranged, after a rock concert. This strong stimulation of sensuality and, at the same time, depression of intelligence and reason ends in erotism and violence; well, this suicide of reason leads to the suicide itself" (Mons. R. Willianson, op. cit., pp. 28-29).
   Father Regimbal affirms that the "beat" can produce an acceleration of cardio pulsation and an increase of the adrenalin tax; it can provokes not only a sexual welfare, but even a excitation that could leads to orgasm". (Pe. Regimbal, op. cit., p.26)
   This author brings important observations about the effects of rock beat. He cites an article of Dr. Bob Larson and a medical crew of Cleveland, that examined about 200 patients, habitual rock listeners. So Dr. Larson says:
   "We notice that this song could have astonishing physical effects: alterations of pulsation and breathing, increase of endocrinal glands secretion, in particular the pituitary gland that regulates the vital processes of organism. When the melody goes up, the larynx contracts; when it goes down, it relaxes.
   "The basis metabolism and sugar tax in blood get modified during the listening. We can consider, so, that it is possible to "play" the human organism as if it was a musical instrument and, in fact, certain compositors of electronic music have considered manipulating the brain, provoking a "shock" in conscious faculties, exactly as drugs do. The main beat in rock and in pop music inicially conditions the body, then stimulates certain hormonal functions of endocrine system". (Dr. Bob Larson, apud Pe. J. P. Regimbal, op. cit., p. 32)
   Note that, according to Dr. Larson, rock has an effect similar to that provoked by drugs.
   From this very article, we want to take one more important quotation:
   The well-known therapist musician Adam Knieste, at the report of a study that lasted ten years about the effects of rock music wrote: "The main problem caused by rock music in the patients I treated elapses clearly from the intensity of noise which produces hostility, exhaustion, narcissism, panic, indigestion, hypertension and a weird narcosis. Rock is not a harmless pastime, it is a drug more lethal than heroin, and that poisons the life of our youth". (Pe. J. P. Regimbal, op. cit., p. 33)
   Dr. Knieste confirms, then, what have said Dr. Larson and even with more emphasis: "rock is a drug worst than heroine."
   Yet in the cited article of Pe. Regimbal we extracted conclusions of the physicians Drs. Mac Rofferty, Gramby Blaine, Barnard Saibel, Walter Wright, Frank Garlock, Tom Allen and others. According to these doctors, rock, with its literarily maddening beat would provoke in the listeners,   beyond other effects:
"Modifications in the emotive reactions, from frustration to uncontrollable violence".
" Neuro-sensorial overexcitement producing euphoria, suggestibility, hysteria and even hallucination".
"Serious perturbations in memory".
"Hypnotic or cataleptic state which transforms the person in to a zombie or robot ".
"Depressive state turning to neurosis and to psychosis".
"Suicide and homicide tendencies".
"Self- mutilation, self- immolation and self -punishment".
"Irresistible impulses of destruction and vandalism".
(Pe. J. P. Regimbal, op. cit., p. 33)
            During the I World Congress about prenatal, in Granada, studies had been presented showing that the music of Maddonna, for example, favors the abortion occurrence. Due to this, the Red Cross advised the pregnant women who will assist the concerts of rock to occupy the last rows. (O Estado de São Paulo Newspaper March 18th, 1993, p. 15).
            The dances in which the youngsters bump against one another apparently for no reason is common in night clubs. Nowadays many rock bands are famous for totally destroying the expensive sound equipment that they had used, in the end of their "concerts". The practical of "mosh" - rock musician that led to the euphoria, does not help himself from jumping in the air, falling over the others – and it is another proof of this lack of self-control that leads to violence and uncontrollable acts.
            In short, the physiological and psychological effects of the rock beat take the youth, as it is of public knowledge, to have immoral attitudes that rock singers advise and praise in their lyrics as well as in their lives, such as:
- Sexual perversions and pornography
- Drug use
- Revolts against all law and authority
- Violence
- Suicide
- Crime and parricide
 
