The Rock and Roll Revolution
By Orlando Fedeli
By Orlando Fedeli
Introduction: The power of music
I - Music: Symbols – Ideas and Morality
II – Rock and Revolution
III - The beat and its effects
IV - Rock e Religion
Conclusion
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.
