Does "Rock music is evil / of the devil" have racist roots?

As a Christian most of the circles I’m around are pretty chill…no stone-cold fundamentalists. But I have been around people (and even had family members) who are 100% convinced that rock music is evil and will lead people to engage in witchcraft and draw pentagrams all over their home.

The root of the belief is that rock music uses drums, which are used by voodoo tribes in Africa to entrance people.

Along a different track of thinking, from where did rock music originate? Slaves. They created the guitar because slave-owners didn’t allow them to make music with drums.

So then is “rock music is evil” sort of an echo of that attitude?

Riccosuave, (edited )
@Riccosuave@lemmy.world avatar

The core of Abrahamic religion is based around an in-group / out-group ideology. When you dove-tail off that premise it is clear that Abrahamic religion uses labelism such as “evil” or “from the devil” in order to obfuscate their suppression and opression of the out-group.

Crack0n7uesday,

I think if that argument holds any water it’s that rock music was originally an offshoot of blues music, which was predominantly an African American music genre in it’s beginning.

Nihilore,

Most definitely but ageism was a big part, rock music coincided with the birth of youth culture, which was seen as a threat against the establishment

afraid_of_zombies,

I have not heard this. Speaking from the perspective of a person whose parents considered pretty much everything to be satanic I just assumed it is because it is new and new must mean bad.

Be a cold day in hell before I respect a single aspect of Christianity

Anticorp, (edited )

That’s a completely different perspective than I’ve ever heard in church. I grew up in a fundamentalist household and the whole “rock is of the devil” attitude was fueled mostly by artists like Black Sabbath and Danzig, where they have a demonic stage presence, and lyrics which are worldly. Danzig used actual devil imagery and pentagrams in his media, and Ozzie was known as the Prince of Darkness, so the Christians weren’t really reaching to say that the artists were opposed to Christianity. Your interpretation probably has much older roots in Southern Baptist movements, which aren’t prevalent in all denominations.

uriel238, (edited )
@uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Yes. Rock-and-roll is an embellishment of blues, which was the spooky music of black people. Blues and Jazz were both topics of moral panics. Elvis himself was the segway, being famous, popular with young folk and had sexually explicit hips. He also brought blues to the television, so everyone could catch the beat.

The 60’s music revolution of London and the electric guitar secured the place of Rock. It was here to stay with the first yeah! yeah! yeah!

So was ragtime, though while we associate rag with Scott Joplin (who was quite black) I haven’t explored rag to know if it was regarded as black, but it was absolutely colonial and anti-monarchy and regarded as vulgar in Europe.

But also so was classical romanticism which broke all the rules of baroque and classical (the stuff sponsored by and patronized by aristocrats). Romanticism came with the Pianoforte (The Piano) which allowed a player to be more emotionally expressive with key velocity changing the tone of a note (and volume) but it was also about breaking the old rules. Getting mathematical. Bringing accompaniment instruments to the forefront. Making the audience feel feelings! The affrontery.

Infamously Paganini was such a good violinist, the church believes he bargained with demons to gain his skills (fiddle lessons for souls!). He was denied a sanctified buriel for fifty years based on this assumption. His caprices are used today as bravura pieces in violin contests.

Back to the present, angry gangsta rap killed the Satanic panic regarding metal (which mostly leaned into the Satan thing). Rap isn’t Satanic, rather it is purely furious, knows the hood was dealt a bum deal for centuries and is mad as fuck about it, and on the verge of riot and revolution. And all the pearl-clutchers wish we could just go back to when metal was calling on Satan.

Now we have the internet, which means we can look up where the music we like comes from, and as much as they clutch pearls, we know that they always are annoyed at poets speaking truth to power or challenging the norms. And what we listen to today will be classic in a generation, and quaint.

hactar42,

As long as there has been popular music, there have been people who say it is evil. Many classical composer where consider controversial. Mozart’s Leck mich im Arsch (Lick me in the arse) aside, anyone who challenged the status quo was considered “evil” but many.

In rock and rolls case, I would say no it is not inherently racist, and it has nothing to do with drums. But I can see how you could draw that conclusion because pre-Elvis rock and roll was considered “race music”. However, that fact that record companies found success with white washed versions of it, would indicate to me that they didn’t consider rock and roll itself evil. Of course, there were always those who hated it no matter how watered down Pat Boone tried to make it and considered it evil. But that’s no different than really anything that goes against the status quo.

As the 60s rolled on, there were minor conflict between rock and roll and the church. Most famously, John Lennon saying the Beatles were more popular than Jesus. In the late 60s bands like Black Sabbath were seen as evil, but I don’t think that applied to rock and roll as a whole. However, into the 70s with bands like Alice Cooper, New York Dolls, Kiss, and then the emergence of punk, more people started thinking of rock and roll in general as evil.