 
 
IV - Rock e Religion

Rock fans consider the song "Stairway to Heaven", from the band Led Zeppelin, the rock anthem. Curiously, it is a song which begins very languidly, similar to a medieval complainte, a song of complaint, somewhat melancholic. As the song moves on, its beat gets faster and faster, until it reaches, at the end, the typical frenetic beat of rock songs. Thus it sums up, through its execution, the whole path of rock history: from its sentimental roots to its frenetic and hallucinating beat.
However, it is not just for being a synthesis of rock beats that this song is important. It contains in itself, actually, a particular fascination, like a magic appeal. It “sticks” to the memory of those who listen to it, with a strange power.
To begin with, the engravings on the record are curious. On a painting hanging on an old and deteriorated wall, one finds an old man curved due to the burden of a large bunch of sticks on his back. A second engraving shows a village at long distance and a hill which a man climbs up, crawling, towards its peak, where a phantom-like creature stands: a sort of a monk wearing a tunic and a cowl, who brings in his hands a lantern where, instead of flames, an hexagonal star shines. He looks downwards, to the man who climbs the rocky slope, fascinated by the glowing of the star.
Now, this hexagonal star is the alchemic star, the cosmic hexagram, the seal of Salomon, the star of the wizards. It is formed by two triangles that overlap one another, denoting the union of the divine with the human, the superior abyss and the inferior abyss. The triangle with has a vertex downwards represents, at each of its vertices, minerals, vegetals and animals; the triangle with a vertex upwards represents, at its vertices, the dew or rain, the sea and the earth. This cosmic hexagram is often surrounded by symbols of metals and planets and by the ouroboros snake, which swallows its own tail. This cosmic hexagram is found on Aurea Catena Homeri, famous alchemic work. (Cf. Ronald B Gray, Goethe, The Alchimimist. CambridgeUniversity Press. Prancha I and Fulcanelli, Le Mystère des Cathédrales. Jean Paris: Jaques Pauvert, 1964, p. 66).
The song lyrics are printed on gothic characters, and a small engraving shows a man reading, thoughtfully, an old book with metal latches. According to Luc Adrian in the article Hard-Rock, La Danza del Diablo (Jesus Cristus # 26, March/April, 1993. p. 8), on a cover of the record of Stairway to Heaven, one would find the following piece of information: "By listening to this record, the young lads are under an enchantment, are dominated and driven by hidden forces, demons. This can lead to demoniac possession".
There’s a lady who’s sure all that glitters is gold
And she’s buying a stairway to heaven
When she gets there she knows if the stores are all closed
With a word she can get what she came for.
 
There’s a sign on the wall but she wants to be sure
Cause you know sometimes words have two meanings
In a tree by the brook there’s a songbird who sings
Sometimes all of our thoughts are misgiven.
It makes me wonder…
There’s a feeling are get when I look to the west
And my spirit is crying for leaving
In my thoughts I have seen rings of smoke through the trees
And the voices of those who stand looking.
And it makes me wonder…
And it’s whispered that soon if we all call the tune
Then the piper will lead us to reason
And a new day will dawn for those who stand long
And the forest will echo with laughter.
And it makes me wonder…
If there’s a bustle in your hedgerow don’t be alarmed now
It’s just a spring clean for the May-Queen
Yes there are two paths can go by but in the long run
There’s still time to change the road you’re on.
And it makes me wonder
Your head is humming and it won’t go
In case you don’t know
The piper’s calling you to join him
Dear lady can you hear the wind blow?
And did you know your stairway lies on the whispering wind?
And as we wind on down the road
Our shadows taller than our soul
There walk a lady we all know
Who shines white light and wants to show
How everything still turns to gold
And if you listen very hard
The tune will come to you at last
When all are one and one is all
To be a rock and not to roll.
 
