Wayne Cristaudo, Senior Lecturer, Centre for European Studies
University of Adelaide, South Australia

Abstract

The wrath and demonic despair of much of contemporary rock music is indicative of a genuine religious need and search. In opposition to the Platonist moral approach to music (exhibited recently by the philosopher Roger Scruton¬s attack upon rock music) that condemns the monstrousness of much rock music, I take my direction from the (all but forgotten) German thinker, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy. Rosenstock-Huessy was a Christian thinker who saw that Nietzsche, by adopting the role of the Anti-Christ, was expressing an important truth about the spiritual poverty of moral idealism and the encroaching catastrophe that required a much more drastic spiritual expression in order to deal with it. I argue that much of contemporary rock is devoted to drawing attention to the spiritual impoverishment of modern life; the harshness of its music and message is a drastic means to wake us up spiritually.

[1] Michael Gambon, playing the part of Raymond in the television show, Perfect Strangers, picks up the microphone at a very large gathering of mostly anonymous family members. There is a place, he says, for a karaoke of despair, a karaoke that is not all happy sappy, but a karaoke of truth, a truth from hell. The audience observes him with increasing unease and shock before he stumbles off. What he says is something that has been known and expressed in the dark and despairing zones of contemporary music for quite some-time. Both lyrically and musically the cries and gnashings of damnation have become ever more prevalent. Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, Nine Inch Nails, Radiohead, Korn, Slipknot, as different as they are or, in the case of those that have broken up, were musically from each other, they have all contributed to making hell a part of mainstream musical consciousness, even moving into radio-friendly zones which are mainly reserved for sappy happy. In this zone, as Trent Reznor sings in "somewhat damaged”:

lost my faith in everything/ lick around divine debris/ taste the wealth of hate in me/ shedding skin succumb defeat/ this machine is obsolete / made the choice to go away/ drink the fountain of decay/ tear a hole exquisite red/ fuck the rest and stab it dead /broken bruised forgotten sore/ too fucked up to care anymore/ poisoned to my rotten core/ too fucked up to care anymore (Nine Inch Nails, The Fragile, 1999).

Or to take one more from thousands of possible choices, Slipknot¬s "Surfacing:” "fuck it all! Fuck this world!/ fuck everything that you stand for!/don¬t belong/ don¬t exist!/don¬t give a shit!/don¬t ever judge me!” (Slipknot, Surfacing, 1999).

[2] Much of this music is as beautiful as it is tortured (OK Computer and the ballads of Smashing Pumpkins in particular, obviously so, but all the other bands mentioned have moments of sheer beauty); much is a sonic aggressive attack reinforcing the rage and howling; much is an outright embrace of evil. At times that embrace adopts the perspective of the evildoer; the effect is shocking, but it highlights all too well the evil of the world and the despair that animates it. At times it is a soundtrack to evil deeds horrifically stark and providing no moral comment in its musical evocations and lyrical descriptions: it is merely an odyssey into evil (Slipknot¬s "Iowa,” Slayer¬s "Sex, Murder, Art,” or from the much earlier Sex Pistols¬ "Belsen was a Gas”). At other times, as in the music of Slayer and a legion of metal bands, it is an unequivocal embrace of the Satanic and apocalypse. Sometimes, but by no means always, that defiance collapses into parody and the whole thing becomes an uproarious ghoulish joke. There is laughter in hell, along with the howls and tears of self-pity, the screams of rage, the curses, the defiant posturing, and the endless repetitions of violence which are as much self-inflicted as other inflicted. There is also a crimson beauty ranging from the delicate splinterings of a soul¬s disintegration to the burning defiance of its last great refusal and the bellowing hatred that through all its discordances retains the shimmering reminder of ethereal choirs in the harmonics that move across the poundings, crashings, roarings and the metallic cacophony of falling walls and wails.

[3] Along with film and comic strips, though I venture even more so, much contemporary rock music (crossing numerous genres)[2] is a vast amphitheatre of rage delivering the performance of hell, exploring, as it does, its multifarious chambers and soul-scapes. What are we to make of the huge success of this performance? No doubt, it is shocking. It is meant to be shocking. No doubt it destabilizes all moral certitudes. It is meant to do that. On occasion it has been directly linked with murder. In the mid-¬nineties in Norway, a central figure of Black metal, the guitarist for Mayhem, Euronymous, was murdered by two other "black metal” performers (Steinke 1996). More recently in Germany, a couple were tried for murder. They had met through a Metal magazine and had sacrificed a friend of theirs in a satanic ritual. Just a couple of instances of life imitating art, a scandal the likes of which metal has periodically become embroiled in, as bands who sing of the bliss of suicide and the relish of murder are, not surprisingly for those on the outside, held responsible for suicides and murders.

