Is Rock Music an Evil Tool of the Devil? The 1984 Rock Expose Why Knock Rock? Says Hell Motherfucking Yeah!
Why Knock Rock? was created with a simple goal in mind: to give concerned Christians the unbiased, objective information they need to make a cold, dispassionate decision to set the family’s rock albums ablaze in a fiery public ritual in order to purge our sick, sad, corrupt world of their Satanic influence.
Setting rock records on fire is the whole deal of co-authors Dan and Steve Peters, who dabbled in rock and roll in their younger days and somehow survived to become glowering scolds who traveled the country preaching about the society-corrupting evil of rock and roll in “seminars” where repentant true believers set their secular record collections on fire to ensure that they don’t destroy any more lives.
When the Peters brothers die and meet their maker, I can only imagine how goddamn smug they will be about the way they lived their lives.
I can see them smiling big, self-righteous smiles as they tell the Lord that they spent their lives serving Him and spreading his message and having the following conversation:
Peters Brothers: We are SO glad to be here, Lord. We are ready to receive our eternal reward for being your humble, selfless servants.
The Lord: That is wonderful, my sons! That truly sounds like a life well-lived. Did you feed the hungry?
Peters Brothers: Heavens no!
The Lord: Did you heal the sick?
Peters Brothers: Definitely not!
The Lord: Did you provide homes for the homeless and give money to the poor and suffering?
Peters Brothers: That wasn’t really our deal either.
The Lord: Did you clothe the naked and give hope to the hopeless?
Peters Brothers: Nope!
The Lord: (exasperated) Then how did you spend your lives in service of Me and my Message?
Peters Brothers: We convinced people to burn their Grand Funk Railroad albums because we thought you didn’t like them.
The Lord: You’re kidding, right?
Peters Brothers: Nope! We have no sense of humor, nor do we have any sense of irony.
The Lord: That’s all you did? You got people to burn Grand Funk Railroad records because you thought they were evil?
Peters Brothers: No, we burned a LOT of different albums: disco, funk, stoner rock, what we like to call “monster rock.”
The Lord: But all you did was set vinyl ablaze?
Peters Brothers: Yes, we performed a wonderful service in your name. You’re welcome.
The Lord: You’re going straight to hell, which, incidentally, is a pretty kick-ass Clash song.
The Peters Brothers are somewhat confusingly credited as the co-authors of Why Knock Rock? but they’re also its subjects and its heroes due to their high-profile campaign against rock and roll.
Rock, in turn, has made the Peters’ job very easy by being egregiously, aggressively non-Christian, even anti-Christian.
yes.
Rock and roll’s greatest sin, in the Peters’ feverish imagination, is that it is tragically NOT Christian and consequently is inherently beyond redemption.
Christians are like Communist in their predilection for proposing the same predictable answer for every problem. For Communists, that answer is worldwide Marxist revolution. For Christians, the answer involves rejecting the lurid temptations of this corrupt and degraded world and accepting Christ as your Lord and Savior.
The Peters brothers and co-author Cher Merrill take unsparing aim at rock and roll for being sexual, profane and violent, for glorifying casual sex and drug use and the occult. But they don’t stop there.
They’re also unstintingly critical of rock music that’s sad or downbeat on the grounds that it inspires depression and drug use and ultimately suicide instead of preaching that the only way to true happiness involves, you guessed it, accepting Jesus as your Lord and Savior.
Knew it!
Michael Jackson, for example, gets exceedingly rare praise from Why Knock Rock? for boldly choosing to forego drugs and alcohol. Jackson was also famously a man of faith but he was not the right kind of Christian for the authors, who deride and dismiss Jehovah’s Witnesses as cult members and consequently anti-Christian and anti-God.