Weird song! What do these mysterious lyrics mean? Of course a few people understand them. Here and there, a verse give a glimpse of something. Enough to awake curiosity. Enough to let one realize that there is something hidden within. Something that immediately hides itself under the thick fogs of the next verse, which is even more mysterious. This song is like a veil that hides and reveals. It claims for being deciphered. Obviously, those who realize that there is something mysteriously hidden within it, they will try to climb up its hill of mystery, where, at the top, there is someone, even more mysterious, who shines a torch at night…
Who is this lady about whom the song talks?
About her, it is said that she wants to buy a stairway to heaven. She judges that all that glitters is gold. Her stairway lies on the whispering wind. It is also said that we all know her and that she wants to show that it is possible to turn everything into gold.
Now, the claim of transforming everything into gold is the dream of the Alchemy, esoteric science, founded on a Gnostic conception of the world. According to the Alchemy, gold would be the fundamental and primary substance of all things. That would be the reason why all things would have a certain glow. Even coal could be transformed into light, or into a shining diamond. Even the most opaque matter can, by friction, start to glow.
Nevertheless, for the Alchemy, the real result of the real art is not that of transforming lead into gold, but to transform the alchemist into God. The gold which was supposed to exist, as fundamental element of all things was nothing but a symbol of the divine pneuma – the divine spark – that lays imprisoned deep inside all beings. More than transforming all into gold, it would also be required to transform all into God, freeing all divine sparks from the matter, reason and moral prisions.
Now, Alchemy was represented in the Middle Ages as a woman holding a nine-step ladder, standing over the ground, and supported by nothing, that is, it reaches the clouds touched by the wind.
This representation of Alchemy can be seen carved on the doorway of Notre Dame Cathedral, in Paris. The most important alchemic work of our time – Le Mystère des Cathédrales – from Fulcanelli, presents an illustration of this carving. (Fulcanelli, Le Mystère des Cathedrales. Paris: J. P. Pouvert, 1964. pp. 32-33, pranche II).
Right after the introduction of the alchemic lady, the lyrics say that she is buying a stairway to heaven, that is, a path to achieve absolute happiness. She acquires it with her own strengths, and the stairway is a natural path to reach divinity. That stairway is the scala philosophorum, symbol of patience that every alchemist must have through the operations of the hermetical labor (cf. Fulcanelli, op. cit., p. 90). It is then explained that if the "stores" – that are the compartments, the celestial spheres, the ayon in the Gnostic language – are closed, she could open them with a word.
Now, according to many Gnostics, the god who created the world – the evil god – would have imprisoned the divine particles in the material universe, which would be kept by an archon, a diabolic spirit. When man dies, his spirit would seek to get across the spheres that surround the earth, but would only be able to go through them if he knew the magic word that would open them or if he knew how to use the sign that marks them. (Cf. Hans Jonas, La Religion Gnostique. Paris: Flammarion, pp. 63-64).
However, if the spirit made a mistake in the password or the receipt, he would fall again into matter, not reaching “heaven”, that is, his freedom and divinization, but he would reincarnate.
The song makes reference to a bird that sings in a tree. Now, in the same book from Fulcanelli, it is reproduced another carving from Notre Dame doorways, in Paris, which illustrates an alchemist at his “laboratory”. There one can see the alchemist under the appearance of an old man leant over a staff along with the cave that represents the alchemic laboratory. At his feet spouts the spring “magnesia” from which comes mercury, requires for the alchemic work. It is this clean spring which flows towards Queen of May that the song makes reference to, in one of its verses. Next, in a tree, there is a bird singing which, according to some authors, represents the bird phoenix, symbol of the divine spirit that exists in the bottom of the human soul.
The song also warns us that “all of our thoughts are mistaken”. Indeed, for Gnosis, intelligence would have been given to us by the evil god at the time of our creation in order to deceive us. The evil demiurge would have built an intelligible world and would have made us intelligent so that we, understanding the world, considered it good, and desired not to leave it. For this reason, intelligence would always lead us to error.
Afterwards the song states that, by looking west, that is, to the direction where the sun dies, the singer would get dominated by a feeling and that his spirit cries to leave his body, that is, to die. Because for Gnosis and Alchemy, death would be the only means for a man to free himself from his body-jail.
And it is important recalling that East is one of the names that the Holy Scriptures give to Christ, and that, therefore, the West is the opposite of Christ, in other words, devil and death.
And all that makes the singer willing for more, astonished…
It would go beyond the scope of this work to make a deeper analysis of this song. We only wanted to show that it is proposes, in a veiled fashion, a Gnostic view of the world. That is why it finishes saying that in the end, we will all be one only thing and that the “one” is all. When we, at last, become the “one” with all – that is, God, then we will be “rock” – fixed – and then we will not be subjected to evolution. “To be a rock and not to roll…”
The author of this song “Stairway to Heaven”, Robert Plant, declared: “I have received the lyrics (from the song) instantaneously, and I have not changed anything. I am proud of them. I think that someone whispered them to me.” (Cf. Luc Adrian, quoted article. In Jesus Cristus #. 26, p. 8).
There is in rock’n’roll, therefore, a secret religion, Gnosis, which, at heart, worships Satan.
According to some, the same song, if played backwards, would allow one to listen to satanic phrases, exactly at the excerpt where it is said that the human spirit cries for leaving, when it looks West, symbol of death. At this point, the following words would be listened: “I’ve got life for Satan”.
And that introduces the problem of subliminal or hidden messages in rock.
 
