THE SPIRITUAL DANGER OF ROCK MUSIC

Homily given by Fr. Dennis Koliński, SJC

St. Peter’s Church in Volo

24 February 2008

The Christian philosopher Boethius, wrote: “Music can both establish and destroy morality. For no path is more open to the soul for the formation thereof than through the ears.”[1] Mick Jagger stated, “We are moving after the minds, and so are most of the new groups.”[2] In 1969, when the Rolling Stones performed the song “Sympathy for the Devil,” the crowd broke out in a rampage of violence during which some people were seriously injured or killed. Mick Jagger later said: “something like that happens every time I play that song.”[3] The Mamas and the Papas once said: “By carefully controlling the sequence of rhythms, any rock group can create audience hysteria consciously and deliberately. ... We know how to do it.”[4] It isn’t a secret that certain forms of rock music have been associated with riots and violence.

Various cultures throughout the history of civilization have known of the profound influence that music has on the formation of character. Great minds, such as Aristotle, Shakespeare and Confucius, just to name a few, have written about it. Yet, so few people today are concerned about the types of music they and their children listen to. Sure, sometimes people are concerned about raunchy lyrics, but the lyrics are only secondary. “The music is its own message.”[5] Plato, who was very aware of the moral effects of music, stated that some kinds of music should even be banned because they can foster a “spirit of lawlessness which can creep in unnoticed, ‘since it’s considered to be a kind of play,’ and therefore harmless.”[6] People today, however, either aren’t aware of what Plato knew already 2500 years ago, or choose to ignore it because they themselves were raised on rock and continue to live in the pseudo-blissful ignorance of its additive nature. In his book, “The Closing of the American Mind,” Allan Bloom wrote that it’s “a pattern of denial: ‘avoid noticing what the words say, assume the kid will get over it.’ ”[7] The alcoholic rarely admits that he has a problem.

Research has found that music acts upon the body in two ways: “directly on the cells and organs, and indirectly by affecting the emotions.”[8] An Australian scholar working with teenage boys found that rock music caused stress to the heart, released chemicals in the brain similar to addictive drugs and often led to violence and casual sexual relationships. Even animals and plants are affected by music. Rats exposed to rock music lost memory and turned cannibalistic in just a few days. When rock music was pumped into barns, cows consistently gave less milk. Other studies have shown that when subjected to rock music, plants suffered damage, genetic mutation or died. But in controlled studies, classical music produced opposite results. Plants grew faster, hens laid more eggs and cows gave more milk. Under the influence of rock music, the brain releases a chemical that decreases intellectual abilities.[9] It’s no wonder that people who listen to rock music often complain that they aren’t able to think straight. The powerful and adverse effects of rock music are well known.

These are only the physical effects of this type of music. Yet, people continue in their delusion that it’s harmless and some adults bask in an illusionary nostalgia for Woodstock, which in reality was just a mass orgy of drugs and sex. Plato observed how certain types of music also dispose a person to self-indulgence, irreverence and other vices. Rock is one such type of music in our day that predisposes one to self-indulgence, rather than self-control; arousing the emotions, rather than ordering them.

Robert Pattison, a defender of rock as a musical form, writes that “rock in its essence is vulgar and narcissistic, based on a denial of any value outside the self.” “Rock is useless to teach any transcendent values.” We, in the Canons Regular of St. John Cantius, and hopefully also you here at St. Peter’s, are trying to renew the world by restoring the sacred. But the message of rock and other forms of music similar to it, is that nothing is sacred. Indulging in a form of entertainment, which is all about sex, anger, vulgarity, narcissism and lack of self-control isn’t going to help you “restore the sacred” in your lives.

The American Medical Association reports that between the seventh and twelfth grades, the average teenager listens to 10,500 hours of rock music. This is more time than he spends in school. To say that it doesn’t influence him is like saying that home schooling will do nothing to make your child a better person. Poison is poison and I’m not sure that any of you would be interested in consuming just “a little” poison. It’s like saying that looking at just a little porn won’t affect you. We expend enormous amounts of energy to avoid cigarettes and foods high in cholesterol so that we can have good physical health, yet many people claim that rock, rap and heavy metal are only harmless fads that will pass. It is commonly believed that Napoleon was killed by adding minute portions of arsenic to his food over an extended period of time. He had not idea of what was happening to him but the effect was the same. The doses of music adverse to the health of the soul entering the ears of young and old alike today are proportionately far greater than the amount of arsenic Napoleon received in his food each day.

The senses are the means, which God gave us to experience the world around us and the two senses, which have the greatest impact on our being, are sight and hearing. Thomas Aquinas wrote that because all human knowledge begins with the senses, the human intellect must, therefore, receive knowledge from them. But there must be a special aspect of the intellect, to help our intellect process the sense experiences of our bodies. This special capacity of the intellect is a faculty of the soul.[10] We are more than just spiritual beings with bodies; a soul with a body attached to it. We are enfleshed souls and everything that enters our bodies resonates in the interior depths of our souls.

The senses, therefore, are also the means by which we cultivate virtue or vice. Because the sensations that we experience through them can sometimes be very powerful, it is necessary that we learn to control them, so that they will be well ordered in conformity with the order God placed within His creation. That’s why we should listen to music that cultivates harmony, order, moderation and self-control, rather than music that cultivates disharmony, chaos, excess and unbridled indulgence. Plato wrote that “a man raised on harmonious music has a better chance of developing a harmonious soul.”[11] And he was a pagan! We’re Christians and we should know that. But how many do? For this reason, it is so important to raise children on harmonious music, rather than discordant and rebellious music. Under the influence of well-ordered music they will learn to instinctively love virtue and will more readily accept the dictates of reason. Rock music does not do this. It is the music of anger, rebellion and self-indulgence.

Just like many of the adults here, I too lived through the 60s. Many thought that it was the dawning of a new age of peace, harmony and love. It was just a grand illusion and I’ll give you just one guess as to who its author was. Part of this age was the rock music that took the world by storm and left in its wake, an era of riots, assassinations, drug overdoses, broken homes and widespread social upheaval, from which we still haven’t recovered four decades later. In fact, we have sunken even deeper into this quagmire because the root causes of this state of affairs are still with us. We have an elephant in the living room but nobody seems to notice that it’s there. Rock stars and rappers shouldn’t be idolized but feared, for many of them are unknowing accomplices of the Devil, who is after your soul. And some, blatantly evil like Marilyn Manson, can’t be anything but conscious and willing agents of Satan. Turn to a rock concert on your TV sometime and then turn off the sound. Does it look to you like a vision of heaven? To me, it looks rather like a frightening image of hell.

“Morality is not simply about learning the rules of right and wrong, it is about a total alignment of our selves. Because music moves our whole being, it plays a major role in setting that alignment. Certain types of music convey a sense of order, proportion and harmony. There is an ancient belief that the stars, the moon, the planets, all of creation, move to a heavenly music.”[12]

So, is the music you are listening to aligning your soul to the movement of the heavens and all of creation or to something else?

During this Lent we are called to dig deep down into our souls and find those things that need correcting so that we can be better Catholics. As each of us prepares to renew our baptismal promises on the Easter Vigil, each of us has to search deep within our heart and honestly ask ourselves: “Do I reject Satan and all his works? All of them.” Christ said “You are either with me, or you are against me.”