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Just as there are American citizens who believe that the Earth is flat, there are registered voters who believe that Bill Armstrong, our Republican junior senator, would make an excellent president of the United States.
Looking toward a possible 1988 campaign, Armstrong bus
already identffled his significant national campaign
issues: budget deficits, military preparedness and rock
lyrics which concern aberrant sex practices
and
Satan worship.
Armstrong obviously doesn't care whether children are
exposed to the knowledge of aberrant sex practices
and Satan worship. If he did, he'd be denouncing the
Encyclopedia Brittanica, which contains articles about
both. And it's available to children in any public
library.
So the senator must believe rock lyrics are a major threat to our American way of life because the songs contain words that encourage degenerate acts. However, such facts as I can summon don't bear this out.
When I was 16 and 17, I conducted extensive research
into whether rock music would innfluence young women so
that they would indulge in sex practices,
aberrant
or otherwise. Like most teenage boys, I wasn't particular.
I would place my test subjects in a $35 Ford sedan, and
cruised around town with them while the radio was tuned to
Jay Mack on KIMN or Bud Ballou on KBTR.
No matter what lewd lyrics the boss jocks played, the
songs had no discernible effect on the libidos of the young
women who participated in my research project. Let's
Spend the Night Together
might as well have been an ode
to chastity, and Light My Fire
never ignited so much
as a trip to the back seat. Virtue remained intact, even to
the throbbing of Louie, Louie,
whose lyrics were so
vulgar that no one has ever learned the words.
To check on the potency of contemporary rock music, I polled several aspiring adolescent lotharios as they gunned their engines at the town stoplight the other evening. They assured me that the results were just as depressingly minimal from their own eager research, conducted as recently as last weekend.
But does rock music encourage Satan worship? I turned on MTV all one day last week, running the audio signal through my stereo so that the house shook with every bass note. The neighbors complained about the noise, and my headache lasted for three pounding days.
But never was I tempted to place a nude woman on an ebon altar. My hands felt no compulsion to fondle black cats, silver pentacles or billy goats. I began to marvel that I had escaped the clutches of Mephistopheles.
Then I learned that the demonic messages appear only if the wicked song is played backward at precisely 71 rpm, a feat beyond my stereo's capabilities. I've never known anyone, even hard-core derelicts whose frontal lobes have been fried since 1967, who deliberately played records backward at 71 rpm. Those controlled-substance casualties have better things to do, but perhaps Senator Armstrong's friends are weirder than mine.
Armstrong's advisers, whoever they are, want to position
him as the conscience of the campaign.
Almost all rock musicians I've known are egomaniacs who
give hedonism a bad name. They should collect royalties
every time someone says jerk.
I find it neatly
impossible to say rock musician
and
conscience
in the same sentence while keeping a
straight face. But there are people dying as they struggle
for elemental human decency in South Africa. There are
people starving in this country and elsewhere.
Neither of these issues has emerged as an announced
concern to potential President Armstrong, the would-be
conscience of the campaign.
Starvation and human dignity, however, were major concerns to America's rock musicians. Last year, they took a break from promoting devil worship and kinky sex. They made a powerful statement against apartheid. They raised millions of dollars to feed people in Ethiopia
Loud and dirty music might indeed be a bad influence on my children but those degenerate musicians have to be a better influence than a praying politician whose conscience is affronted by the suggestions of song lyrics, but is apparently unaffected by the realities of racism and hunger.
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