 
Conclusion
 
”The Nazarenes will never rise.”
 
That is the apostate scream that rock’n’roll makes young catholics sing.
 
It is evident that many young people that love rock will say they do not accept satanic rock, nor what is called “heavy rock”. This argument proceeds as much as the one of the drug addicted who argues he does not to accept cocaine, just light drugs. He, who is addicted to light drugs is a drug addicted. He will usually end up using heavy drugs. Now, the addiction to light drugs is also an addiction, it is also condemnable. The satanic or heavy rock has made explicit, in clear terms, what the hallucinating beat would have subjacent to it - and consequently, irrationally - and what has been part of rock magical appeal ever since. The denial of reason and the placement of the sensation as value to be looked up to meant a denial of the wisdom that man reaches, supernaturally with the grace, and naturally by means of his intelligence. The repudiation of reason spread by the Liberalism and Romanticism meant the refusal of the truth. However, the Truth is Our Lord Jesus Christ. "Ego sum Veritas, via et vitam" (Jn). Is it any strange, then, that this denial of the Truth - Christ – would end up leading to Satanism?
 
Rock seems to us an intrinsically bad musical gender. It is not possible to accept it. The Church placed harsh censorships against other modern beats such as waltz or tango. What would Saint Pious X say about rock? And how would he consider the priests that want to use a satanic rhythm even in the Masses to attract the youths?
 
What attracts the masses is Christ: “And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all things to myself.” (Jo 12, 32)
 
It is not allowed to the youths to surrender to lowest sensations – for that will never elevate them until the sanctity nor take them to heaven.
 
To save the youngsters of our days it is necessary to make them love the true beauty of good music, which mirrors the infinite beauty of God. It is necessary to make them love heroism and sacrifice – which is Christ's cross - and not to endow them with pleasure. It is necessary to make them love the truth, so that they have wisdom. Only by doing so, new Nazarenes will rise.
 
God, who is capable of making sons of Abraham out of rocks, is also capable, in its merciful omnipotence, to take poor souls out of the evil rock path and to transform those who give themselves to Satan into new Nazarenes. That the Virgin, Queen of all beauty, very soon work such miracle. 
    Para citar este texto:
"Rock: Revolution and Satanism"
MONTFORT Associação Cultural
http://www.montfort.org.br/eng/cadernos/arte/rock/
Online, 17/11/2024 às 14:17:37h