The Music That's In League With Lucifer: Jazz, Blues, Rock’n’Roll, Heavy Metal and Hip-Hop

Today is January 3, 2019, the New Year is still in it's infancy. As I have said many times over, I will often use music as a form of therapy. It is when I do that, at times, I begin to see things more clearly. It also has been some of the inspirations for me to be able to string together the written words for stories, such as this one.

The other day as I was scrolling through my Facebook Feed, I saw a post by Paddy Rock Radio. It mentioned two CD's, one by Medusa's Wake, the other by Clan of Celts and how great they both are. Now some of you may have seen me post and share about Clan of Celts before. Back in August my wife surprised me with a copy of their CD "Beggars, Celts & Madmen". The first time I heard them was on MacSlon's Irish Pub Radio awhile back and I really liked the song "Dream Catcher". Clan of Celts is based in London and they are described to be "Rock, Metal, Country, Punk, Classical and of course Traditional Irish". While Medusa's Wake is based in Sydney and is said to be "modern with traditional roots, undeniably Australian and yet unmistakably Irish at the same time". There was a time when I would have never thought that "Punk" or "Metal" would be included as some of the many different genres and sub-genres of music that I do appreciate. The sub-genre of "Celtic Metal" should be there too, as several years ago, while I was on one of my many trips through YouTube, I discovered an older group called Celtic Legacy. One of their songs was "Resurrection" and it's certainly not a religious one, but it has a great meaning if you truly listen to the words.

Not long ago I had written a review, of sorts, for the Clan of Celts CD. In that, I also mentioned the following, "There has always been a strong argument that folk music is the original rebel music. The music of the people and historically through that music the people challenged the land owners, challenged the state and wrote stories that recounted these acts; Therefore it could be argued that folk was in fact the first real punk rock" - London Celtic Punks​. I thought this to be an interesting description since according to some information on my family history it is said that my ancestors are from County Cork Ireland. Cork has also sometimes been referred to as "The Rebel County" due to the prominent role it played in the Irish War of Independence. In some more on my family history it shows that they arrived in what one day would be known as America way back in the 1630's, it also shows me to be descendant of a Soldier of the Confederate States of America. So I guess by heritage and tradition it may only be natural for me to be a "rebel at heart". I am a person who stands up for my own personal beliefs and opinions despite what anyone else may say or think. I will refuse to follow anyone that attempts to force me to think the same way they do even at the cost of being labeled as an outcast to society. I will not compromise my individuality or personal beliefs and opinions for anyone. I'm pretty straightforward and honest and I'll be sure to tell you like it is.

Before reading that Facebook post, I did not recall ever hearing anything from Medusa's Wake. I thought I'd take another little trip through YouTube and give them a listen, it didn't take me long to start liking what I was hearing. Perhaps my eclectic taste in music was influenced with me practically growing up in and around radio stations in the 1960's to the 1980's, since both my Dad and oldest brother were DJ's. Although I was raised in a Christian home, where Christian and Gospel music was often heard in church and at home as well, there was a lot of the other styles that reached my ears too. This may seem unusual since, for a time, rock and roll had been defined, by some, to be the "Devil's Music".

As I was listening to Medusa's Wake I began thinking of that "devil's music" and the many other styles of music that have been vilified and demonized by those who didn't appreciate it. In part of the Introduction of the book "The Devil’s Music: How Christians Inspired, Condemned, and Embraced Rock ’n’ Roll" by Randall J. Stephens it reads, "Victorians scorned bawdy barroom songs and vulgar Irish tunes. In the early twentieth century, jazz and Dixieland were new targets of moral outrage". In an article titled "The Devil Has All The Best Tunes: How Musicians Discovered Their Dark Side" in part it reads, "No one knows for sure which 18th-century cleric said that “the Devil has the best tunes”. That article also reads, "Venetian composer Giuseppe Tartini (1692-1770) said he was inspired to write the ‘Sonata In G Minor’, the so-called ‘Devil’s Trill’, after Satan, playing a violin, appeared to him in a dream. Satan was something of a multi-instrumentalist himself, because as well as playing the fiddle, Ezekiel 28:13 states that he had his own instruments (tabrets – small drums – and pipes) built into his very being. Tartini was one of a number of composers who used tritones, a musical interval that goes across three entire tones, and which was branded “Diabolus in Musica” or “The Devil’s Interval”. These dissonant chords reappear in heavy metal music by bands such as Slayer and Black Sabbath, and even in the edgy theme tune to The Simpsons. In the documentary film Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey, producer Bob Ezrin, who has worked with Alice Cooper, KISS and Deep Purple, said: “There is something very sexual about the tritone. It apparently was the sound used to call up the beast.”

