Does "Rock music is evil / of the devil" have racist roots?

As a Christian most of the circles I’m around are pretty chill…no stone-cold fundamentalists. But I have been around people (and even had family members) who are 100% convinced that rock music is evil and will lead people to engage in witchcraft and draw pentagrams all over their home.

The root of the belief is that rock music uses drums, which are used by voodoo tribes in Africa to entrance people.

Along a different track of thinking, from where did rock music originate? Slaves. They created the guitar because slave-owners didn’t allow them to make music with drums.

So then is “rock music is evil” sort of an echo of that attitude?

jjjalljs,

I’ve never heard anyone blame the drums before. Usually it’s thinly veiled “rock is blues, blues is black, black is bad”

Also sometimes “too left wing. Damn commies”, sometimes.

radix,
@radix@lemmy.world avatar

Tangential to the question, but Elvis was famously censored from the waist down in an early TV appearance for being too sexy. Then, of course, lots and lots of rock in the ‘free love’ 60s and 70s was explicitly about drugs.

Going from ‘sex and drugs’ to ‘of the devil’ is a pretty short line to draw for some people.

ivanafterall,
@ivanafterall@kbin.social avatar

I'm liking the sound of this devil fellow.

Noel_Skum,

Would it be true to say that perhaps you have some Sympathy For The Devil?

radix,
@radix@lemmy.world avatar

I’ve been Runnin’ with the Devil since 1978.

Pat_Riot,
@Pat_Riot@lemmy.today avatar

Well, a friend of the devil is a friend of mine.

Riccosuave, (edited )
@Riccosuave@lemmy.world avatar

The core of Abrahamic religion is based around an in-group / out-group ideology. When you dove-tail off that premise it is clear that Abrahamic religion uses labelism such as “evil” or “from the devil” in order to obfuscate their suppression and opression of the out-group.

maegul,

Bob Dylan certainly thinks so: medium.com/…/like-it-is-bob-dylan-explains-what-r…

His take is that Rock n Roll was bringing white and black people together and so the establishment sought to shut it down.

SeeMinusMinus, (edited )
@SeeMinusMinus@lemmy.world avatar

Some blues guitarist back in the day sold his soul to the devil to become the greatest guitar player of his time and with his powers he wrote a album and invented rock n’ roll. He died at age 27 and since then lots of great rock stars have died at age 27. Its called the 27 club. Personally I think that’s fucking cool and it makes me like rock n’ roll even more 🎸

Nemo,

Short answer: Yes.

the_q,

Short wrong answer.

XTL, (edited )

There is an answer to any question that is simple, quick, and wrong.

– somebody

Voyajer,
@Voyajer@lemmy.world avatar

What’s wrong about it?

Kolanaki,
@Kolanaki@yiffit.net avatar

I only recall seeing rock n roll start receiving hate after Elvis Presley became big because prudish Christians didn’t like the way he gyrated his hips in most of the things I’ve seen covering the history of rock.

infreq,

Funny how just the first few lines of your post clearly establishes that you are from the US

Can_you_change_your_username,

As another person from the US, I don't find it funny at all. A bit disheartening actually.

leraje,
@leraje@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

https://c.tenor.com/gmPkXOfez1kAAAAC/tenor.gif

Da_Boom,
@Da_Boom@iusearchlinux.fyi avatar

Look up the satanic panic

rottingleaf,

Along a different track of thinking, from where did rock music originate? Slaves. They created the guitar because slave-owners didn’t allow them to make music with drums.

What the flying fuck? The guitar is one of the oldest mediterranean instruments. Naturally it evolved from antiquity, but just how did you think that?

That attitude stems, naturally, from association with sex, drugs and pacifist rebellion with rock music. Organized religion often supports sexual morality, is suspicious of drugs (when it doesn’t incorporate their usage), and considers the social hierarchies to be of divine root, thus going to war would be the right thing to do and pacifism would be the opposite.

TheBananaKing,

I don’t think so, at least not for everyone.

My grandfather (born round the start of the first world war) was hideously racist, not overtly religious, but neither of those seemed to figure into his horrified disgust and moral panic at “rock and roll”. Seriously, he’d be less shocked at someone wiping their ass with a slice of bread and eating it, than he would be at them playing rock music in the house. If it featured on a TV ad, or came in the window from someone driving past, it was like he was under siege.

Part of it was the sex-and-drugs angle, I’m sure, but I think even that was a small part of the whole.

I think the biggest part was that it was a symbol of counterculture, of men growing their hair long and rejecting the order and authority of the world he was born into. He experienced a fuckton of social change in his lifetime, he couldn’t navigate the culture any more, and this left him lost, angry and afraid. There were these people pissing on all the symbols he understood, and waving around a bunch he didn’t, while rejecting all the values he’d been taught - and dancing about it, like (from his perspective) a horde of crackheads ransacking a library and smearing shit on everything for lulz.

I mean, I wince and block channels with any kind of ‘reaction videos’, and I’m only genX. I get it, to a degree - though I’m trying at least to ensure that when I get irretrievably stuck in the past, it’s at least from this century. But the change I’ve been through only stretches from Kojak to Skibidi Toilet whatever the fuck that is. His stretched from before cars or refrigeration to the internet itself. I don’t think I’ll see as big a transformation as he did in his time; I hope I cope a shitload better than he did with what I do see, but who knows?

lvxferre,
@lvxferre@lemmy.ml avatar

[some are] convinced that rock music is evil and will lead people to engage in witchcraft and draw pentagrams all over their home.

