The Angelus
Rock and Roll: A deadly Revolution
By Father Richard Williamson
September 1985
"THE EXPERIENCE of being with fourteen thousand teenagers to see the Beatles is unbelievable and frightening and, believe me, it is not at all funny, as I first thought when I accepted this assignment. The hysteria and loss of control go far beyond the impact of the music. Many of those present became frantic, hostile, uncontrolled, screaming unrecognizable beings. If this is possible - and it is - parents and adults have a lot to account for to allow this to go on.
"This is not simply a release, as I first thought it would be, but a very destructive process in which adults allowed the children to be involved - allowing the children a mad, erotic world of their own without the reassuring safeguards of protection from themselves. The externals are terrifying. Normally recognizable girls behaved as if possessed by some demonic urge, defying in emotional ecstasy the restraints which authorities try to place on them. The hysteria is from the girls and when you ask them what it is all about, all they can say is, 'I love them.'
"There are a lot of things you can say about why the Beatles attract the teenage crowd. The music is loud, primitive, insistent, strongly rhythmic, and releases in a disguised way (can it be called sublimation?) the all too tenuously controlled, new-acquired physical impulses of the teenager. Mix this up with the phenomena of mass hypnosis, contagious hysteria and the blissful feeling of being mixed up in an all-embracing orgiastic experience and every kid can become "Lord of the Flies," or the Beatles.
"Why do kids scream, faint, gyrate, and in general, look like a primeval, protoplasmic upheaval and go into ecstatic convulsions when certain identifiable and expected trademarks come forth, such as "Oh, yeah!" a twist of the hips or the thrusting out of an electric guitar?
"Regardless of the causes or reasons for the behavior of these youngsters, it had the impact of an unholy bedlam, the like of which I have never seen. It caused me to feel that such should not be allowed again, if only for the good of the youngsters. It was an orgy for teenagers."
This eyewitness account of a rock concert comes from a certain Dr. Bernard Saibel, child guidance expert for the Washington State Division of Community Services in the Western United States. It was as long ago as 1964 that this Beatle concert took place, which a Seattle newspaper asked him to attend!
The report he made is quoted on pages 56 and 57 of a most interesting book in English, by a Protestant college professor, Davie Noebel. It is called The Marxist Minstrels, subtitled "A Handbook on Communist Subversion of Music." The book contains a thousand other testimonies, with docuмents and references to back them up, on the devastating effects of rock music.
There would in fact be many interesting things to say about rock music, which is at one and the same time a manifestation and a cause of the present decadence of western youth and civilization. The conductor Léon Bernstein said in 1967, "We must take rock-and-roll music as both a symptom and generator of this revolution," meaning the revolution of the young generation today. (Quoted in Rock-and-Roll, The Devil's Diversion, by Bob Larsen, 1967, McCook, Nebraska, p. 116.)
Amongst all the interesting things to say about rock-and-roll, that is undoubtedly the most important. Rock comes from revolt. It leads to revolt. It is to be judged and to be treated like a revolt, negatively by repressing the disorder, positively - and that is more important-by restoring order. Firstly then,
Rock comes from Revolt
It is worth reading in The Marxist Minstrels of the wide variety of Communists and Jєωs (always the spiritual spearhead of Communists) who, from the end of the Second World War onwards, clearly had in view to exploit the moral power of music in order to corrupt the morals of the West and of America in particular. See likewise Rock-and-Roll, Pere Regimbal, 1983, Editions St. Raphael, 31 King Street West, Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada J1H IN5, page 28, an introductory docuмentation on the rock production studios being steadily financed by the sect of the Illuminati. Not that these habitual enemies of Christ are responsible for our free decisions to follow them, but finding these revolutionaries behind rock music helps us considerably to locate what rock music is.
Those are just a few indications as to the people behind rock music. Now let us listen to the rock musicians themselves.
"Rock is more than just music, it is the center of energy of a new culture and a youth in revolt" (Rolling Stones, RR, p. 18).
"I feel spiritual up there [performing]. Think of us as erotic politicians. I'm interested in anything about revolt, disorder, chaos, especially activity that has no meaning" (Jim Morrison, DD, p. 40).
"Our real followers ... are the hippies ... all of them think like us and are questioning some of the basic immoralities tolerated in present-day society - the war in Viet Nam, illegality of abortion, persecution of ɧoɱosɛҳųαƖs" (Keith Richard, one of the "Rolling Stones," DD, p. 39).
"We probably seem to be anti-religious because of the fact that none of us believes in God" (Paul McCartney, one of the Beatles, DD, p. 36).