[4] Even when rock music was more about hip-swivelling than suicidal tendencies and deeds, let alone the carving up and disposal of dead bodies, it was seen as the devil¬s music. Attacks upon the power of music to corrupt the soul, don¬t, of course, start with Christians burning records of Elvis Presley. In an insightful piece written nearly forty years ago, the jazz and rock critic Ralph J. Gleason, while emphasizing the power of music to destabilize the social world, recalled one of Plato¬s many attacks on music from the Republic (Stephanus, ed., para. 424);

Speaking of the importance of new styles of music, he (Plato) said, "The new style quietly insinuates itself into manners and customs and from there it issues a greater force . . . goes on to attack laws and constitutions, displaying the utmost imprudence, until it ends by overthrowing everything, both in public and in private.” That seems to me to be a pretty good summation of the answer to the British rock-singer Donovan¬s question, "What goes on? I really want to know” (Gleason 1969, 64-5).

[5] The moral attack upon music has not changed much since Plato, certainly not as much as rock music has since Donovan. A relatively recent reworking of Plato¬s critique can be found in Roger Scruton¬s The Aesthetics of Music, where he attacks the music of monsters (he singles out REM and Nirvana) thus:

Music soothes, cheers and pacifies; it threatens the power of the monsters, who live by violence and lawlessness, Those lonely é beings are astounded by music, which speaks of another order of being - the order which Øthe footstep hears, as the dance begins.¬ It is this very order that is threatened by the monsters of popular culture. But much of it is also a kind of negation of music, a dehumanizing of the spirit of song (1997, 504).

For Scruton, as with Plato, music is not primarily about expressing the hell within us, but creating harmony within ourselves so that we become more integrated with each other, that is to say, more civilized. Scruton sees contemporary popular music as responsible for creating monsters and pushing society into anarchy. As with Plato, his argument emphasizes the mimetic dimension of human being while attempting to devise a stable and harmonious social and political order.

[6] To be sure, a host of bands would be flattered that they are creating a more anarchic and terrifying social disorder. But while the Platonic dogma that leads from discordant sound and song to discordant society may have an intuitive appeal to it, it does not strike me as being supported by any facts. The popular music before and during the two world wars of the last century was hardly music of rage and discordance; popular music in Nazi Germany was as light and breezy as popular music in the rest of Europe.[3] And the concentration camp guard did not go home and crank up Cradle of Filth or Human Piss Parade.

[7] Plato and Scruton, at best, have cause and effect the wrong way round: that is, sensitivity to the discordances of the world and within the self may well lead people to search for discordant modes of expression (an insight at the basis of the mystery schools and philosophically appropriated by Aristotle in his theory of the cathartic nature of poetry). This hypothesis would, at least, fit with the fact that while there may be a lot of order in the modern world, not a lot of people feel harmony within it, as is evidenced by the huge number of people suffering from various forms of depression, anxiety attacks, and stress related diseases. Radiohead¬s "Fitter, Happier,” which begins "fitter happier/ more productive/ comfortable/ not drinking too much/ regular exercise at the gym (3 days a week)/ getting on better with you associate employee/ contemporaries/ at ease/ eating well (no more microwave dinners and/ saturated fats)” and ends "fitter healthier and more productive/ a pig/ in a cage/ on antibiotics” (Radiohead, OK Computer, 1997), beautifully captures the bi-polar character of the age: the rule of comfort creates a spiritual desert. Or, as Smashing Pumpkins put it in "there is no why”: "and in your sad machines/ you¬ll forever stay/ desperate and displeased-with who you are.” (Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, 1995.)

