Rock Music

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Rock Music

Soon after rock music began making an impact on youth during the 1950s it was denounced by parents, clergymen, educators, and others in positions of authority. The new music was antitraditional, antiauthoritarian, and disparaging of adult influence over teenagers. Pastors denounced it as evil—the product of Satan.

Rock music of the 1950s, however, did not prepare people for the upheaval of the 1960s and the open defiance against societal mores. In particular, the Rolling Stones' image as a "bad boy" band continued the identification of rock music with antiestablishment values in contrast to the "tamer" persona exemplified by the Beatles. In 1967 the Rolling Stones released Their Satanic Majesties Request. This was a harbinger of future events—two years later on December 6, 1969, some 300,000 young people gathered for a free pop music festival at Altamont Raceway, California, featuring the band. The crowd heard Mick Jagger singing "Sympathy for the Devil" while Hell's Angels, who had been engaged as bodyguards, beat up spectators and clubbed and kicked a man to death. After the event, no one was willing to take responsibility for the debacle.

Some rock bands turned up the power on their electric instruments and created the sound known as heavy metal, a name that seems to have been derived from a line in the 1968 Steppenwolf song, "Born to Be Wild." One performer, Alice Cooper, moved into shock entertainment by integrating the occult, sadomasochism, and animal abuse in his act. The shock element developed from an unplanned event in 1969. During a concert in Detroit, Michigan, Cooper released some chickens into the audience at the close of his act. The audience killed them and tore them to pieces, a fact subsequently noted in the press.

A new connection between rock music and the occult was made in the late 1960s by another British band, Led Zeppelin. Formed in 1968, their first album went gold the next year. Guitarist Jimmy Page had a strong interest in magic and the occult and upon attaining fame and fortune purchased the house on Loch Ness once owned by Aleister Crowley. Crowley's advocacy of drugs and sex magic had already earned him a reputation as a supporter of black magic and Satanism (though he was into neither), and that image began to follow Page, Led Zeppelin, and the bands that followed their lead.

In 1970 Black Sabbath followed on the heels of the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin. In spite of lack of interest from radio stations and the music press, their first album hit the charts and remained for 13 weeks. Other albums followed that kept the band popular for the next two decades. While its predecessors had some ties to the occult, Black Sabbath actively cultivated an image of evil and darkness—its name suggestive of a satanic mass and its use of black in their stage clothing and album covers. Lyrics explored mystical fantasy themes. Among the early members of the band was Ozzy Osbourne who would leave in 1979 and cultivate a more graphic satanic image.

Through the 1970s and 1980s, heavy metal was on the edge of the larger rock community as music expressing teenage rebellion in both England and the United States. As such, it was music enjoyed for a relatively few years before its followers reached adulthood. The music survived because there was always a new crop of teenagers entering the market each year. However, due to the rapidly changing audiences it was difficult for many bands to survive on top for more than five to seven years. In order to capture the attention of an audience with an increasingly short attention span, some bands moved into the most graphic portrayals of sex, sadism, and Satanism, themes that played predominantly to male teenagers.

Satanist themes dominated heavy metal lyrics and images, horrifying pastors and parents (even those raised on Elvis Presley and the Rolling Stones). These people saw heavy metal music as both a direct attack upon the mind and morals of their children and a new low in cultural degeneracy.

Performers such as Ozzy Osbourne were singled out for particular criticism. After leaving Black Sabbath, Osbourne formed a new band that later released the albums Talk of the Devil (1982), Bark at the Moon (1983) with Osbourne as a werwolf on the cover, and Ultimate Sin (1984). Incidents in which teen delinquency was tied to listening to heavy metal rock received wide publicity and Osbourne was accused of instigating crimes and suicides.

Another band drawn into the Satanism/antiSatanism controversy was Judas Priest. They were accused of releasing albums that contained subliminal messages encoded into the songs via a process known as backward masking. A Reno, Nevada, couple charged that their son attempted suicide after listening to their Stained Glass (1978) album, which they argued contained subliminal messages ordering the suicide. The courts dismissed the case but not before rock music received a significant amount of negative publicity.

More contemporary groups that actively cultivated the satanic image include Slayer, a relatively unknown band on the rock scene whose albums covers include an inverted satanic pentagram as their logo and other satanic symbols (such as an inverted cross) and whose lyrics cultivate satanic and black magic themes. Slayer was considered extreme, but other bands such as the obscure Possessed to the more widely recognized Motley Crüe (Shout at the Devil, 1983) also drew on satanic symbolism.

Contemporary rock has been criticized especially for the values it incorporates. However, to date, no valid evidence has been produced to link even the more objectionable form of heavy metal music as a causal agent to specific patterns of antisocial behavior or to long-term negative effects among devoted fans.