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Your Child and the New AgeChapter 15
Popular Music with Pagan Roots
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"The one thing I got from Hitler was the idea of the Nazi youth. ... The youth of today re the leaders of tomorrow. They're young, they can be brain-washed and programmed." (Nikki Sixx of the rock band, Motley Crue)"Overexposure to violent images is desensitizing us to violence. Because it now takes more and more violence to make us feel shock and revulsion, media violence has to become more and more graphic to be profitable. We are addicted—and we’re about to overdose." (Tipper Gore in Raising PG Kids in an X-Rated Society) |
Adventures into the world of Zen, free sex, and mind-expanding drugs during the ‘60s paved many strange paths to "higher" consciousness. The long hair of those years was primarily a sign of eroding boundaries, rebellion against authority, and experimental ways to live — and die. Music nurtured this liberation. It summoned, taught, inspired, and unified the seekers. Those who sang the same words felt the same rhythms and caught the same vision.
Like New Age spirituality, the music of the New Age has developed through syncretism and synthesis — a blending of contemporary dreams, ancient paganism, Eastern religions, and modern technology. The album jacket copy for Windham Hill’s "Pioneers of the New Age" summarizes the thrill of the "new" discoveries:
"It was like a gardener’s experiment in cross-pollination gone wild. Each different type of music fertilizing the other, producing a stunning hybrid flowering. John Coltrane mixed jazz with Eastern music. Bob Dylan mixed folk music with beat poetry and electric guitars. Jimi Hendrix and The Beatles [added] electronics and multitracking...."
Two distinct forms of music emerged. First, the ambient sounds labeled "New Age Music" flow from a growing fascination with Eastern meditative religions. Appealing to man’s spiritual yearning for inner peace and harmony with nature, it can induce trance states -- especially when accompanied by New Age visualizations.
Second, the throbbing rock music unashamedly promotes occult values, sensual images, orgiastic rhythms, and vulgar expressions. It has captured the hearts and minds of children around the world.
On the surface, these two types of music seem as opposite as what they proclaim: inner peace or sensual violence. But they both lead toward the same result: union with the "angel of light" who seeks to immunize children against Truth and persuade them to worship idols. Rock star Jimi Hendrix summarized the process from his dark perspective:
2"You hypnotize people [with music] to where they go right back to their natural state, which is pure positive . . and when you get people at that weakest point, you can preach into the subconscious what we want to say."
ANCIENT FORMS OF NEW AGE MUSIC
The New Age includes the dark as well as the beautiful side
of evil. The mind behind the enticing masks hates God and everything
He represents. Thus New Age music includes not merely the smooth,
hypnotic strains that flow from electric synthesizers, but the
whole range of music that lauds New Age enticements— and
suggests the use of meditation, magic, and drugs to reach them.
Man’s attempts to transcend the boundaries of the physical
world through music weave through the history of mankind. While God encouraged His people to enter His
presence through
songs of praise (Psalm 100), Satan offered a seductive counterfeit used in pagan societies
as a connecting link to other gods. Nevill Drury, who promotes
New Age meditation and visualization in his manual, Music for
Inner Space, points to ancient cultures as models for today:
3"In societies where magic and myth define and influence everyday existence, man aspires to be like the gods and to imitate them, thereby acquiring mastery of nature. ... In both primitive societies and ancient cultures, magical incantations and songs are a source of power."
In India, the ancient Hindu ragas would stir the imagination, alter consciousness and inspire occult exploration. Drury explains that the drone component— "the unchanging basic note or pitch"—sustains the music and "meditatively makes each musical performance an ‘inner journey.’ One literally travels with the music, lured into new areas of consciousness...."
4 He continued,"Repetitive rhythms and mantric musical patterns are used universally to induce trance states. However, we have a choice within the altered state of allowing ourselves to surrender to the music and be 'possessed' by its intoxicating rhythms or 'ride' the music or drumbeat on our journey to the inner world."