Then comes the 1980s. The Reagan years. Where you have the rise of the Moral Majority, the Satanic Panic, and PMRC, which loved to label things as “evil”. Make things us versus them. I don’t think it had anything to do with the actual music. It was more of the anti-establishment messages and decadence that was associated with the rock and roll lifestyle. It didn’t help that many bands purposefully adopted satanic symbols for shock value.

But, in true 1980s fashion instead of talking to their kids, boomer parents just labeled it as evil and forbid it.

Battle_Masker,
@Battle_Masker@lemmy.world avatar

I think we’re ignoring the bigger question: what kinda music DOESN"T have drums? like, literally EVERY FORM OF MUSIC uses drums, or some machine playing back a drum beat.

son_named_bort,

Acapella

Pat_Riot,
@Pat_Riot@lemmy.today avatar

So barber shop is the lord’s music then. Hmmm

Pea666,

Classical music doesn’t necessarily have drums. It might have some percussion but they’re not as prominent as with a lot of pop music.

OmgItBurns,

I’d say that most forms of music have some kind of rhythm instrument, often those are some form of percussion instrument.

I’ve definitely heard some experimental stuff that didn’t use any form of rhythm instruments. Then again, you can just record the ambient sound of a city and call that music, so to each their own.

afraid_of_zombies,

A cappella

pythonoob,

Church hymns

ThatFembyWho,

Ambient and some styles of classical music come to mind.

chitak166,

Umm, no.

Lots and lots and lots and lots (repeat ad infinitum) of music has no drums.

afraid_of_zombies,

String quartets? A cappella?

JustinAngel,

Pretty much anything that takes followers away from the church is likely to be labeled evil.

chitak166,

Bingo boingo.

Anticorp,

I had to sit through a poorly made documentary at church as a kid about how Star Wars was evil. Star Wars, which Lucas made to be as generic good vs evil as possible, was labeled as evil by my church. I can pinpoint that as one of the moments in childhood where I started becoming critical of the views of my church, and questioning the things they were telling me. Another key moment was when they had a young man go up to the podium and give his testimony. He talked all about how he was living a life of partying, rock-and-roll, and sex, and then found his way back to the church. I vividly remember thinking “well if that’s an option, that’s the road I’ll take too! Sounds like fun!”. My church did a lot of things like that which had the opposite effect they intended.

hal_5700X,
@hal_5700X@lemmy.world avatar

No. Seeing how “Rock music is evil.” thing started with Elvis Presley. Then in the 70’s you had people going for rock bands like the Rolling Stones for singing about sex and drugs. They moved to metal bands in the 80’s. Marilyn Manson was the big name target in the mid-late 90’s.

ElderWendigo,

Maybe read a little more about the history before you start whitewashing it.

Elvis Presley in particular was seen as a problem specifically because he was a white man singing black music to young white girls. The same people hated that Rock and Roll before white artists adopted it, but it only really became a problem after a boom in popularity with white children. Rolling Stones were still singing black music to white audiences. While the contemporary trend might have been to stigmatize the sex and drug lifestyle, that lifestyle was still seen by racists as a black influence. Those prejudices were still firmly rooted in a pervasive racism that still very much gripped the country. The war on drugs and free sex (like sex and marriage between races) was very rooted in racism.

Metal, Glam, and Marilyn Manson is a couple generations removed from the black roots of rock music. But, the people promoting these satanic panic ideas were at the same time fighting to censor and restrict the growing Hip-hop scene. It was all the same fight, which is how you get people like Dee Snyder from Twisted Sister and Frank Zappa speaking out about legislation targeting censorship of Hip-Hop and Rock music. Maybe race wasn’t the only issue for conservative fascists, but it never stopped being a factor.

lvxferre,
@lvxferre@lemmy.ml avatar

[some are] convinced that rock music is evil and will lead people to engage in witchcraft and draw pentagrams all over their home.

I think that it’s pretty safe to say that at least some people around you are stone-cold fundamentalists. This sort of discourse doesn’t come from non-fundamentalists.

That said as stupid as “rock is [from the d]evil” claim is, I don’t think that it’s rooted in racism. Instead I think that it’s because some values often followed by rock bands, singers and fans clash directly with some values of Christianity.

Note that some sort of percussion pops up in almost every musical style, across the eras.

Slaves. They created the guitar

This was already addressed, but… come on, acoustic guitars are from Middle Ages Iberia, and they backtrack all the way into the lutes of the Ancient Egypt and Anatolia. (Probably. It’s so old that the origins are hard to determine.)