[8] The real problem, however, is not only that people don¬t feel harmony, it is that people don¬t feel at all. It was precisely this recognition that led to the creation of punk music. As Richard Hell of Television put it: "People don¬t have to try not to feel anything anymore; they just can¬t.” (Bangs 1987, 261); and Johnny Rotten put it in just two words "Pretty Vacant.” Thus when Scruton makes the claim about the social value of harmony, rhythm and melody that has been lost on the youth (and not just the youth) of today, he fails to really grasp the disease he wants to cure. That is, feeling monstrous is the price being paid for being able to feel at all. His moral opprobrium has blinded him to the inefficacy of his cure. He seems incapable of conceiving that the kind of dancing he wants to transpose from the ball-rooms of eighteenth century Vienna into today¬s urban machines easily take on a macabre and robotic quality suggesting a sense of vacuity no less disturbing than the howlings and ragings of metal bands where people are, at least, feeling their humanity. Scruton¬s argument is thoroughly idealist, which is to say, it ignores the particular world and the problems at hand and substitutes a set of solutions belonging to ideal human beings and an ideal (i.e., non-existent) social environment.

[9] Contrast this way of thinking with the following suggestions of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, a Christian social philosopher who was a major source of inspiration for the anti-Hitler circle operating in Germany before and during the war known as the Kreisau Circle. Rosenstock-Huessy was vehemently anti-Platonist, who, having fought on the battlefield at Verdun, thought long and deeply about the meaning of the experience of hell. Rosenstock-Huessy knew nothing about rock music, but he knew a lot about the human heart, philosophy, and sociology. Unlike Plato, he did not emphasize the need for reason to control the passions, nor did he believe it desirable or possible to create a harmonious society based upon rational principles. Rather than seeing social harmony as based upon an eternal pattern requiring the suppression and censure of destructive and disorderly forces, he saw that the social balance we achieve is the result of their incorporation over time. Thus in his study of the "total revolutions” of the last millennium, Out of Revolution, he devoted his attention to the great social benefits which were forged from the "hellfire” of the European revolutions (Rosenstock-Huessy 1969, 23). Unless humanity had descended into the depths of despair its greatest creations, observes Rosenstock, would never have occurred. In contradiction to Plato, then, he, like Nietzsche before him, emphasized that chaos and destruction have to be affirmed as essential and desirable components of life. Whatever concordance we have is the result of how we have actively responded to and acted upon, not merely expurgated or repressed, our discordances. Such a way of thinking, then, requires breaking with a fundamental tenet of classical philosophy that like generated like, that a good man generated good things, a well ordered city well ordered souls and the like. On the contrary, says Rosenstock-Huessy: "Without desecration, no consecration, without the fear of the unholy, no belief in Holiness” (1942, 369).

[10] In his Lectures on Comparative Religion Rosenstock-Huessy had discussed the role of music in dealing with our discordances saying, "When you play music, you answer the god of discord, and noise, and dissonanceéand say, by our organ, we tone down the peacelessness, the war-like world, and the strife of the world” (1992, 13: 22¥3). As is evident from his different examples of jazz (the most discordant popular music around when he was writing which he saw as a response to an expression of the speed of American life), square-dancing and church music, the "toning down” occurs through the act of music making more than in the specific chosen form of the music. More pertinent for the point I wish to make about the role of rage rock in contemporary society is Rosenstock-Huessy¬s unusual reading of Nietzsche. The deeply committed Christian Rosenstock-Huessy saw in the Anti-Christ, Friedrich Nietzsche, a depth of love and spirituality of infinitely more value than what he considered to be the arid moralizing and anemic faith of most of Nietzsche¬s Christian contemporaries. Moreover, unlike some of the other Nietzsche-philes (mainly of the post-second world war American and French variety), Rosenstock-Huessy does not shirk the terrible side of Nietzsche that links up with National Socialism. Nevertheless, Rosenstock-Huessy, who left Germany immediately on Hitler¬s coming to power, and whose Jewish mother committed suicide because of National Socialism, saw that the truth of something couldn¬t be turned away from because of its explosive nature. For Rosenstock-Huessy, the immortal contribution of Nietzsche lay in the fact that he looked "into a new kind of hell which he opened and willingly entered, a hell in which he was in many times of man at the same time. And in opening this hell, he gave a truer picture of our nature” (1942, 369).