"Christianity will disappear. Already we are more popular than Jesus Christ" (John Lennon, the Beatles, RR, p. 21).
"I resent the implication that the Rolling Stones are like revolutionaries and that the Beatles weren't. If the Stones were or are, the Beatles really were too" (John Lennon, MM, p. 112).
"Rock music is sex and you have to hit the teenagers in the face with it. I entice my audience. What I do is very much the same as a girl's strip-tease dance" (Mick Jagger, leader of the "Rolling Stones," DD, p. 38).
* * *
All of this was summed up by an American anarchist writer, Jerry Rubin, in his best seller, Do It, which is like a second Communist Manifesto:
Rock-and-roll marked the beginning of the revolution ... we see sex, rock-and-roll and dope as part of a Communist plot to take over America ... we have combined youth, music, sex, drugs and rebellion with treason - and that's a combination hard to beat.
Elvis Presley woke up our bodies, changing them altogether. The hard animal Rock whose secret lies in its energetic beat, penetrated warmly inside our bodies; the pounding rhythm roused all the suppressed and held-back passions. The back seat of a car was the theater of the sɛҳuąƖ revolution while the car's radio served as a medium for subversion. Rock marked the beginning of the revolution. We have fused together a new political life with a psychedelic style of life. Our way of living, our acid [=drugs], our freaky clothing, our rock music, that is the true revolution (RR, pp. 18-19).
Rock Music leads to Revolt
Next, rock music breathes revolt through every pore, by what it is in itself. It pushes to revolt by its words firstly and then by the musical means which it sets to work to drive home its message into the consciousness or the subconscious of its audience. "We are all the time working to direct the thoughts and wills of people, and most of the groups are doing the same" (Mick Jagger, RR, p. 18).
Rock music could be defined as a kind of popular music characterized by the combination of ancient savage rhythms originating from Africa with modern western electric instruments. Popular it certainly is throughout the entire world, especially amongst young people. "According to an American inquiry in 1981, 87% of all adolescents spend between three to five hours a day listening to rock music. Since the coming of the walk-man, they spend seven to eight hours. In one single year, 90% of all discs sold throughout the world were discs of rock (130 million per year), not including 100 million rock albums," says Pere Regimbal. And "rock-and roll can now be heard as a matter of course in Paris, Rome, Warsaw, Ankara, Calcutta, Saigon, Rio, Buenos Aires, Lima or Havana," says the magazine "Senior Scholastics," DD, p. 88. It's obvious!
What then is rock's message? The words and the accompanying music will tell us. Now it is true that for rock, as for any sung music, the listener is much more taken by the song than by the words being sung which may even escape him altogether, as is often the case, for instance, with Gregorian Chant. Nevertheless, for music in general, the words show what the musician was inspired by, and that inspiration will have fixed his choice of musical means, hence the importance of the words in order to grasp the meaning of the music; and then for rock in particular, let no one think that the youngsters do not understand the lyrics with two or even three meanings - "The kids can understand them" (MM, p. 68).
Let us then begin with the words - what do rock lyrics say? Firstly, they push sex and impurity in all its forms continuously, more or less openly - for a series of examples, see The Devil's Diversion, pp. 24-30 and since that book was written the examples have got far worse. Next, the lyrics likewise push drugs. For examples, see The Devil's Diversion, pp. 30-35, The Marxist Minstrels, pp. 72-73, where Dr. Noebel gives a list of fifty or so rock songs encouraging the taking of drugs in terms more or less veiled or in an ambiguous slang, but which is perfectly clear to the youngsters.
Next, the lyrics push anarchy, communism and anti-christianity. "We must go down into the streets, now is the time for violent revolution" (Rolling Stones, MM, p. 215). "You don't know how lucky you are, boy, back in the USSR" (the Beatles, MM, p. 67).
And here is a description of the Beatles in 1964 by a Derrick Taylor: "They're completely anti-Christ. I mean, I am anti-Christ as well, but they're so anti-Christ they shock me, which isn't an easy thing" (MM, p. 101). The rock musical "Jesus Christ Superstar" is a tissue of blasphemies against Our Lord, Our Lady and the saints of the Gospels (MM, p. 243, 245).