ElderWendigo,

deleted_by_author

    •
    feedum_sneedson,

    Are you really done? This might be a major life moment for you.

    lvxferre,
    @lvxferre@lemmy.ml avatar

    This might be a major life moment for you.

    Nah. ElderWendigo@shitjustworks is clearly a witch hunter, and witch hunters don’t usually learn. Five minutes later they get another major life moment: misread something, point hooves and screech, get called out, then delete the comment while downvoting people calling them out, as they run away with tail between legs.

    [I kind of wanted them to point out historical falsehoods in my comment though. If there’s something false there I’d gladly fix it.]

    lvxferre, (edited )
    @lvxferre@lemmy.ml avatar

    Your whole comment is just so much racist whitewashing and ignorance it is painful to read.

    In no moment I whitewashed rock, denying its black origins. I didn’t even mention the origins of rock. So don’t be a liar - or worse, assumptive trash.

    The anti-rock movement is deeply rooted in racism.

    That does not contradict what I said given that I was talking about that specific claim, not about the anti-rock movement as a whole.

    Long before there was any hint of witchcraft in Rock and Roll, it’s greatest threat to christian fundamentalism was in brining black music to white audiences.

    I believe this to be correct but it does not contradict what I said.

    Your whole comment is just so much racist whitewashing and ignorance it is painful to read.

    No, it is not. Learn to read.

    This kind of bullshit is how conservatives today get away with claiming racism doesn’t exist anymore.

    I’m neither what would be considered “conservative” where I live, nor in USA (where rock is from). And I am not responsible for what your intellectual peers claim. (You might not be a conservative but you bloody behave like one!)

    Nota bene: if two were to play this “I’m an illiterate so I make shit up lol” game, you’d be screwed, as it would be really easy for me to label you as an Islamophobic and a nationalist, on the exact same grounds that you’re claiming that I’m [ipsis ungulis] “a racist” and “whitewashing rock”. Think on why.

    Or alternatively you might go back to Reddit. Given that you lack basic reading comprehension, you’d be doing everyone a big favour.

    Pat_Riot,
    @Pat_Riot@lemmy.today avatar

    And the electric guitar was invented by Les Paul.

    Slaves invented the banjo which they developed from stringed gourd instruments they had in Africa.

    feedum_sneedson,

    Oh well the banjo is pretty good too.

    TheBananaKing,

    I don’t think so, at least not for everyone.

    My grandfather (born round the start of the first world war) was hideously racist, not overtly religious, but neither of those seemed to figure into his horrified disgust and moral panic at “rock and roll”. Seriously, he’d be less shocked at someone wiping their ass with a slice of bread and eating it, than he would be at them playing rock music in the house. If it featured on a TV ad, or came in the window from someone driving past, it was like he was under siege.

    Part of it was the sex-and-drugs angle, I’m sure, but I think even that was a small part of the whole.

    I think the biggest part was that it was a symbol of counterculture, of men growing their hair long and rejecting the order and authority of the world he was born into. He experienced a fuckton of social change in his lifetime, he couldn’t navigate the culture any more, and this left him lost, angry and afraid. There were these people pissing on all the symbols he understood, and waving around a bunch he didn’t, while rejecting all the values he’d been taught - and dancing about it, like (from his perspective) a horde of crackheads ransacking a library and smearing shit on everything for lulz.

    I mean, I wince and block channels with any kind of ‘reaction videos’, and I’m only genX. I get it, to a degree - though I’m trying at least to ensure that when I get irretrievably stuck in the past, it’s at least from this century. But the change I’ve been through only stretches from Kojak to Skibidi Toilet whatever the fuck that is. His stretched from before cars or refrigeration to the internet itself. I don’t think I’ll see as big a transformation as he did in his time; I hope I cope a shitload better than he did with what I do see, but who knows?

    rottingleaf,

    Along a different track of thinking, from where did rock music originate? Slaves. They created the guitar because slave-owners didn’t allow them to make music with drums.

    What the flying fuck? The guitar is one of the oldest mediterranean instruments. Naturally it evolved from antiquity, but just how did you think that?

    That attitude stems, naturally, from association with sex, drugs and pacifist rebellion with rock music. Organized religion often supports sexual morality, is suspicious of drugs (when it doesn’t incorporate their usage), and considers the social hierarchies to be of divine root, thus going to war would be the right thing to do and pacifism would be the opposite.

    Da_Boom,

    Look up the satanic panic

    theKalash,

    Show them some Christian Rock and watch their heads explode.

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