Page:The Evangelical Roots of Rock n’ Roll.pdf/13

Religions 2016, 7, 24 p. 106). The first Rock n’ Roll musicians would have never dreamed of discarding their region’s dominant religious faith; instead, they lived with their “secular” profession and often hedonistic lifestyles while still adhering to their evangelical faith. In 2015, at the age of 79, Jerry Lee Lewis revealed he remained worried about his soul because of the way he led his life, calling it “ungodly”: “I was always worried whether I was going to heaven or hell . . . I still am. I worry about it before I go to bed”.

Rock n’ Roll quickly moved from its rural, Southern and working-class roots, becoming an increasingly urban, national, and then international phenomenon. Accordingly, the nature of Rock n’ Roll changed, including its Christ-haunted quality. For the first generation of Rock n’ Roll musicians, there were recognized cultural/religious boundaries. While those boundaries were frequently transgressed through songs or personal actions, the boundaries were still recognized. Son House, Hank Williams, and Jerry Lee Lewis may have transgressed what their own religious faith proscribed, but they maintained their religious faith and believed in those boundaries. Rock n’ Roll, once it left its Southern cradle, lost its evangelical Protestant context and tensions.

This can be seen during the 1960s, as the cultural center of Rock n’ Roll moved from Memphis and the rural South to the radically different coastal cities of San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles. Jim Morrison, lead singer of the popular late-1960s band The Doors, said, “I am interested in anything about revolt, disorder, chaos—especially activity that seems to have no meaning” (, p. 286). The musicians discussed in this essay may have created “revolt, disorder, chaos”, in their music and in their lives, but it was not without meaning to them or their larger society. They defined their transgressions as such against an established religious order that they still associated with Jim Morrison and The Doors were harbingers of nihilistic rebellion for its own sake.

1980s punk rock rebel G.G. Alin, himself brought up in a very strict religious household, took this sentiment to its logical conclusion by declaring, “In Rock n’ Roll there can be no limits, no rules”, and demonstrated this by frequently defecating on stage during his shows. This, then, is the terminus of Rock n’ Roll’s rebellious impetus. It goes beyond Frank Zappa’s statement that the electric guitar, and thus Rock n’ Roll, was “blasphemous” (, p. 43), because for something to be blasphemous, there has to be something to blaspheme against. The Sex Pistols understood this in their aforementioned “God Save the Queen”, when declaring, “When there is no future/How can there be sin?”. Therefore, the question is, what happens to a cultural force partially predicated on rebellion, when there is nothing to rebel against, no larger force to be resisted, when all cultural barriers have been erased, at least in the minds of those rebelling?

The erasure of all social barriers can be understood as liberating, allowing the individual artist to forge meaning according to the dictates of his or her creativity. Greil Marcus argues this point at length in his book Lipstick Traces, where he links the twentieth century’s avant garde artists from different media, such as the Dada movement in the early twentieth century, with the punk rock ethos, particularly The Sex Pistols. Marcus writes that punk was “something new in postwar popular culture: a voice that denied all social facts, and in that denial affirmed that everything was possible” (, p. 2). The belief that all barriers are false constructs of prior generations that do not apply today is attractive, particularly to the young. In this line of thought, with enough creativity and daring, anything is possible, including fashioning the self outside of society’s constraints.

The flip side of this “freedom” is that the erasure of cultural and religious boundaries can sometimes erase meaning as well. Even when the Christ-haunted musicians discussed in this essay transgressed their own religious beliefs, those same beliefs created meaning in their lives and to a large extent defined who they were. It does not seem coincidental that once Rock n’ Roll shed any misgivings about the pleasures of the “secular” world, that self-destructive hedonism became as much a part of the “Rock n’ Roll lifestyle” as the music itself. Far from creating a new society and new vistas of perception, it can be argued that from the 1960s onward one of the defining features of Rock n’ Roll is an unceasing body count of talented musicians destroyed in their prime. James Miller argues,