Finally, let us indicate occultism and satanism as being pushed by rock lyrics. Amongst another wealth of examples, here are a few: The Rolling Stones "baptize" one of their albums "at the request of their satanic majesty." On the sleeve they pose as witches. One of their songs, "Sympathy for Satan," is the national anthem of Satanists. On another of their discs can be heard the cries of voodoo possessed recorded at Haiti. The musicians of the group, KISS (Knights in the Service of Satan), present themselves in the clothing and with faces of devils, and in "The God of Thunder," they sing to the god of thunder as the god of rock-and-roll (RR, p. 22). The group, AC/DC (Antichrist/Death to Christ), in "Hell's Bells" sings: "I've got my bells and I'm gonna take you to hell. I'm gonna getcha! Satan getcha! Hell's bells, yeah! Hell's bells!" (RR, p. 23).
In addition to these direct messages of Satan, there are also hidden in some of the best-known rock songs backward, masked messages, that is to say, words which you can only hear when you play backwards a recording of the song! Fr. Regimbal gives several examples in his little brochure, "Rock-and-Roll," pp. 19-22. Order the cassette of the lecture of Fr. Regimbal on rock-and-roll in order to hear with your own ears this strange music without words which, however, played backwards becomes a series of perfectly comprehensible words in English. For example, in "Revolution No. 9," of the Beatles, "Turn me on, dead man," ... the meaning is too obscene and blasphemous to write down here; in the album "Killers" of the group, Queen, "Start to smoke marijuana"; in "When Electricity Comes to Arkansas," of the group, Black Rock Arkansas, "Satan ... Satan ... Satan. He is god, he is god, he is god," and the message ends in a crazy laughing. In the most popular rock song of all, "Stairway to Heaven," by the group Led Zeppelin, the seemingly innocent words have in fact an occult and sinister meaning throughout the song, as deciphered by Fr. Regimbal, and at certain moments there is a backward-masked message also. For instance, when one hears in the normal way, "There's a feeling I get when I look to the West," the occult meaning of that is the feeling of bewitchment of the disoriented person, disoriented meaning turned away from the Orient, which in the prophet Zachary refers to the Messiah, and turned instead towards Lucifer who shines in the West, and at this same point, when the tape is played backwards, there can clearly be heard, "I've got to live for Satan" (RR, p. 20).
Truly, rock music, as judged by the words being sung, is not just an innocent past-time, amusing the young. It is Satan himself who is calling the tune, the Luciferian Pied Piper of Hamlin!
What then are the musical means which he sets to work in rock music? There are various kinds of rock music, but always, always, the pounding beat. The first rock music (called soft rock), began in the early fifties when white musicians set about accentuating the rhythm of various kinds of black music from the southern United States - "Rhythem," "Blues," and "Soul." Indeed in 1952 a Communist subversive in the United States, Sidney Finkelstein, wrote that the "chauvinist barrier between classical music and popular music should be smashed by inundating the American public with the 'music of the Negro people'." The ancestors of these blacks from the south had brought from Africa the tribal music of the voodoo rites in which an incessant pounding rhythm with strong syncopations brings the native dancers to a state of hypnotic monotony in which they lose consciousness and self-mastery, and in which then voodoo can enter into them, pushing them into sɛҳuąƖ atrocities (DD, p. 130). What despair for the Christian missionaries from the West when they find back at home exactly the same frenzies in dancing which they strive to combat in the African tribes where they work (DD, p. 134)! In the Far East, Bob Larsen has picked up exactly the same correlation between pounding music and sensual gesticulations, reaching even trances and demonic possession (DD, pp. 135-136). Thus, the American composer, Dmitri Tiomkin, said in 1965, "In our popular music at least, we seem to be reverting to savagery ... More to the point is the fact that youngsters who listen constantly to this sort of sound are thrust into turmoil. They are no longer relaxed normal kids."
But how does a strongly rhythmic music obtain such effects? It was said above that rock music could be defined as a music which combines ancient African rhythms with instruments of modern technology. What rock musicians bring to the African rhythms to plunge the entire world into a wild ocean of sound is precisely the panoply of modern technology.
Modern technology serving the beat is what determines, first of all, the instruments of the average rock group, consisting ever since the Beatles in a quartet: two guitars, a bass guitar, and drums. The guitar is the basic instrument, firstly on account of its rhythmic character, but the classical guitar has been transformed into the metallic electric guitar attached to loudspeakers which makes a mechanical and much louder sound. The bass guitar is likewise amplified by one or two powerful loudspeakers, to such a point that a listener standing close by can feel the whole insides of his body vibrating (DD, p. 79). The basic rhythm is provided by the drums, to which likewise are attached synthesizers, like electronic organs. The drummer and his rhythm play such an important role that drum solos can last anything up to a quarter of an hour in a rock concert. Moreover, the electricity serves not only to amplify but also to distort the sound, creating Larsen effects, or "wah-wah pedals." Truly, without electricity there would be no rock. This tells us its artificial and extremist character, everything designed to blow the fuses of the nerves. This absolute need of a superactive relaxation is surely the counterpart of the super-passive modern televisual and suburban life. Hence, rock comes most naturally to the countries farthest advanced in industrialism and suburbanism, the United States and the United Kingdom.