In a Jack Chick-like fashion, the authors take unseemly delight in Jackson’s suffering, and the suffering of every other hell-bound rocker. In their obsessive, narrow minds Jackson spoke openly about experiencing feelings of depression and hopelessness despite his enormous fame and wealth not because he endured unimaginable psychological and verbal abuse as a child and was viciously exploited from a young age by the very people who should have protected him but rather because he has not turned his life over to Christ, and used his vast power to extol His name and consequently is fated to never know true happiness or self-acceptance.
The authors don’t have to work very hard to find examples of un-Christian behavior in the rock world. There’s no rock star interview soundbite too inane or harmless to be re-purposed as a damning confession about the inherently evil and ultimately destructive nature of rock.
I will be the first to concede that rock and roll IS very sinful. Its essence is inherently rebellious and anti-authoritarian, which are strikes one, two and three in Why Knock Rock’s estimation. It’s full of sex and drugs and flagrant greed and bad boys and girls who lived hard and fast and died young.
At its most unbecomingly ghoulish,Why Knock Rock? devotes a lengthy chapter to the ugly deaths of rockers. The point is to illustrate that the sinful and sordid lifestyles of rockers inevitably lead to equally sinful and sordid deaths but along with the requisite drug casualties and suicides are a good number of rockers who died young due to car accidents or plane crashes.
The implication seems to be that by devoting their lives to the anti-Christian world of rock and roll, these godless heathens are practically BEGGING God to strike them down as violently and dramatically as possible.
Why Knock Rock? depicts rock as a sinister realm of malevolent pied pipers leading innocent Christian children on the road to eternal damnation that winds through heavy-drinking and drug use (marijuana), estrangement from family, church and school and then ultimately suicide.
From the way The Peters and Cher Merrill write about rock and roll, you would imagine that many, if not most, rock songs unambiguously encourage listeners to commit suicide.
They depict a kooky rock realm where, in order to move units and get press, every rock album has to have a ballad, an upbeat dance tune, something catchy and commercial for the radio as a first single and finally a song about how listeners should take their own lives.
The authors continually cast sour judgment in the direction of rock musicians who lead the debauched lives they promote in their music, hedonistic existences full of sin, sex, drugs, violence and flirtations with the occult.
But they’re just as angry at hypocritical, cynical rockers who evangelize on behalf of drugged-up, satanic fuck-fests in their music yet lead sober, responsible off-stage lives.
The authors see hypocrisy and greed as sins as vast and unforgivable as smoking dope, fornicating with groupies and all of the other vices of the rock and roll lifestyle.
They’re angry at evil rockers for being sincere in their embrace of unhinged excess but they’re even angrier at rockers who are faking it for the money and the attention, who are greedy and cynical and opportunistic as well as in league with the Anti-Christ.
The Peters and Merrill genuinely seem to think that the goal of every Black Sabbath or Ozzy Osborne album is to convince listeners to slit their wrists, hang themselves or blast their brains out even if that would, by definition, decrease their fan base.
Does Ozzy Osborne want his fans to hang themselves out of an overwhelming sense of hopelessness and despair or does he want them to keep living so they can buy his albums?
Is he a phony who should be condemned for his hypocrisy or a real monster who should be cast out of society for single-handedly making the world much worst?
Why Knock Rock? has it both ways. It accuses rock and roll of every crime and dramatically deems it guilty while filtering it through the harshest, narrowest prism.
This angry, bible-thumping manifesto was released in 1984, three years before the release of NWA’s Straight Outta Compton kicked off a gangsta rap revolution. If the book had been released a decade later, I suspect it would have focussed overwhelmingly on rap music as an even greater evil than rock.
Yesterday’s outrages can’t help but look hopelessly quaint today. The transgressions outlined in Why Knock Rock? seem harmless and square by today’s standards.
The Culture War has only gotten hotter since The Peters and Merrill railed against the evil influence of Kiss and Van Halen with wildly misplaced self-righteousness. God only knows what they’d make of Lil Nas X. I don’t know if their fragile psyches could handle provocations that intense but you’ve got to give the devil his due: he may be responsible for all of the evil in the world, but he’s responsible for some pretty nifty music as well.
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