Back in the early 1980's, when I was in high school in Arab, Alabama, I worked a part-time job at the local Pizza Hut there. A friend and co-worker made me some 8-Track Tapes, yes they used to be a thing way back when, of some "Christian Rock" music. In the book "The Devil’s Music: How Christians Inspired, Condemned, and Embraced Rock ’n’ Roll" in part it reads, "The musicologist and blues musician Robert Palmer took note of popular Christian rock in 1981. Roughly a decade after the music first received widespread attention, Palmer observed that "when rock-and-roil enjoyed its initial surge of popularity in the mid-50s, many fundamentalist Christians recoiled in horror." The lyrics, the beat, and the sexuality of it all made it seem like "the Devil's music." Now, declared Palmer in the New York Times, rock and fundamentalism "have become more and more closely entwined since the 50's." He pointed to the many popular performers who identified with some variety of Christianity, including Bob Dylan, Al Green, Johnny Cash, B. J. Thomas, Donna Summer, Van Morrison, and Arlo Guthrie. Dylan's Slow Train Coming (1979) was the best of the "born again" albums, he judged. Palmer even figured that many Christian artist "write and record music that is more or less indistinguishable from conventional rock and pop." Indeed, the Christian music industry became a big business and a handful of artist even achieved enviable chart success. For some critics of the era, the conservatism and the perceived conformity of Christian pop music never sat well. Rock music was meant to liberate and break with convention, so said doubters. It could never be the theme music of born-again Christianity." How often do we see when others will vilify and demonize anything that they may not like or agree with?

Also in this book it mentions that the British founder of the Salvation Army, William Booth, once said "The music of the Army is not, as a rule, original. We seize upon the strains that have already caught the ear of the masses, we load them with our one great theme, salvation, and so we make the very enemy help us fill the air with our Saviour's fame." This use of "rock" music to reach young people reminds me of how the Christians adopted some of the Pagan rituals in order to more easily convert them. (Please see my previous article, "Christian, Pagan Holidays, Beliefs And Traditions".) In another place in this book it reads, "For conservative Christians, too, pop music often channeled bad taste and was beneath their exacting standards. Among America's many Christians, evangelicals raised the loudest complaint. Others might find the songs of Elvis, the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, or Madonna degraded and artless. But for evangelicals, fundamentalist, and other conservatives it was much more than that. The music was sinful, deranged, and demonic. Conservative Protestant and Catholic magazines sounded the alarm with headlines like "Musical Smut," "What Is the Disease in Modern Popular Music?." "Rock and Roll: The Devil's Heartbeat," and "Are the Beatles Minstrels of the Antichrist?" For the author of the last, the question quite simply answered itself. Such definitive hostility makes it all the more unusual that by the late 1960s and early 1970s, millions of conservative Christians decided that rock music could serve the church and the cause of evangelism. Christian rock bands equipped with electric guitars, drums, tambourines, and synthesizers became an important feature of Pentecostal and charismatic churches. (The latter tradition, originating in the 1950s and 1960s, brought the theology and practice of Pentecostalism speaking in tongues and divine healing especially into mainline, established churches.) Soon the music and styles of rock also made their way into Southern Baptist, Nazarene, Presbyterian, and other denominations. The change was evident to anyone who listened to the new sound of worship bands or witnessed sermons by long-haired pastors and youth ministers who donned bell-bottom jeans, wore faded denim jackets, and used the idioms of the counterculture." Although in those Southern Baptist churches I attended when growing up where my Father was the Pastor and others I went to after my parents had divorced and I was living with my Mother, I don't ever recall anyone "rockin' out to Jesus" or dressing like "hippies".