As for the other main elements in music - harmony and melody - certain rock artists are not lacking in talent. For example, the Beatles in some of their pieces show a true musical art. But rock in no way values these elements or this art, because they involve too much the superior and spiritual part of the soul. Thus, jazz has a melodic interest, but rock has none or only a little. What counts is the animal beat. As a rock musician, Frank Zapper of the Led Zeppelin, said: "I realize that this music got through to the youngsters because the big beat matched the great rhythms of the human body and I further knew that they would carry this beat of rock-and-roll with them the rest of their lives" (DD, P. 61).
Indeed, within the human body there are several life rhythms, the beating of the heart, the undulations of the brain, the breathing of the lungs, the walking of the feet. Now, the fact that music can affect animals, deaf-mutes, the mentally weak and even plants (yes! - MM, pp. 118-120), proves that it has a physical effect on bodies, independently of the reason. Music is dynomogenic, that is to say, it plays powerfully on the activity of the muscles by causing, for example, an often involuntary movement which it requires a conscious effort to stop. Now if the singing tenor's sustained note coincides with the wavelength of wine glasses, it can make them vibrate until they are smashed; likewise the marching in step of a platoon of soldiers, if it coincides with the rhythms of a suspension bridge, can pull the bridge down. If then, the rhythm of the music were to engage the rhythms of the body, why should not the music be able, as it were, to break something within the body?
"By carefully controlling the sequence of rhythms," said John Philips of the group, Mamas and Papas, "one can introduce hysteria in one's audience. We know how to do it, anybody knows how to do it." And to prove it, they caused, at their next concert, a riot in Phoenix (MM, p. 69)! "We know what we are because we know what we're doing ... There were very few things that happened to the Beatles that weren't well thought out by us, whether to do it or not," said John Lennon (The Legacy of John Lennon, David A. Noebel, Nelson, New York, 1982, p. 28).
By way of example of a medical analysis of the process by which rhythm might, as it were, break down the body, doctors point out that the autonomic nervous system of the human body bathes in a cerebrospinal liquid which has a rhythm directed partly by the pituitary gland, the master gland of the body. This gland influences almost all the vital processes of the body, directing for example the secretion of the hormones of the endocrine glands (DD, p. 78, 79). If then, the pituitary gland were let loose by the physical vibrations of the beat, the whole nervous system would be unhinged, hence an abnormal secretion of the sɛҳuąƖ hormones, which would explain the erotic movements in rock dances. "Rhythmic music and dancing are ways of getting at the nervous system. I will show some movies demonstrating how the primitive rhythms of a stone-age tribe in Kenya and a band at a London ball produced the same trance-like emotions," said Dr. Wm. Sargent to the Royal Society of Medicine in London (MM, p. 55).
Furthermore, the beat, by stimulating the secretion of the hormone epinephrine, diminishes in the blood the ionic calcium which is of major importance for directing the nervous system, and the sugar, which is the only nourishment of the brain. Hence the exhausted nerves and the unhinged brain following on a rock concert. This powerful stimulation of the sensuality, together with the depression of the intelligence and reason, ends up in eroticism and violence. And this ѕυιcιdє of the reason leads to ѕυιcιdє quite simply. Many different doctors recognize the same effects of rock on human beings: frustration, loss of self-control, diminishing of the intelligence and will, going as far as euphoria, hysteria, hallucination, hypnosis, depression, neurosis, and psychosis, terminating in violence directed either against others in almost irresistible impulses of destruction and vandalism and rioting, or against oneself in self-punishment, self-mutilation and self-immolation, together with a grave increase in tendencies to ѕυιcιdє (RR, p. 34). Rock songs actually promote ѕυιcιdє, for instance "Goodbye, cruel world." Among the causes of death of youngsters in the United States today, ѕυιcιdє is number two, next after road accidents, but be careful, many of these accidents could be masking ѕυιcιdє! By their liberalism, the parents are committing the ѕυιcιdє of their God-given reason. The punishment is logical. The children commit, often starting out from rock music, ѕυιcιdє quite simply.