In primitive Africa and South America, the witchdoctor functioned as a mediator between the tribe and demonic spirits. The sacred drum, which is credited with magical powers, together with hallucinatory drugs (sorcery) induced trances which transported him -- actually his mind and imagination -- into the spirit world. There he received guidance. As Obo Addy, a drummer and singer from Ghana explained, the beat opened the veil between the physical and spiritual domains:
5"My father was a medicine man. He told the future and healed the sick. Music invoked the spirits my father possessed."
The ceremony often involved the whole tribe. Intoxicated by the drum’s beat, the dancers would eventually surrender to the persuasive rhythms and enter a state of trance. A description of the Macumba (Brazil) spiritists’ trance dance ends with this observation: "If I was looking for a mindless joy it was here, in a dance with the brain turned off and the body taking its orders straight from the drum."6
Musicologists Manfred Clynes and Janice Walker explained that "the central nervous system transforms a musical rhythm into a movement pattern." This "rhythmic experience of sound largely is not under control—we are driven by it."7 Nevill Drury illustrates the point:
8"The rhythms which induce trance states are repetitive, energetic, and often loud and overwhelming. They lead the dancer away from the familiar setting of the everyday world into a disorienting atmosphere pulsing with vibrant rhythms, which usually build to a climax. In voodoo it is at this point that the loa gods possess and 'ride' their subjects in trance like hones, while in Africa the dancers imitate the movements and footsteps of the possessing spirits."
THE INTOXICATING MESSAGE OF ROCK
Hard rock soon soared in popularity, even among children. Heavy metal "differs from other forms of rock by its bombastic chords, screaming lead guitars, throat-wrenching vocals, and a demolition derby approach to drumming," warned Jeff Lilley in his 1989 article, "Dabbling in Danger."
9Dave Hart, a research analyst for Menconi Ministries, identifies three kinds of metal music.
1. Party metal, the most popular style, emphasizes sex, drugs, partying, and living for today with no thought for tomorrow. "It’s the stuff getting on the charts: Bon Jovi, Motley Crue, Del Leppard," explains Hart. "There is very little overt occultism."10
It does, however, teach Satan’s favorite messages: Follow your feelings and Live to lust. Mere explicit sex no longer shocks enough, so party metal has stooped to the level of kinky, cruel, and violent sex—"porn rock"—such as Judas Priest’s song about oral sex at gunpoint.
2. Thrash metal joins punk music and heavy metal in a perverted focus on violence and death. ‘"Eighty-six ways to die’ is the theme of half of these albums,"11 explains Hart. The album jackets flaunt hateful messages such as Megadeth’s Killing Is My Business—and Business Is Good, Metallica’s Kill ‘Em All, and Anthrax’s Spreading the Disease.
At concerts, "metalheads" or fans "shake their heads and hair vigorously to the beat. Many reel and careen into each other in a wild style of dancing called ‘moshing’—the punkers call it ‘slam dancing.’ Pity those who collapse under the feet of the feverish throng."12
3. Black metal is satanic. The album jackets display grotesque pictures smattered with skulls, chains, blood, demons, goat heads in pentagrams, and a mockery of crosses. The titles proclaim the power of supernatural evil: Destruction’s Bestial Invasion, Slayer’s Hell Awaits, Venom’s From Hell to the Unknown, and Maiden’s "Number of the Beast?" from the album Live After Death.
Whether the musicians personally practice Satanism or merely play at it for its shock value matters little to the children who absorb the messages. No doubt, the image of a vampirish Ozzy Osbourne drooling blood and singing about an "X—rated demon that lives in my head"13 has inspired occult fascination in the hearts of his young worshipers who had moved beyond fear. Surely Venom’s ritual images in the song, Sacrifice has fueled that curiosity:
"Sacrifice to Lucifer... /Bring the chalice/Raise the knife/Welcome to my sacrifice...."14
Given full freedom to indulge natural desires, many youngsters learn to crave the most shocking, lewd and brutal entertainment available.
WHEN DARKNESS RULES
One of Webster’s definitions for the word
muse, the root of music, is "the personification of a guiding genius or principal source
of inspiration."
Man has two main sources of inspiration outside of himself: God and Satan. While both
communicate their thoughts to willing listeners, the latter is an aggressive liar who
desires to stir rebellion against God. (See I Chronicles 21:1; John 3:2, 27; Acts 53;
13:10; Ephesians 2:2-5.)
