Rock music, as loosely understood – n’ roll, metal, hard, punk, grunge, alternative, new wave, garage – as opposed to Pop (fundamentally serious vs throwaway) is and has been the single most important artform of the second half of the twentieth century, and start of the twenty-first. Post-Holocaust, and staring down communism, it is rock music that has had the power to energise, connect, pacify and beautify generations of the culturally open of the world.
Christianity, on the other hand, is a totemic, bullying, manipulative, invented, false, cruel, political and tired old cocksucker. The revelation earlier that Acade Fire‘s recording studio/church was set to be sold set me thinking: well the Arcade fire are a groovy, passionate alt. rock band, what the fuck were they doing recording in a church in the first place? Just ‘acoustics’? If rock n roll really is the artform of the truth, then keep out of buildings of lies, surely? Unless it’s all just some bizarrely inverted image of attempted integrity, as it seems to be.
Gram Parsons, Bob Dylan, Prince, Nick Cave, Low, Laughing Leonard Cohen et al have all celebrated their ‘Struggles with God‘, as if they were some kind of badge of honour, something by which to keep their collective cool, to make us respect them more, by passion of integrity or somesuch claptrap. Well sorry, but it makes me feel you’re soft-headed, frightened, confused infants. I assume I don’t need to highlight my feelings on Chris Martin, Bono, Creed, The Killers, any rapper thanking god after every fucking show or award…they subsist in a postmodern Sodom and Gomorrah of their own fear, ambition, false-reverence, patronage and hypocrisy.
Never mind the singer of Lostprophets, the biggest child abuse conspiracy of all time was the introduction of the concept of Hell as a tool of social and behavioural control, and one of the (probably only) useful gifts to culture from heavy metal has been the cartoonish commodification of it; by Dio, Iron Maiden, AC/DC, via however many formless others and t-shirts you like. I’m not mentioning the other major religions here as all the data is not yet in on their affect on rock music, but suffice to say rock and roll is the sound and feeling of freedom, and in it’s most sophisticated state, of pure humanism if not out-and-out atheism.
The linking of Christian sentiments, old or fucking new testament, to this artform is a massive insult, and should be kicked into the cultural dustbin as quickly as Neo-Nazi fascist punks were. Before I hear the cries of ‘It’s a personal choice, it’s a belief, and it’s in the Bible’, if that is the case outlow christening and baptism until the individual makes up their own mind, go ahead and believe in superstition if you wish, and I will go on believing in Music…and god didn’t write the Bible, the politicians of it’s time did.