[11] Nietzsche had, of course, written of the god Dionysos, that god who is torn to pieces and whose disciples tear themselves to pieces in the mad and terrifying celebrations of existence and rebirth; but, as Rosenstock perceptively sees it was not enough for Nietzsche to write of this torn-to-pieces-hood, he had to do it; and in doing it, he made of himself a sacrifice, in the knowing that "man” would be sacrificed for the over-man, in anticipation of the wars which he predicted would convulse the earth. For Rosenstock-Huessy, the fact that Nietzsche took upon himself the name of the Anti-Christ was a profound recognition of what the times most needed: a great act of spirit, observes Rosenstock, was required to find a sign terrifying enough to wake up the following generations to the meaning of the great explosive concoctions which Nietzsche rightly saw as inevitable. Men and women were shocked that a philosopher would be so shocking as to call himself The Anti-Christ. After two world wars and the death camps, it is perhaps easier to see why the taking on the name of the Anti-Christ was appropriate for a soul who took upon itself the role of interpreting the meaning of the times. Nietzsche, then, for Rosenstock-Huessy had to kill the "G-O-D” of idealist philosophy in order to be open to and to speak of the genuinely divine. The "G-O-D” and "Christ” of most of Nietzsche¬s contemporaries, said Rosenstock-Huessy, were, in fact, vacant signs that deluded Europeans about the terrifying world they were creating. Nietzsche had sensed that beneath the surface of European civilization was a deep longing for meaning, that its nihilism was a preparatory stage for the possibility of a more fruitful future¥and the future would entail massive sacrifice.

[12] What Rosenstock-Huessy saw in Nietzsche is, I think, true of much of contemporary rock music. That is, it senses that beneath the surface of prosperity, sterility and comfort there is something terrifying happening, a hell that is there for those who can see and lies in waiting for those who can¬t. This music is both announcing the existence of this hell and exploring it. Such an exploration requires a conscious act of sacrifice by those who explore it. And frequently such exploration is described in sacrificial terms. Thus Sid Wilson from Slipknot describes what he is doing: "To me it¬s like I¬m killing myself” (Metal Hammer 1999, 3). Or better, Marilyn Manson, the self-proclaimed Antichrist Superstar. His (semi-auto-) biography with Neil Strauss, The Long Hard Road Out of Hell, has as its front-piece a passage from section 24 of the second essay of Nietzsche¬s On the Genealogy of Morals ("ØGuilt¬, ØBad Conscience¬ and the Like”) which begins: "In a stronger age than this decaying, self-doubting present, he must yet come to us, the redeeming man, of great love and contempt” and concludes: "This anti-Christ and antinihilist; this victor over god and nothingness: he must one day come.” And on the back cover of the video Dead to the World (Manson 1998), he says: "Society has traditionally always tried to find scapegoats for its problems. Well here I am.” The conscious act of descent into hell is also accentuated by Manson in his deployment of the schemata of Dante¬s Inferno for the chapter headings of The Long Hard Road Out of Hell.

[13] The legion of bands that enter into and express the hell states, then, demonstrate a profound awareness of a deep and widespread spiritual hunger that cannot be satisfied by moral pieties coming from churches and school rooms. What is required is becoming society¬s worst nightmare, adopting the sounds and gestures and images of total defiance. But, at least in those bands who are authentic about their music, the defiance is intended as a blast of truth at a world they see to be drowning in its own lies and delusions about who we are and what we want that it expresses dismay at the isolated acts of rage (such as shootings in schools), precisely because they are an unwelcome reminder that something is deeply wrong.

[14] The karaoke of despair is at once a combination of play and fury, of pantomime and terror. The fact that rage rock is part of an enormous industry, that it too is "product” and that the musicians are still just playing "songs” means that there is no completely escaping the dimension of parody and inauthenticity that is part of this world as such. And yet in the midst of such contradictions, there is a demand to take truth seriously, in particular those truths that most people don¬t want to know, a point made by Shawn Grahan of Slipknot when he says, "I believe I bring disgusting truth. I bring what most people want to hide” (Metal Hammer, November 1999, 11). The point is more graphically made and developed by Jonathon Davis of Korn in an interview with Jaan Uhelszki in 1996 for the online music magazine Addicted to Noise:

ATN: Was there anything you learned being a coroner that has helped you now as the lead singer of Korn?

Davis: The only thing I learned is to appreciate life more. I cut up a lot of my friends, and have seen everything that I could possible imagine, every kind of heinous crime you could imagine.

ATN: I did read that you found a dildo inserted in a corpse . . .