Many popular singers have acknowledged their links to a supernatural source of
inspiration other than God. For example, Joni Mitchel admitted being ruled by "a male
muse named Art" who opened to her "the shrine of creativity."
WHAT DO CHILDREN LEARN?
"Children spend an estimated four to six hours a day with music. They get up to it get dressed to it, do their home- work to it, and fall asleep to it. That adds up to 11,000 hours of listening to music between the seventh and twelfth grades alone."17
Do children really listen to the words? Former disc jockey and rock musician Bob DeMoss travels throughout the United States speaking to parents, teachers, and kids. He tests grade-school students to prove that children learn the lyrics and often understand the adult message.
When asked a question about the title of the Samantha Fox song, Touch Me, (I Want Your ___), eighty percent of the fourth-graders filled in the missing word "body." Obvious familiarity enabled them to sing the words to George Michael’s seductive I Want Your Sex. 1
81. Spurn Jesus Christ.
Album jackets expose an incredible hatred of Christ. Replete with crosses of every kind— bloodied and broken, moss-covered, upside-down, even right-side-up but in an occult setting—they mock the symbol of Christ’s victory.
Metal Church’s album, Blessings in Disguise, twists Christianity with song titles such as "Rest in Pieces."
Venom spills out its rage on the cover of Welcome to Hell: "We’re possessed by all that’s evil. The death of your God we demand... ."20
Craig Chaquico of Jefferson Starship proclaims an alternative religion: "Rock concerts are the churches of today. Music puts them on a spiritual plane. All music is god."21
"It’s bad to be good," proclaims Poison,22 illustrating the reversal so typical of satanic ideology.
In her video, Like a Virgin, Madonna makes herself the object of worship. Dressed in a lacy slip and a cross, the sex goddess writhes seductively in a mystical church setting resplendent with candles and crosses. Like an ancient cult prostitute, she blends sexual lust with spiritual worship—an occult formula that has proven its magnetism.
2. Fuel the imagination with promiscuity, perversion and violence.
The children who listened to Prince’s songs while doing their homework heard lyrics such as these from the album, Dirty Mind: "My sister never made love/To anyone else but me... /Incest is everything it’s said to be."23
Megapopular Guns N’ Roses rose to the top with its debut album, Appetite for Destruction, which sold over seven million copies. This band plays for "the kids"—and the kids love them. Consider the impact of songs like "Anything Goes" on a child’s mind: "Panties ‘round your knees/With your ass in debris... ." The next lines present a graphic image of intercourse, then the song finishes with a hint of sadomasochism: "Tied up, tied down/Up against the wall/Be my rubbermade baby/And we can do it all."24
The original album cover for Appetite For Destruction showed a bare-breasted woman sprawled on the sidewalk with her panties pulled down. A robot/monster stood over her, while a huge flying creature with tiny red demonic-looking cling-ons hovered above. After many complaints, the rape scene was replaced by a cross with five skulls — one for each band member—but the controversial scene was printed on the inside liner.
Not only do today’s songs glorify sex of every kind, they promote the myth that girls enjoy rape and violent, sadistic sex. Thus words like shoot and bullets and gun may refer to the action and anatomy of sex rather than murder. What do children learn from these double messages? Dr. Stuessy answers with a startling question:
"What if I were an impressionable fifteen-year-old boy today? My rock heroes have told me that sex on a date is expected and that it is a violent act.... My date is to be the object of my sexual cutting, slicing, and shooting. I must be very conscious of exerting my masculinity. I don’t want my date, who, for all I know is 'experienced'... to think I'm a wimp! I will nail her to the bed and make her scream in pain! Boy, this sex stuff is great!"25
Tipper Gore responds, "Can anything be worse than being a teenage girl, having to cope with teenage boys who are psychologically primed to cut, slice, and shoot...? Yes—being a teenage girl programmed to accept it."26
3. Indulge in drug and alcohol abuse
Song lyrics and personal testimonies extol the delights of chemical as well as sensual intoxication. Occasional warnings fade in the overwhelming contradiction of many rockers’ drug-dazed lifestyles. Guzzling their favorite whiskey during concerts and singing about the types and techniques of drug abuse, idolized models—like pied pipers—draw children into a deadly trap of mindlessness, hysteria, sensuality, and violence.
