The Musical Decline of the Devil's Cool
Remember when the Devil was cool? Seriously… The Devil used to be everywhere. All the good horror movies ended with the hero battling either some demon or the Devil himself. Books had devilish themes, like “The Exorcist” or “Rosemary’s Baby”. But most of all, the Devil was hiding in our music – ever lurking, always luring. Think about it. Didn’t it tickle the nape of your neck a little with excitement to just look at that cover of Iron Maiden’s “The Number of the Beast”? All those people in that fire – burning and dancing and fucking at the mercy of the Devil, like puppets on his strings. Better yet… Remember when you went to your friend’s house, and he would usher you into his room with a hushing gesture, close the door and pull the curtains before he let you in on a secret: if you play Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” backwards you can hear a tribute to Satan! The two of you lit a black candle and shivered in the dark, thinking it was kinda ridiculous, but, at the same time you never know, right? The strange eerie sounds from the turn table, where the mysterious untitled record was being tortured in the wrong direction, filled the room and you could almost hear something. There! Was that something about the Devil right there? Right where he sings “Is there a bustle in your hedgerow…” Go back again! Wow!
“Oh, here’s to my sweet Satan.
The One whose little path would make me sad,
whose power is Satan. He’ll give those with him 666.
There was a little tool shed where he made us suffer, sad Satan.”
Check it out here (dude).
You just gotta tell Mark! He would just flip over this! And then you ran over to the next guy’s house and suddenly you were the one with the dark powers of knowledge. The Grand Master of Dork Ceremony.
Finding subliminal messages in your favorite songs and looking for hidden details in lyrics and on album covers became a sport and everybody who did it belonged to a secret society of rockers with too much time on their hands. But it was fun. It added a touch of mystery and magic to these albums. It made them even more unique. You listened to them back and forth for hours on end, trying to find the bigger picture. Who was the “Threebones” talked about in the backward reading on “Piece of Mind”? What did this “sign“ look like? You drew your own theories and compared notes with your friends in school – out of sight of parents and teachers. It’s not that you were a Satanist or a devil worshipper, you were just mesmerized by the “forbidden” and by the dark powers at play in your very room. It was a secret between you, the band, and your closest friends. Your world of music was one giant Ouija board.
At times it was blatantly presented to you on a silver platter. You bought records from bands like Mercyful Fate because the cover of Melissa was so damn Satanical it just had to be good. You also made a few mistakes and bought Venom’s “Black Metal” because it had a goat on the cover and supposedly contained prayers and incantations to summon Satan! Only problem was that the music sucked goat balls. You also had those songs from the big bands, like the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” or “The Number of the Beast” by Iron Maiden, that didn’t leave much to the imagination. Those were the ones your parents already knew about, and that you were kind of screwed trying to explain away as “it’s just art, Mom!” But it didn’t matter. The Devil was in ALL the cool music: Dio, Ozzy, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Mercyful Fate, Motley Crue, WASP and Alice Cooper. And your dad had some weird shit in his collection too: Robert Johnson, George Daniels, and didn’t that Wagner thing he kept playing, “Gotterdamerung”, sound like a black mass?
The Devil was way cooler than God. What did the Almighty Lord have? Fucking Stryper? Big whoop. Even gay bands like KISS were “Knights In Satan’s Service” (pass the word, dude).
Let’s face it… What did you rather draw on your science book in middle school - a picture of Eddie inside a pentagram, holding a bloody angel’s head and grinning like a lunatic or a picture of Jesus preaching to the mountains? The Devil won every time – because he was cool.
There is even such a thing as an actual dissonant tone interval in music called “The Devil’s Interval”, Diabolus in Musica. This refers to a pair of tones spanning three whole tones, resonating rather oddly when played together, or in sequence. Say, a C and a F#, for instance. The tritone was even condemned by the Church and forbidden to be included in any musical pieces. The Diabolus in Musica was supposed to conjure up sexual feelings and call upon the Devil himself to join in.