Davis: I¬ve had even worse, I¬ve had a ten month old baby who was fucked by his dad. With its legs totally broken back, just totally killed by fucking him. I¬ve seen many things like that, so I¬ve learned you just have to appreciate life and I¬ve learned how people really are, and how this world is. But I don¬t know, I didn¬t really incorporate it all in my lyrics.

Davis: We just try to bring out the hidden evils of innocence. Innocence is very evil and that comes across in our music. (Uhelszki 1996)

[15] How does one persist in a world so full of such terrible truths? This is at least one of the tasks that motivates bands like Korn. First of all one must own up to this truth, to the monster in human beings. It is this owning up to the monster in everybody, this playing with the monster that seems so offensive, so monstrous to mainstream moral thinking. Mainstream moral thinking takes the harmonious as normal and the horrific as a departure from the normal. But those who are in hell simply know the world is not that way. They see the normal as a faïade or mask that conceals the more brutal behaviours and energies of the monstrous. For them, the monstrous is not a departure from the normal, but a coeval, vital and creative presence. Not to acknowledge and work with it is to be deluded. What is so hard for the Platonist to grasp is that these bands of evil which wallow in hate, sacrilege and the abyss are frequently fronted by articulate spokesmen who not only, in spite of their lyrics, do not cheer when young kids kill or suicide, but who see their task as opening up a more truthful view of reality for their audience. Thus, for example, while Marilyn Manson has managed to outrage the Bible belt of America with his obscene and satanic defiance of the Bible, and has been held responsible for the Columbine Massacre, his father says, beaming with pride at his son¬s achievement and character, that the central message of his music is that "he wants parents to raise their children right, and that¬s probably what¬s wrong with society today” (Strauss 1997). And in the interview cited above Jonathon Davis responds to the question "What are you going to do to make your son¬s life better, and hopefully untouched by the evils of childhood?” by saying: "Try to teach him everything I know, early, and not repeat the mistakes my parents made. Let him make his own mistakes but not overstep the boundaries” (Uhelszki 1996). It may seem perverse that the best preparation for youth¬s entrance into adulthood is a musical odyssey through the perversions that make up hell. But this is exactly the path that contemporary rage rock has taken.

[16] Closely related to this is the rage it directs at parents for their failure to love their children. Billy Corgan, singer of the former Smashing Pumpkins, puts it bluntly when he says of his family: "I feel I was fucked overéWhy the fuck did you have me if you weren¬t going to take care of me? Why the fuck did you raise me to be a fucking squirrel? Why was I raised to lose? Why wasn¬t I given the skills necessary to lead a successful, happy, productive, loving life? Why has it been impossible for me to maintain a relationship?”(Wise 1997). These whys directed at his family are not isolated instances of child abuse but the expression of damnable anger expressed by a significant percentage of a generation at its parents.

[17] The energy of the music and the lyrical content of rage rock simultaneously affirm the reality of one¬s own rage, loss and despair and the validity of feeling them. To be sure, for many of the audience, the music might be seen as just a "rush,” a good night out, and its meaning may be of no great existential consequence. Yet a substantial number of the bands who express their rage at their parents¬ selfishness and the "fucked up world” around them take it far more seriously. They realize that they are able to provide a line of direction for those that need it. The music is a conductor for evil truth, a means of drawing out the evil that one feels inside oneself initially into a form that is sonically and lyrically visible and which then triggers a range of visualizations from CD covers to stage sets to t-shirts, etc. It all expresses the specific spirit conjured up by the band. That spirit, in turn, is a force facilitating a kind of quasi-tribal identification. Thus donning a t-shirt with a band name on it is often as much a part of the life-way as actually listening, a way of informing others of how one experiences and positions oneself within reality. The bands from hell, then, are conductors of energy which externalize and give shape to powers which otherwise threaten to engulf and drive mad in large part due to the amorphous and depletive character of the energy of despair and depression. Through its artistic transmutation the feeling of evil, or the pain that is the sign of its presence, has found a place to be, and another way to be. It is no longer everywhere and all the time. Moreover, as an element of a music and song its very nature is changed. One ceases to be in total despair when one has sufficient energy to leave the despair and use it as energy for creation. In much the same way as a dream or daydream about killing someone enables the release of one¬s desire to kill without actually killing, music about wanting to kill everything provides a safety valve leaving one with a vital creative experience rather than a pile of dead bodies, even if the songs are about piles of dead bodies. Of course it may not be enough, one can still be a killer and enjoy the music from hell, turn it into part of a soundtrack for the deed. But the soundtrack is not essential to a deed that has been carried out from time immemorial without such sound tracks.