A reporter from The Boston Globe asked Nikki Sixx of Motley Crue (who flaunts his delight in drugs and Jack Daniels), "Do you ever have second thoughts about your influence on teenagers?"
"No," replied the rocker, "I think we have a very positive message. It’s very much an American message: Live free, express yourself, and it’s up to the youth to change the world. Also, just have a good time."27
4.Ignore dangers such as suicide and death.
Many
experts link the six thousand (and rising) annual teen suicides to "depression fueled by rock music and lyrics that glamorize sadistic violence and drug abuse, as well as suicide itself."28 The coroner’s report for nineteen-year-old John McCollum from Indio, California states, "Decedent committed suicide by shooting self in head with .22-caliber pistol while listening to devil music."29John, who died wearing his stereo headphones, had been listening to power-packed suggestions such as, "suicide is the only way out," in Ozzy Osbourne’s song "Suicide Solution" from the Blizzard of Ozz.
Why is this happening? Dr. Mark Rosenburg, speaking at the1988
Conference at the American Society of Suicidology, helps answer
that question: "It was thought that the way to prevent suicide
among teens was to treat depression... . That’s a fallacy.
It is not the case with these kids. Rather than being clinically
depressed, these young suicide victims are impulsive, acting
out fantasies."
"I l
ike to drink blood out of a skull and torture females on stage,"30 says W.A.S.P.’s Blackie Lawless, master of shock rock. His concert props give the appearance that he means what he says.A small fraction of the horrendous consequences of dabbling in the occult have come into public view in recent years—stories too horrible to comprehend, like that of fourteen-year-old Tom Sullivan. In January 1988, after a classroom assignment to research different religions, Tommy became fascinated with Satanism. He dreamt Satan told him to kill his family, so he murdered his mother with his Boy Scout knife, tried to burn his home, slashed his own wrists and throat, and died outside in the snow. In his diary, "Book of Shadows," he had written:
31"To the Greatest Demons of Hell. I, Tommy Sullivan, would like to make a solemn exchange with you. If you give me the most extreme of all magical powers... I will kill many Christian followers who are serious in their beliefs... I will tempt all teenagers on earth to have sex, have incest, do drugs, and to worship you. I believe that evil will once again rise and conquer the love of God."
Throughout the week before the killing, Tommy, whose room was decorated with posters of his favorite heavy-metal musicians, had been singing a song "about blood and killing your mother."
32Such murderous acts shouldn't surprise us. "People are drawn in [to satanism] by music," explained Pete Roland, a satanic killer. "When you’ve got this music playing over and over again all the time—you know, Megadeth, Slayer, Metallica --- and you’re hearing praise to the devil and... to the ideals of evil, you begin to cheer for it."
33AC/DC’s Bon Scott died soon after recording Highway to Hell. He asphyxiated in his own vomit, joining the ranks of Jimi Hendrix and many other hard-drinking, drug-dazed rock idols. AC/DC quickly plugged in a new lead singer, but the same mocking spirit can be heard as he shrieks out the incredibly arrogant words of "Back in Black" at jackhammer speed:
"I’m let loose from the noose ... I got nine lives... running wild."
Indeed he is. In "Hells Bells" he hisses, "Got my bell, I’m gonna take you to hell..."34 "There’s a battle going on and the battleground is the kids," says Doug Raley, director of Frontline Ministries in Central Oregon. "There are casualties and fatalities... It’s a physical and spiritual war that’s as real as the Vietnam War."35
6. Envision a one world government.
While the dark side of the occult rages openly, an equally sinister assault hides behind the bright lie of global peace. Rock ‘n’ roll spectaculars like "Live Aid" and "Freedomfest" joined rock idols and their billions of worshipers in worldwide celebrations of globalist visions. "We Are the World,"36 they proclaimed, not realizing they celebrated a counterfeit oneness based on the New Age monism: All is one.