How cool is that? Where’s God’s Interval? In Celine Dion’s arias? Give me a fucking break. Listen to Black Sabbath’s first album. It’s loaded with the Devil’s Interval, amassing fat spooky ominous chords that blew a world away! Or how about Slayer’s album by that very name, “Diabolus in Musica”. It’s a tribute to the Devil in the Music, and relies heavily on tritone riffs.
Giuseppi Tartini, a famous violinist and composer in the 18th century, was told by the Devil himself in a dream how to write and play a specific piece, and as soon as he woke up he actually did just that. To this day “Devil’s Trill Sonata” is an extremely hard piece to play, and it is theorized that Tartini had six digits on his left hand. A present from the Devil? Who knows? That’s the point.
In Swedish folklore violin players could go down to the stream by the bridge and learn to play like a master from the Devil himself, in the shape of Neckar – the naked water spirit. You either did or died, as many players bitterly learned. It was a predecessor to the old Cross Roads mythology of the 20th century. Remember Robert Johnson? Went to see the Devil a poor black man and came back the father of Delta blues. It seems the Devil always had a lot to offer in terms of music, passion, and technical prowess and this was always reflected throughout all aspects of rock’n’roll as some sort of subtle, or subconscious, tribute to his supposed powers.
Maybe we wouldn’t even have had rock if it hadn’t been for the Devil. The Devil was in Wagner’s choirs, in Robert Johnson’s guitar, in Elvis’ hips, in the backward masking of “Stairway to Heaven”, and in the face of that spooky bitch on the cover of the first Sabbath album. The Devil was anywhere rock was played, exacting his sinful influence over the young and impressionable, and thus, in effect, saving us all from becoming our parents.
Where is he now?
Look at the music scene and point him out to me. What the hell is there to be upset about anymore, even from the most stuck up goody two shoes parent’s point of view? These days, it seems, that the only place the Devil hangs out is in juvenile Black Metal bands, populated by angst-addled cat-torturers who get off on wearing panda bear make up to cover up their zits and wielding sharp objects to fend off any cootie-riddled girls (fat chance, kids). It kind of defies the purpose with the Devil in the Music if you broadcast it on 10. It’s too easy for people to dismiss and is almost directly boring in its grotesque non-shock value. The Devil is supposed to be the Tempter – the Deceiver. He is supposed to lure our young into the shining world of sin and decadence by being better and more interesting than the Other Guy. He is supposed to offer a haven from order, discipline, and strict parenting. He was like the cool uncle that let us peek in the pin-up mags in the bottom drawer, with a wink and an extraction from us not to tell our parents. The Devil used to be a quality stamp on our music, assuring it was worth rocking out to and free from all the fucking things that were good for us. If music was a food circle, the Devil’s rock was all meat and no vegetables. Nowadays the Devil is a cartoon character in Norway.
Who gives a shit?
And see what it is doing to our music scene. Quality is going down the drain because a new generation of kids is trying so hard to annoy a new generation of parents with music that is just too atonal and static to appeal to anyone outside that little retarded circle of kids. It’s not that I don’t get it, I do, but it fucking sucks, kids. The Devil taught me how to rock. Who the fuck taught you?
I guess our kids are screwed because we had Uncle Satan in our corner growing up. He looked out for our musical needs and made sure we made the most out of rocking out with our cocks out.
What the hell can he trick our kids into that we didn’t already see, hear, and wreck to all Hell and back? Yes, our kids are screwed. The shock factor is gone. There is nothing out there that would upset us, because we already walked on the Dark Side of town. The Devil would be better off taking over all the major labels, signing only bubble gum pop, selling it by the song on the Internet to kill the record stores and the longevity of original rock’n’roll instead – creating armies of mindless chart oriented commercial teenage slaves. That would piss me off. And then he could…
Wait a minute…
Fuck.