But for now my thoughts do once again turn to those many different genres and sub-genres of music that I often listen to and appreciate. To start off with I'm going to list some forms of early music such as Classical, Baroque, Medieval or Renaissance. Then I'll add Jazz, Big Band, Ragtime and Swing. Next I'll add Blues, Reggae and R&B/Soul. I've got to go ahead and throw in some Cajun/Zydeco, Celtic (Traditional, Folk and Contemporary), German Folk and Italian Folk. Oh, and Bluegrass, Honky Tonk, Adult Contemporary, Doo Wop, and Rockabilly too. Then of course there is that Classic Country and Rock that I grew up with from the 1960's, 1970's and 1980's, but I also enjoy tunes from the 1950's too. I have said on more than just one occasion that at times I do feel something, almost "spiritual", but not necessarily religious, when listening to these types of music.

In the book "The Devil’s Music: How Christians Inspired, Condemned, and Embraced Rock ’n’ Roll" by Randall J. Stephens and another one with a similar title and subject, "Devil’s Music, Holy Rollers and Hillbillies: How America Gave Birth to Rock and Roll" by James A. Cosby, both discuss how many artist, which are considered the pioneers of rock and roll in the mid 1950's, such as Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and Johnny Cash, among others, were raised in the South and much of their musical life was formed in a Pentecostal church. Both books also mention about how in the 1950's, when the threat of the "Red Scare" and almost certain nuclear Armageddon or destruction, that the rock and roll music that the teenagers of that time were listening to gave them some form of hope with the fears and anxieties during the early "Cold War" years.

In the Introduction of the book "Devil’s Music, Holy Rollers and Hillbillies: How America Gave Birth to Rock and Roll" there is this quote, "I do believe the music of the Beatles taught the young people of the Soviet Union that there is another life" - Mikhail Gorbachev. Later it reads in part, "As a general philosophy of life, it is true that rock and roll has not provided all of life's answers. Still, rock and roll has proven meaningful and profound in its own way. As partly evidenced by the Gorbachev quote that begins this introduction, it is hard to even measure the true, worldwide impact of rock music beyond record sales and figures except to otherwise say that its impact has been enormous." The other book, "The Devil’s Music: How Christians Inspired, Condemned, and Embraced Rock ’n’ Roll", regarding another of some notable persons of the "Cold War" years, reads. "In early August 1986, a group of political commentators and journalist interviewed President Reagan about the troubles of the modern youth and drug abuse in America. Asked about how his sunny optimism squared with darker social realities. Reagan admitted that there was much work to be done. He also pointed the finger squarely at rock celebrities and the entertainment industry. The former California governor had already risen to national fame in the 1960s for targeting the counterculture and denouncing, as he put it, "that mess in Berkeley." Now he went after other Pied Pipers of teenagers. If the president "described America as upbeat, optimistic-why are drugs such a problem now?" the reporters asked. "Well, how do you relate that?" said Reagan in his typical off-the-cuff and somewhat disjointed, rambling style. "For one thing," he continued. we've had some of our modern day things of interest to young people in the music world that has stimulated this, that it made is sound as if it's right there and the thing to do, and rock and roll concerts and so forth, musicians that the young people like and that make no secret of the fact they are users, and many times, when they're performing, the lyrics of songs, show business, itself." Record company executives, music store chains, and others in the industry felt unfairly targeted. The president grossly mischaracterized their business." How often do we see when others will vilify and demonize anything that they may not like or agree with?

Now I served in the US Air Force from 1982 to 1988 in the latter part of the "Cold War" years and Ronald Reagan was my Commander-In-Chief and I was very proud of that. I have always thought him to be a great man and a wonderful President, but of course he was not without faults. As a personal note, one of my favorite cassette tapes that I would listen to, some times even while on alert guarding just a small portion of America's nuclear arsenal located on the plains of South Dakota, was the 1983 Pink Floyd album "The Final Cut". The album itself has an anti-war message. The song "Two Suns in the Sunset" portrays a nuclear holocaust; the final result of a world obsessed with war and control. That might be just a little bit of irony right there!

