Charismatic Style Worship: Getting High on Music

ROCK MUSIC BREAKS THROUGH TO SPIRIT REALMS

No less an expert on rock music than Jimi Hendrix agreed that it is hypnotic and that it connects people with a spirit realm, when he said:

„Atmospheres are going to come through music, because the music is a spiritual thing of its own … YOU HYPNOTIZE PEOPLE to where they go right back to their natural state [which, biblically speaking, is the fallen, sinful state]… People want release any kind of way nowadays. The idea is to release in the proper form. Then they’ll feel like GOING INTO ANOTHER WORLD, a clearer world. The music flows from the air; that’s why I CONNECT WITH A SPIRIT, and when they come down off THIS NATURAL HIGH, they see clearer, feel different things…“ (Jimmy Hendrix, rock star, Life, Oct. 3, 1969, p. 74).

Please note, too, that Hendrix was not talking about the words of rock music, but the music itself. Much of Hendrix’s rock music did not have words.

The spirits with which Jimi Hendrix associated were demonic, as we know from the Bible. And his frank testimony, speaking, as it does, from beyond the grave, is a loud warning to „Christian rockers.“ What confusion and folly to think that we could take the same music that has allowed rockers to break through to demonic realms, „to the other side,“ as Jim Morris of the Doors put it, and incorporate that very music into the service of a completely different and holy realm of spiritual life!

ROCK MUSIC IS SEXUAL

Not only is rock music hypnotic, it is sensual, sexual. How can music that has always been acclaimed by the world as sexual, all of the sudden be spiritual? Consider just a few of the hundreds of quotes that could be given. All of these are testimonies of secular rockers who have no agenda except to honestly describe the nature of rock music as they see it:

„The main ingredients in rock are … sex and sass“ (Debra Harry, Hit Parader, Sept. 1979, p. 31).

„Rock is the total celebration of the physical“ (Ted Nugent, rock star, Rolling Stone, Aug. 25, 1977, pp. 11-13).

„That’s what rock is all about–sex with a 100 megaton bomb, the beat!“ (Gene Simmons of the rock group Kiss, interview, Entertainment Tonight, ABC, Dec. 10, 1987).

„Rock ‚n‘ roll is 99% sex“ (John Oates of the rock duo Hall & Oates, Circus, Jan. 31, 1976).

„Listen, rock ‚n roll AIN’T CHURCH. It’s nasty business…“ (Lita Ford of heavy metal group The Runaways, Los Angeles Times, August 7, 1988).

„Rock music is sex. The big beat matches the body’s rhythms“ (Frank Zappa of the Mothers of Invention, Life, June 28, 1968).

„Rock ‚n‘ roll is pagan and primitive, and very jungle, and that’s how it should be! The moment it stops being those things, it’s dead … the true meaning of rock … is sex, subversion and style“ (Malcolm McLaren, punk rock manager, Rock, August 1983, p. 60).

„When you’re in a certain frame of mind, particularly sexually-oriented, there’s nothing better than rock and roll … because that’s where most of the performers are at“ (Aerosmith’s manager, USA Today, Dec. 22, 1983, p. D5).

„Rock music is sex and you have to hit them [teenagers] in the face with it“ (Andrew Oldham, manager of the Rolling Stones, Time, April 28, 1967, p. 54).

„The great strength of rock ‚n‘ roll lies in its beat … it is a music which is basically sexual, un-Puritan … and a threat to established patterns and values“ (Irwin Silber, Marxist, Sing Out, May 1965, p. 63).

„[Rock music] is the strongest drug in the world“ (Steven Tyler of the group Aerosmith, Rock Beat, Spring 1987, p. 23).

„Everyone takes it for granted that rock and roll is synonymous with sex“ (Chris Stein, rock manager, People, May 21, 1979).

„Pop music revolves around sexuality. I believe that if there is anarchy, let’s make it sexual anarchy rather than political“ (Adam Ant, From Rock to Rock, p. 93).

„What made rockabilly [Elvis Presley, Bill Haley, etc.] such a drastically new music was its spirit, a thing that bordered on mania. Elvis’s ‚Good Rockin‘ Tonight‘ was not merely a party song, but an invitation to a holocaust. … Rockabilly was the face of Dionysus, FULL OF FEBRILE SEXUALITY and senselessness; it flushed the skin of new housewives and made pink teenage boys reinvent themselves as flaming creatures“ (Nick Tosches, Country: The Twisted Roots of Rock ‚n‘ Roll, p. 58).

„For white Memphis, the forbidden pleasures of Beale Street [where the bars and whorehouses and gambling dens were located] had always come wrapped in the pulsing rhythms of the blues. … Elvis’s [rock & roll] offered those pleasures long familiar to Memphians to a new audience“ (Larry Nager, Memphis Beat, p. 154).

„Rock and roll aims for liberation and transcendence, EROTICIZING THE SPIRITUAL AND SPIRITUALIZING THE EROTIC, because that is its ecumenical birthright“ (Robert Palmer, Rock & Roll an Unruly History, p. 72).

„Rock and roll is fun, it’s full of energy … It’s naughty“ (Tina Turner, cited in Rock Facts, Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, p. 12).

„Rock and roll was something that’s hardcore, rough and wild and sweaty and wet and just loose“ (Patti Labelle, cited in Rock Facts, Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, p. 17).

„Sex, violence, rebellion–it’s all part of rock ‚n‘ roll“ (John Mellencamp, Larson’s Book of Rock, p. 170).