Rock and Roll is Sacred Music

St. Johnny Rotten.

Look up “Christian rock” on YouTube, as I just did, and you will get a glimpse of an old controversy: is rock and roll the Devil's music? A large number of Christians have always believed this—that something about rock and roll makes it intrinsically immoral. In fact, a huge number of rock and roll musicians have thought so themselves. Keith Richards once said in an interview he usually wrote “Luciferian” songs; Neil Young has called rock “God and the Devil shaking hands.” Jerry Lee Lewis has said “I know I am playing for the Devil.”

This seems to me absurd. Why should the Devil get all the good songs?

Is rock beautiful? Does it “strike a chord” in you, as it does in me? Then, by definition, it is from God, not the Devil. Here's why: God is the perfect being. This means he is the perfection of being, reality, or truth. It also necessarily means that he is the perfection of moral good—evil cannot be an aspect of perfection, for it is a flaw. It also follows that he is the perfection of beauty. Ugliness cannot be an aspect of perfection, for it too is a flaw.

From this it follows that the more beautiful a thing is, the more it approaches God. We understand this instinctively, I think, when we experience beauty in nature. Our perception of beauty comes with a sense of awe; it is felt as a communing with the divine intelligence. So too in art. Ergo, as rock is beautiful, rock is divine. (Note too that beauty is not the same as mere prettiness. Real beauty requires the sublime.)

Music, indeed, of all the arts, is most completely justified by beauty alone, because as music it can convey no other message, no didactic content, no "redeeming social importance." This makes it the most sacred of the arts--as in the "music of the spheres." There is a reason that angels are traditionally pictured strumming harps.

Ergo, rock music is intrinsically good, not evil; a thing of God, not the Devil.

Add to that the actual origins of rock. Rock began in Gospel music. This genesis is commonly obscured, largely I think because of the pre-conceived notion that rock is anti-religious in some way. It is commonly claimed that rock began instead as the mogrel child of county and western plus rhythm and blues. But just listen to some of the performances of Sister Rosetta Tharpe. You cannot deny that she was singing and playing rock already in the 1940s. But she was not classed as rock and roll—she was the most popular Gospel singer of her day.

http://youtu.be/JeaBNAXfHfQ

And the first Doo-Wop hit was a flat-out Christian religious song, “Crying in the Chapel.”

http://youtu.be/Qe_tL7aVGE8

The strange emotional energy of rock began as the energy of a revivalist meeting; that characteristic snare beat began as the clapping of the congregation. Rock emerged from exactly the places where gospel was omnipresent, among people who were raised on gospel as their music. Jerry Lee Lewis attended Southwest Bible Institute. Little Richard started out singing in Pentecostal churches, and was eventually himself ordained a minister. Chuck Berry's dad was a Baptist deacon. Elvis Presley learned guitar from the family pastor.

In context, it becomes clear that rock and roll's reputation as “the Devil's music” makes sense only in a Gospel context—only on the assumption that music, or this music, ought to be reserved for sacred places and occasions. Rock was bad because it was the supposed profanation of a sacred musical form.

That still makes it more religious than--just about anything else.