“Rock and roll is the devil’s music!” That was the dire warning from preachers, school boards, and parents back in the 1950s. Elvis was swiveling his torso in public, Bill Haley was rockin’ around the clock, and then there was the beat, the beat, the beat. That throbbing, propulsive force that would surely lead kids to think about the act they shouldn’t understand until long after they were married and sent out into the world to procreate. Even the name, rock and roll, was a euphemism for sex, coined by southern (read: black) blues and R&B singers. Satan got the blame, as he did for anything the grown-ups didn’t like back then. He was undoubtedly leading the innocent to eternal damnation using guitar, bass, and drums.
Eventually, the devil beat the rap. It’s hard to overstate the important role The Beatles played in letting Lucifer off the hook. While the record companies tried to save civilization from certain doom by having bland white faces like Pat Boone re-record Little Richard and Chuck Berry songs, the Fab Four snuck in and made the new music acceptable to parents. The joyous innocence of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” on the homefront won out over fire and brimstone from the pulpit.
But I’m not so sure Beelzebub hasn’t stuck a finger in the pot over the years. The amazing artistry of rock and roll, pop, and all the assorted genres and sub-genres that have been such an important part of my life can’t be denied, but certain developments and performers over the years make me wonder if an otherworldly force of pure evil has intervened to muck things up every once in a while. I’m usually not a devil/angel kinda guy, but what else could explain this unholy seven?
1. Auto Tune – Digital pitch correction for vocalists. Sounds harmless, right? The singer doesn’t quite hit the note during recording, so the playback frequency is electronically tweaked a bit to fix it. Saves time, saves money, the vocalist doesn’t have to re-record the part with the bum note in it. One could say the singer doesn’t have to learn to sing the song correctly, a shortcut that can be breathtakingly obvious during a live performance. But on a cold, grim day in 1998 a new autotune horror was unleashed on the world when Cher’s producers used it to create intentional vocal distortion on the chorus of the song they were recording. “Believe” became a worldwide smash, and the fingernails-on-chalkboard sound of autotune distortion became an overused monster that refuses to die. I picture ol’ Satan having a pretty good chuckle over that one.
2. “Achy Breaky Heart” – I’m not looking to pin blame on anybody simply because the song is so awful. There have always been terrible songs that became wildly popular, and there always will be. There’s just no accounting for the public’s taste, and that’s the way it should be. If we all liked the same thing, etc., etc. I blame Billy Ray Cyrus (and, of course, Belial) for the song’s contribution to the explosion in popularity of line dancing. Grown-ass men and women in goofy “cowboy” hats and boots, marching around the dancefloor in unison, doing what looked like an updated version of the Hokey Pokey. The guys going through all the motions with their thumbs firmly planted in their belt loops, looking like they’d rather be anywhere in the world other than where they were, always cracked me (and Ol’ Scratch) up.
3. The Doors – I can’t think of another reason for the massive success and lasting legacy of this repetitive, boring, brain-numbing band. I have a handful of friends with a depth of popular music knowledge and critical acumen worthy of respect, who try to convince me I’m wrong on this one. I suspect they’re mere pawns of The Great Evil, being used to lead me down a dangerously mediocre path.
4. The compact disc – I read somewhere that the biblical devil doesn’t represent evil, he represents temptation. If that’s true, then he is surely to blame for the CD. Small, easy to store, portable, and “perfect sound forever,” in the words of satanic marketers back in the 1980s. I sold or gave away my entire original vinyl LP collection because I bought into the hype, only to realize later that the sound wasn’t perfect by a long shot, and CDs (and the lasers that play them) don’t last forever. The occasional crackle and pop of a well-loved LP was replaced by the digital chatter and skips of a CD going bad, decidedly worse on the ear. Jewel cases were notoriously fragile and tended to break at the hinges or the spindle that holds the disc. The original longboxes CDs were sold in to fit existing record store shelves were wasteful trash. The promise that they would eventually be cheaper than vinyl records due to lower manufacturing time and cost never came to pass, and the 80-minute potential running length of the little aluminum discs became an invitation for artists to stop editing their releases. Too many potentially great albums from the CD era are only passable because songs that wouldn’t have made the final cut due to vinyl (or cassette) time restraints were left on to fill the available space. Well played, Satan, well played.
5. Justin Bieber – Too obvious?
6. Eddie Van Halen – Without a doubt, a brilliant rock guitarist. And he married that cutie Barbara Cooper from One Day at a Time. How cool was that? But he was also the man who introduced a technique called guitar “tapping” to the mainstream rock audience. Van Halen’s enormously popular debut album included “Eruption,” an instrumental based almost solely on harmonics tapping; hitting the fretted strings at high speed with your fingertips, like a tiny keyboard, instead of plucking them with a pick. It sounded like speed-of-light guitar playing, much faster than contemporary shredders playing more conventionally.
Tapping wasn’t new when Eddie arrived on the scene, but it was a commercially marginal effect, at best. Beelzebub’s intervention in this case, once again reflecting the evil of temptation, was sending that first Van Halen record to multi-platinum status and making Eddie an international guitar hero. An entire generation of up-and-coming players bent on breaking Eddie’s notes-per-second speed limit was unleashed, like demons from the gates of hell. A commercially viable number of guitarists and speed metal fans loved it, leading to an entirely unlistenable but successful catalog of records by the likes of Steve Vai, Joe Satriani, Yngwie Malmsteen, and dozens of other Eddie imitators. Most of the newcomers only imitated, or tried to outdo, Eddie’s playing speed, completely overlooking the man’s impressive melodic sense. “What hath Eddie wrought?” was a phrase coined by a music writer in response to the flood of technically impressive, but musically barren, records from his many acolytes, but I know who’s really to blame.
7. Digital music streaming – Not because it isn’t convenient, what could be handier than having a vast music library on your phone or laptop? Not because streaming digital music doesn’t sound good. I have a Qobuz subscription that I would hate to be without, and it sounds damn fine when I stream it over my main system via Bluetooth. To me, the devil in the streaming details is the possibly fatal blow to the concept of albums and the shortening of listener’s attention spans. Songs are cherry-picked for quick listening to the point where releasing albums barely makes sense for artists anymore. Open up Spotify and check out the new Billie Eilish record, for example. “Therefore I Am” has been streamed by her fans more than half a billion times, way more than anything else on the record. The least popular song, “Not My Responsibility,” has been listened to 479,566,492 fewer times. Eilish fans are obviously not greeting the release of Happier Than Ever as a full-length album, but rather as a collection of songs with next to no connection. “Take what you need and leave the rest,” as Robbie Robertson once wrote. Even albums that were loved as complete artistic statements back in the day aren’t being listened to like that anymore. Listeners pull up Sgt. Pepper on Spotify to hear “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” quite often, “Lovely Rita,” almost never. I suspect the current popularity of the vinyl format is the only thing keeping the concept of “albums” hanging on by a thread. Why the Prince of Darkness wants to kill the LP is unclear, maybe he misses the constant press he used to get in the 50s when rock and roll was a singles-driven medium.
EARWORM: Mitch Ryder & the Detroit Wheels, “Devil with the Blue Dress On/Good Golly Miss Molly” (1966) – Sometimes Lucifer wanted to be the star of the show.
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