[18] In spite of the demonic imagery that overwhelmingly attaches itself to this music it generates its own form of transcendence in the moment of its expression, and thus reveals itself to have a genuine spiritual, even religious quality. In opposition to Scruton who condemns such music (he thinks REM are monsters!) as irreligious because of what he sees as its endless repetitions and its obsession with "the thin time-slice of the now” (Scruton, 506), I see it as tapping into one of the most religious of all processes¥the ecstatic transmutation of suffering. Even the most Satanic bands that sing of the liberation of death vindicate the opposite through their staying alive to sing and play, through the ecstatic shape that they conjure up and participate in. The music is the vital sign of the triumph of life over death. Such an approach to spirit may well be called negative, for it does surround itself with symbols of darkness, despair, destruction and death which are inescapable components of life. These four Ds put a mighty brake on the "progressivist” world-view shared by modern conservatives and radicals alike who focus their attention upon material accumulation, administrative systems, and social manipulation, and have the idolatrous belief that political action can solve spiritual problems. It does not matter what kind of society we live in, the truth of darkness, despair, destruction and death must find expression. Indeed, to deploy a more archaic, but, in my view, a way of speaking, one more in tune with our experiences, we may say that these four great powers have created a form of music in order to make themselves visible in a world which rationalizes, compartmentalizes, and hides their presence, as if they were mere contingencies of existence, mere intruders who interrupt the mechanical repetitions and routines of a peaceable life of plenty. These four Ds have entered through music through the machines and rhythmic motions that are appropriate for the age.

[19] One essential human experience that best finds expression in religious form is the recognition of and participation in the continuity between death and life. That is why the occupation of the zone of their interface is so emotionally charged, so potent with religious feeling, bringing together as it does the great forces of agony and ecstasy, those two extreme feelings from which all genuine religion (as opposed to the merely moral) stems. In this important respect, there is no fundamental difference between Christian or pagan religions. This religious or spiritual strain of experience is expressed in symbols or motifs, visually, lyrically, or sonically, beginning from the pole of suffering or of joy, from that of damnation or of salvation. That some bands are self-consciously pagan and/or anti-Christian in their symbolisms and lyrics, while others can still draw upon the Christian stock should not blind us to the common experiences that form and are mediated through different traditions. That so much of rage rock, in particular, and heavy metal, generally, expresses and depicts itself through symbols of the Satanic owes, as we have suggested above, no small amount to the perceived sterility, phoniness and failure of dominant Christian culture to be open to the ecstatic experience generated by the music.[4] What Deena Weinstein rightly says of much heavy metal is true of how the signs of evil often function in rage rock: "that if society chooses to place the power of ecstatic experience in the realm of evil, then I will call myself evil” (Weinstein, 262).

[20] The music of hell states, then, is absolutely misunderstood if its negativity is dismissed as lacking in spirituality. The issue is what the time and the age require for spirit to make itself manifest, or rather, what spirits are required in a particular time and place. And only the condition of living souls give us a clue to what that is. This is why an approach to music which reproduces the Platonic fallacy of the timeless nature of truth and that holds that music should always be peaceful, harmonious, uplifting, etc., is so un-spiritual, so irreligious, so dead, and hence so incapable of squeezing the life out of death.

[21] What I have designated as a negative religiosity could more accurately be called preparatory. Far from dehumanizing, it re-humanizes the living dead by taking people through the process of what being living dead means, and in that process, drops of life are squeezed from death, ecstasy from agony, and beauty from ugliness.

[22] In many bands, there is a very clear conception of the spiritual nature of the stages of the process involved. One of the most musically and lyrically intelligent bands is the enormously popular Tool. Their drummer has described their music thus: "Chaos is the undercurrent of everything that happens in life. You can equate our music to childbirth. It¬s brutal and harsh, but there¬s a beautiful thing occurring” (Widerhorn 1996). Tool¬s album of 2001, Lateralus, powerfully captures the process leading from wrath to ecstasy and the spiritual dimension of the process. The song "Ticks and Leeches” typically expresses the anger that is so widespread:

Suck and suck. Suckin up all you can suckin up all you can suck.
Workin up under my patience like a little tick.
Fat little parasite. Suck me dry.
My blood is bruised and borrowed.
You thieving bastards.
beat my compassion black and blue.
Hope this is what you wanted.
Hope this is what you had in mind.
Cuz this is what you¬re getting.
I hope you¬re choking. I hope you choke on this.