Many
megastars who proclaim New Age consciousness-raising and leftist political ideologies, have been commended for their social concern. What do they teach? A popular song, "When the Children Cry" from the album, Pride, by White Lion, typifies the same anti-American, one-world sentiment we saw in global education: "No more presidents/ And all the wars will end/One united world under God."37Their god is not our God, as evidenced by Pride’s other songs. There can be no peaceful united world until "at the name of Jesus every knee [will] bow... and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord" (Philippians 2:10-1l). Between now and that great day, the world will be duped into welcoming a global religion and government. It will worship the ruler of the "one united world," the Antichrist, Satan’s shrewd, cruel puppet (Revelation 13:8). Meanwhile, He reminds us:
"We do not belong to the night or to the darkness. So then, let us not be like others, who are asleep, but let us be alert and self-controlled... putting on faith and love as a breastplate, and the hope of salvation as a helmet." 1 Thessalonians 5:5-8
Endnotes:
1. "The Power of the Young," "Star Rap" column, Faces Magazine (19 September
1984): 50.
2. Robin Richman, "An Infinity of Jimi " Life (3 October 1969): 4.
3. Nevill Drury, Music for Inner Space Dorset, California: Prism Press,
1985), 21.
4. Ibid., 28.
5. Kathleen Donnely, "Giving Voice to the Magic of Africa’s Talking Drums,"
San Jose Mercury News, 7 April 1989.
6. Drury, 18, citing A.J. Langguth, Macumba, 1975, 70.
7. Manfred Clynes (ed.), Music, Mind and Brain (New York: Plenum Publishing
Corporation, 1982), 174.
8. Drury, 18.
9. Jeff Lilley, "Dabbling in Danger," Moody Monthly (March 1989): 17.
10. Dave Hart, Heavy Metal Madness (Cardiff, California. Menconi Ministries,
1989), 3.
11. Lilley, 3.
12. 12. Hart, 2.
13. 13. Ozzy Osbourne, "No Bone Movies," Blizzard of Ozz, Jet Music Ltd.,
CBS, 1981.
14. Venom, "Sacrifice," Here Lies Venom, Neat Music, Combat Records MX8062.
Written by Dunn, Bray, Lant. Cited in Tipper Gore, Raising PG Kids in an
X-Rated Society (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1987), 120.
15. "Rock 'n’ Roll’s Leading Lady," Time (16 December 1974): 63.
16. Rock and Roll: A Search for God, video cassette with Eric Holmberg, Reel
to Real Ministries, P.O. Box 44290, Pittsburgh, PA 15205, quoting Angus
Young, Hit Parade, July 1985, 60.
17. Rising to the Challenge, an educational video presentation, Parents’
Music Resource Center, Arlington, Virginia, 1988.
18. Peggy Mann, "How Shock Rock Harms Our Kids," Reader's Digest (July
1988): 102.
19. Ibid., 102.
20. Venom, Welcome to Hell, Combat Records, 1985.
21. Rock and Roll: A Search for God, quoting Bay Area Magazine, 1 February
1977.
22. Poison, Open Up and Say Ah, Capitol Records.
23. Prince, "Sister," Dirty Mind, Warner Brothers Records, 1980.
24. Lyrics included in Guns N' Roses, Appetite for Destruction, Geffen
Records, Warner Brothers Communication Co., 1987.
25. Gore, 89.
26. lbid., 90,
27. lbid., 149.
28. Mann, 103.
29. Ibid.
30. Gore, 47, citing "An Exclusive Talk with a Shocking Performer Blackie
Lawless," RockLine (April 1985): 14.
31. Jeff Lilley, "Evil in the Land," Moody Monthly (March 1989): 14.
32. "Boy Became Killer After Occult Interest," San Jose Mercury News, 13
January 1988.
33. Geraldo, August 14, 1989.
34. AC/DC, Back in Black, Atlantic Recording Corporation, Warner
Communications Co., 1980.
35. Renoe Melton, "Icons of Satanism Lurk in Records, Films, Television,"
Bend Bulletin [Oregon), 9 October 1988.
36. By Lionel Ritchie and Michael Jackson.
37. White Lion, Pride, Double Trouble Productions, Inc., 1987
Chapter 16: Preparing children to discern the message in popular music
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