In a 1994 written report,"Generational Differences in Musical Preferences" by Tom W. Smith, which was done for the General Social Survey project and funded by the National Science Foundation, it starts with this, "Musical tastes change with times. New genres regularly appear, established styles decline in popularity, and some musical stalwarts undergo revivals. Whether an original form of music, a foreign import, or a second (or later) coming of an old style, "new" musical genres appeal disproportionately to the young (probably especially to those in their teens). Each emerging generation is open to the popular music of its day and especially drawn to music that plays to that generation and defines itself as that generation's sound. As that generation ages, it tends to maintain its preference for the music of its youth. Other genres may come along and the absolute popularity of a type of music will probably wane as new forms emerge, but at a minimum each generation remains relatively more favorable toward the music of its youth than generations raised either before or after the advent of a genre of music." With this I think about my eclectic taste in music once again. It goes as far back to some of the most early forms of music. And now that I'm in my 50's I have added some Metal/Punk, which includes those previously mentioned, among others such as Nightwish and Alter Bridge (which a friend and co-worker burned me a copy of the AB III CD). There's even some Doom/Folk/Medieval Metal from Apocalypse Orchestra to throw into the mix. I also find it interesting that my oldest son's and my taste in music will sometimes overlap, despite that "generational differences in musical preferences" as mentioned. He has even introduced me to some Electro-swing from Caravan Palace, Dark Pop from Gorillaz (a British virtual band), and Indie Pop/Electronica from Mystery Skulls. I know, I'm not normal, but I have never claimed to be either. My poor little YouTube Channel probably screams every time I log on when it has to decided what videos it should "suggest" to me over in that column on the right!

While listening to one genre of music I can hear how it has been influenced by another. A simple but good example of this would be the music of the region of Appalachia, which includes English ballads, traditional Irish and Scottish tunes as well as sacred hymns and the blues. Even on MacSlon's Irish Pub Radio, I have heard Celtic Metal/Punk versions of the songs "I'll Fly Away" and "Amazing Grace" both of which have Christian and Gospel origins. It may seem a little strange to some and I'm sure there would be those who would rebuke those versions. Back when Dave Bray was a member of Madison Rising, was when I first heard their rockin' version of "The Star Spangled Banner" as I was taking, yet again, one of my many trips through YouTube. An article in the Huffington Post from February 2014 it stated, "Madison Rising bills itself as “America’s Most Patriotic Rock Band“ but it clearly does not believe in originalism when it comes to interpreting the national anthem. The band delivered an unwieldy, awkward rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner“ at Daytona International Speedway on Saturday that would likely have been met with as much disapproval from Francis Scott Key and John Stafford Smith as it was by NASCAR driver Brad Keselowski. “Well, I wish they would just sing the damn song,” Keselowski said after the Nationwide Series season opener. “That is my reaction.” The rendition of the anthem was so cringeworthy that it soon went viral, garnering attention at media outlets ranging from Deadspin to The Associated Press." While there are some songs that I personally don't think should be "re-worked", I really happened to like this one. Another "cover song" I heard while tripping through YouTube was Disturbed's version of "The Sound of Silence", which again I really liked very much. Yet another is one by Caravan Palace, which was mentioned earlier as one my oldest son had introduced me to. The song, "Black Betty", of which I am more familiar with as done by Ram Jam in 1977. The origin and meaning of the lyrics are subject to debate. It was first recorded in the field by US musicologists John and Alan Lomax in December 1933, performed A cappella by the convict James "Iron Head" Baker and a group at Central State Prison Farm in Sugar Land, Texas. Ram Jam's version became an instant hit with listeners, as it reached number 18 on the singles charts in the United States and the top ten in the UK and Australia. At the same time, the lyrics caused civil rights groups NAACP and Congress of Racial Equality to call for a boycott. David Hackett Fischer, in his book "Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America", states that "Black Betty" was a common term for a bottle of whisky in the borderlands of northern England/southern Scotland, and later in the back-country areas of the eastern United States.

The title for this writing was influenced, in part, from a line in one of my favorite movies, "Highlander", a 1986 British-American fantasy action-adventure. In this movie, Connor MacLeod from the Scottish Highlands, known as the Highlander, is one of a number of immortal warriors. In an early battle he is thought to be mortally wounded. He survives and makes a complete recovery. His family and friends are convinced that this is the work of the devil, the words "He's in league with Lucifer." are spoken. His fellow Clansmen wanted to burn him at first but they end up banishing him instead. The soundtrack to this movie has some really great tunes, including "Who Wants To Live Forever" performed by Queen. Way back when "Rock’n’Roll" was still in it's infancy, there were some Conservative Christians that wished to ban it and they even held rallies in some places throughout America where it is said that records were burned in protest. How often do we see when others will vilify and demonize anything that they may not like or agree with?

There are some evil influences in this world, but do I believe that all of these many different styles of music are in league with Lucifer, or that it's the "Devil's Music"? With as much as I share about how I enjoy those many different genres and sub-genres, I believe that this question quite simply has already answered itself.