The song "Grudge” speaks of the process of transmutation:

Saturn comes back around. Lifts you up like a child or Drags you down like a stone To consume you till you choose to let this go.
Give away the stone. Let the waters kiss and
Transmutate this cold and fated anchor.
Give away the stone. Let the oceans take and
Transmutate these leaden grudges into gold.
Let go.

While, finally, the title track of the album directly addresses the ecstatic and experience of the divinity of the self and the music which summons us to this realization:

I embrace my desire to
feel the rhythm, to feel connected
enough to step aside and weep like a widow
to feel inspired, to fathom the power,
to witness the beauty, to bathe in the fountain,
to swing on the spiral
of our divinity and still be a human.

[23] In other words, Tool know exactly what they are doing and why they are doing it. Like the alchemists who saw the transformation of lead into gold as both a chemical and spiritual process, Tool are engaging in an alchemical transformation of human energies born out of pain and despair. To be sure, many who merely play with the forces of death and darkness are opening themselves and others to powers they cannot control, and may suffer the terrible consequences. But we must ask ourselves the question: why this genre now and why are so many young people attracted to the music of hell? A social theorist schooled in Marxism or any of its tributaries would focus upon the profits to be made from such music or the social or cultural identity of its makers and listeners. But such a response largely misses the point. There is no question that this kind of music sells, and that it (like everything else) is easily exploited in the search for profits; likewise certain musical styles find strongest support among some sociological, gender, ethnic or racial groupings. But why this now? Why doesn¬t the equivalent of "I Want to Hold Your Hand” musically and lyrically suffice for so many young (and not only young) people today and why do so many need to hear songs of rage and hate? At the risk of glibness, the short answer is that the world as it is now (and for whatever reasons) does not provide sufficient spiritual nourishment. Many of the bands that fill the air with their hatred do so because they see that the hardness of their words and sounds is the only way to touch a world full of increasingly hard hearted and empty headed people: softer words and tones simply do not suffice for them anymore. Some bands, as we have said, embrace Satanism, but even there, when pressed, almost always preserve a clear line of demarcation between the symbolic energistics of dreaming of serving the demonic and the literal demonic acts of actually murdering and raping. While the outsider may be terrified by the potential to blur such boundaries, the overwhelming majority of fans who frequently read the mild mannered and good natured banter of their heroes know exactly what is going: the construction of "safe zones” of psychic release. And to repeat, there can be no guarantees that such zones will always be safe. But as we have just seen, in a band like Tool that release is itself viewed as a step on the way to spiritual rebirth and the awakening of a consciousness that looks into the spiritual depths of our existence.

Notes

[1] I would like to thank Professor Hartmut Moeller, director of the Musikhochschule in Rostock, for giving me the opportunity in a lecture and seminar series to discuss and formulate the ideas in this paper, Greg Hainge for helpful comments on the penultimate draft, and Michelle Phillipov and Lucille Bruyand for helpful material.

[2] What I call rage rock is spread across, and not limited to, metal, hard rock, punk, and neo-classic.

[3] Peter Wicke points out that in 1938, 60 percent of radio programmes in Nazi Germany were devoted to dance and light music (1985, 154¥-5).

[4] I have seen little if any evidence of much historical understanding of the roots and historical formation of the Christian churches in rock music circles, which is not surprising given we are looking at artists not scholars. That the intellectual eclecticism of a Satanist like Anton La Vey looks deep to Marilyn Manson only serves to show the absolute shallowness of the style of Christianity he is reacting to. The adoption of pagan and Satanic symbols for expressing states of death and rebirth in rock is, in large part, a reaction to the slick and sleazy US evangelism of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century with its tub-thumping fire and brim-stone sermons, simplistic spiritual cure-alls, tacky commercialism and opulence, bullying self-righteousness, and small minded bigotry, with periodic sex and financial scandals thrown in for good measure.

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