I think that it’s pretty safe to say that at least some people around you are stone-cold fundamentalists. This sort of discourse doesn’t come from non-fundamentalists.

That said as stupid as “rock is [from the d]evil” claim is, I don’t think that it’s rooted in racism. Instead I think that it’s because some values often followed by rock bands, singers and fans clash directly with some values of Christianity.

Note that some sort of percussion pops up in almost every musical style, across the eras.

Slaves. They created the guitar

This was already addressed, but… come on, acoustic guitars are from Middle Ages Iberia, and they backtrack all the way into the lutes of the Ancient Egypt and Anatolia. (Probably. It’s so old that the origins are hard to determine.)

Pat_Riot,
@Pat_Riot@lemmy.today avatar

And the electric guitar was invented by Les Paul.

Slaves invented the banjo which they developed from stringed gourd instruments they had in Africa.

feedum_sneedson,

Oh well the banjo is pretty good too.

ElderWendigo,

deleted_by_author

    •
    feedum_sneedson,

    Are you really done? This might be a major life moment for you.

    lvxferre,
    @lvxferre@lemmy.ml avatar

    This might be a major life moment for you.

    Nah. ElderWendigo@shitjustworks is clearly a witch hunter, and witch hunters don’t usually learn. Five minutes later they get another major life moment: misread something, point hooves and screech, get called out, then delete the comment while downvoting people calling them out, as they run away with tail between legs.

    [I kind of wanted them to point out historical falsehoods in my comment though. If there’s something false there I’d gladly fix it.]

    lvxferre, (edited )
    @lvxferre@lemmy.ml avatar

    Your whole comment is just so much racist whitewashing and ignorance it is painful to read.

    In no moment I whitewashed rock, denying its black origins. I didn’t even mention the origins of rock. So don’t be a liar - or worse, assumptive trash.

    The anti-rock movement is deeply rooted in racism.

    That does not contradict what I said given that I was talking about that specific claim, not about the anti-rock movement as a whole.

    Long before there was any hint of witchcraft in Rock and Roll, it’s greatest threat to christian fundamentalism was in brining black music to white audiences.

    I believe this to be correct but it does not contradict what I said.

    Your whole comment is just so much racist whitewashing and ignorance it is painful to read.

    No, it is not. Learn to read.

    This kind of bullshit is how conservatives today get away with claiming racism doesn’t exist anymore.

    I’m neither what would be considered “conservative” where I live, nor in USA (where rock is from). And I am not responsible for what your intellectual peers claim. (You might not be a conservative but you bloody behave like one!)

    Nota bene: if two were to play this “I’m an illiterate so I make shit up lol” game, you’d be screwed, as it would be really easy for me to label you as an Islamophobic and a nationalist, on the exact same grounds that you’re claiming that I’m [ipsis ungulis] “a racist” and “whitewashing rock”. Think on why.

    Or alternatively you might go back to Reddit. Given that you lack basic reading comprehension, you’d be doing everyone a big favour.

    hal_5700X,
    @hal_5700X@lemmy.world avatar

    No. Seeing how “Rock music is evil.” thing started with Elvis Presley. Then in the 70’s you had people going for rock bands like the Rolling Stones for singing about sex and drugs. They moved to metal bands in the 80’s. Marilyn Manson was the big name target in the mid-late 90’s.

    ElderWendigo,

    Maybe read a little more about the history before you start whitewashing it.

    Elvis Presley in particular was seen as a problem specifically because he was a white man singing black music to young white girls. The same people hated that Rock and Roll before white artists adopted it, but it only really became a problem after a boom in popularity with white children. Rolling Stones were still singing black music to white audiences. While the contemporary trend might have been to stigmatize the sex and drug lifestyle, that lifestyle was still seen by racists as a black influence. Those prejudices were still firmly rooted in a pervasive racism that still very much gripped the country. The war on drugs and free sex (like sex and marriage between races) was very rooted in racism.

    Metal, Glam, and Marilyn Manson is a couple generations removed from the black roots of rock music. But, the people promoting these satanic panic ideas were at the same time fighting to censor and restrict the growing Hip-hop scene. It was all the same fight, which is how you get people like Dee Snyder from Twisted Sister and Frank Zappa speaking out about legislation targeting censorship of Hip-Hop and Rock music. Maybe race wasn’t the only issue for conservative fascists, but it never stopped being a factor.

    JustinAngel,

    Pretty much anything that takes followers away from the church is likely to be labeled evil.

    chitak166,

    Bingo boingo.

    Anticorp, (edited )

    I had to sit through a poorly made documentary at church as a kid about how Star Wars was evil. Star Wars, which Lucas made to be as generic good vs evil as possible, was labeled as evil by my church. I can pinpoint that as one of the moments in childhood where I started becoming critical of the views of my church, and questioning the things they were telling me. Another key moment was when they had a young man go up to the podium and give his testimony. He talked all about how he was living a life of partying, rock-and-roll, and sex, and then found his way back to the church. I vividly remember thinking “well if that’s an option, that’s the road I’ll take too! Sounds like fun!”. My church did a lot of things like that which had the opposite effect they intended.

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