Rock is to be judged like a Revolt
A revolt is to be judged by its causes and by its fruits. For instance, the revolt of the Spanish Catholics against Communism in power in 1936 in Spain, was absolutely justified both in its causes and in its fruits. Now the fruits of rock-and-roll are absolutely rotten. Most of the docuмentation of this article has been drawn from two relatively old books by Larsen and Noebel, dating from 1970 and 1974 respectively. The very useful brochure of Fr. Regimbal dates from 1983, which enables him to docuмent nine further years of rottenness. But even in the two years which have unfolded since then, 1983 to 1985, the rottenness has advanced with giant strides. Take, for instance, MTV and the rock video cassettes which are clearly satanic. Rock is a whole world of muck, filth and satanism, of which the average reader has no idea until he has checked a little for himself. Music is a serious affair having a great power over morals. Only the liberals deny it, thus leaving the field wide open to Satan. Rock music is not just an innocent pastime, good to amuse the children if that's what they like; rock music is the outstanding instrument of Satan to set youngsters on the road to hell and to keep them there for the rest of their lives and for all their eternity. No use objecting that rock is not always wild, it is not always filthy - the master of the dance remains always Satan, who asks no better than to get the youngsters little by little into this whole world of rock. When judged by its fruits, rock deserves a most severe condemnation.
However, if we consider it in its causes, our judgment must be more complicated. Certainly, the revolt of rock lines up with original sin and exploits it, and by making listeners throw off all restraint, it pushes them into a thousand personal sins of which the young, for example, are fully conscious and for which they are responsible. But who made them this materialistic world, Godless, faithless, lawless, supersensual, supercommercial, against which the rock singers are revolting? Alice Cooper, who took the name of a witch when he consecrated himself to Satan (RR, p. 46), tears chickens and dolls to pieces on the stage and then throws the pieces out into the crowd because "all the audience wants is sex and violence. I know because I used to watch television all day" (LJL, p. 98). Alas, rock reflects all too faithfully the abortion society which it comes out of. Our society does without God, rock mocks Him! Our society has no love of country, rock turns to Communism; our society aborts its children, neglects the family, rock will snatch away even the children it has and will αssαssιnαtҽ them; our commercial and televisual society delights in sex and violence, rock wallows in sex and violence, to rot the youth with them. "I figured the only thing to do was to swipe their kids ... by saying that, I'm not talking about kidnapping, I'm just talking about changing their value systems, which removes them from their parents' world very effectively," said rock singer, David Crosby (LJL, p. 85). Parents! is it difficult to get through to your children? That's because you are up against Pied Pipers of Hamlin who know what they are doing, who may not however know that they are the instruments of the punishment of the Good Lord to Whom your generation has refused to render what was due to Him!
Rock should be treated like a Revolt
A revolt is to be treated by the repression of all disorder and by the restoration of order, so that the same causes will not continue to produce the same effects. Now, the disorder of rock is so unbearable for moral health by its message and by its beat that any wise family father will absolutely suppress it in his family. Fathers and mothers! Check what your children are listening to! Don't let them do what they like! Give them neither money nor discs nor record player nor television nor walk-man nor guitar nor drums with which they may do as they wish! And do not say that it's too late. It's your turn to protest! If your children are already caught up in rock, get to realize how evil it is, inform yourselves, pray God and the Blessed Virgin for the souls of your children which are at stake, and then give battle to Satan, give battle with Satan for those souls! Will your children resist? Then show that you too, but you above all, have convictions! It is precisely these Catholic convictions that the rock generation has such a desperate need of! And then play the man, Dad, the man of God. Do not give up, for the love of the souls of your children, do not give up. And if, with the help of God, you win your child over, make him himself break his own discs or cassettes, for example. It is an important physical gesture, even decisive, says Bob Larsen, in order to break the spell of rock music (DD, p. 149).
And what should be done positively to get at the deep causes of rock? We must convert! Let us adults live like true Catholics, let us demonstrate through our concrete example the truth and the beauty of Him, Who is the Way, the Truth and the Life. Let us renounce our materialism, our soft comfort, let us love our country, let us throw out the television set, let us genuinely flee this whole display of filth and immodesty! If necessary, let us go and live in the country, that the children may put two feet down to earth again, God's earth beneath God's heaven, and for the love of God. And were that not possible, then let us at least strive to cultivate in the home a love of healthy and good music, because youth needs a song as it needs a flag and an ideal, and this healthy song will contribute powerfully to form healthy morals. Satan has always known it. How could we Catholics ever have forgotten?
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