That old devil music.

In its early days, rock was the music of youth

vital fresh, full of energy.

As it and its practitioners have aged,

they have taken the only way out into ugliness and evil

THEY'RE STANDING behind a railing in what appears to be some kind of warehouse. Eight or nine of them, a study in tattoos, stubble, and leather, leering, grunting, making hideous, contorted faces, seemingly in some kind of drugged or alcoholic stupor. On the other side of the railing, a huge, fat man-the guy must weigh four hundred pounds-is groveling on the floor with a halfnaked wench. Music pounds in the background. The fat guy is screaming-little pig eyes shut tight, veins near-bursting in his forehead-"WILD THING! YOU MAKE MY HEART SING! YOU MAKE EVERYTHING GROOVY! WILD THIIINNNNNG!!"

The woman, clad in a filmy negligee that reveals, well, too much, leans forward, mincing and pouting at the camera and-wait a minute! Is that . . .? Yeah, it is-it's Jessica Hahn! You remember-the one who was all over the news after her tryst with now-defrocked evangelist Jim Bakker. My, my. What wonders time doth perform. Two years after flaunting her "victim" status to every media outlet within earshot, the scantily dressed Miss Hahn is planting a big, wet smooch directly on the mouth of her buddy, comedian Sam Kinison, as the blitzed-out bunch of onlookers howls its approval.

But don't get excited. It's only TV. MTV, that is-music television, to the uninformed. Kinison and Miss Hahnsurrounded by a chorus of high-ranking members of the rock elite (Billy Idol, Slash, Steven Tyler, among others) are performing in a video of Kinison's new song (a remake of the old Troggs classic), "Wild Thing."Miss Hahn gets a chance to show off her new face and breasts (courtesy of Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner), while Kinison uses his magnum-screecho voice to make the transition from comedian to rock 'n' roll singer.

To call this video soft porn would be kind. Certainly there is nothing soft about it. This thing is ugly, man, deliberately ugly.

Let me pause for a moment to make a confession. I am a refugee from the world of rock 'n' roll. After eight years playing guitar in nightclubs and two on the road as a member of a band-recording contract, Greyhound bus, roadies, the whole bit-I bailed out in 1975 with a case of severely jangled nerves, a blown-out eardrum, and not much else to show for the "dues" I'd paid. After several more years as a pop-music critic-in which I wrote for all the usual publications-I finally threw in the towel. I didn't want it any more. No more smoky nightclubs, no more bad music. Today, I'm as foreign to the world of rock music as a fish out of slime. And it was with that attitude-that of an observer, an emigree, an alien-that I re-entered that world to see where it had gone some 35 years after its birth in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1954.

FIRST I SUBJECTED myself to a 42-hour MTV blitz (ooooh, my head!). Then some routine fact gathering. First the night table next to my bed sits a stack of magazines: Rolling Stone, Spin, Rip, Heavy Metal-copious notes scrawled in the margins. Then, a couple of days' de-tox time. When all is said and done, my reaction is . . . What in God's name happened?

First things first. Today, rock 'n' roll is the most prosperous industry in the world. The average person between 13 and 26 listens to two to three hours of rock music per day. The rest of us are bombarded by rock music-on car radios, on television, at the gym, in the dentist's office, and at the shopping mall. Most films today feature rock soundtracks. In short, there's no escape. Rock's sheer pervasiveness makes it the most profound values-shaper in existence today. Unless you are deaf, it's virtually guaranteed that rock music has affected your view of the world.

The problem is that present-day rock has little to do with the original form that began in the Fifties. Back then, the music business was populated by artists with real talent and original vision. Elvis, Buddy Holly, Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, the Everly Brothers, and Jerry Lee Lewis -to name only a few-all contributed genuine vitality, energy, and artistry to the music they made.

It was precisely because of this freshness and rhythmic force that rock so quickly replaced the tired popular music of the day-the last whimpering exhalation of Fifties crooners. By 1960, it had conquered and subjugated a generation.

Then, in the 1960s, rock split and went in two distinct directions. The reigning supergroups of the decade-the Beatles and the Rolling Stones-each paved the way for countless bands to follow. The Stones were the progenitors of the look, the sound, and most importantly the attitude that every heavy-metal outfit today utilizes. The Beatles' combination of cuteness and artiness (not to mention their excellent musicianship) gave birth to softer, more melodic, and less primitive groups like U2 and the Talking Heads.

To oversimplify greatly, rhythmic rock divorced ,itself from melody and ended up as a relentless percussive assault on the human ear; and melodic rock, gradually downplaying its debt to rhythm, evolved into a beatier version of the Fifties popular music it had replaced. Thus Paul McCartney, who has penned songs that rank alongside Irving Berlin's as true classics, has become just another saccharine schlockmeister; while the Rolling Stones have been transmogrified into ludicrous parodies of themselves.

There's a paradox here. One of the prime reasons that rock sells across the board is that it perpetuates the myth of eternal youth. But the performers themselves needn't be young. Today, the music business is rife with middleaged rockers, their faces now marked by crows' feet and double chins, their once fashionably skinny bodies now seriously thickened around the middle. Recently, a new supergroup consisting primarily of members over forty emerged on the scene. Calling themselves the Traveling Wilburys (catchy name!), the group consisted of ex-Beatle George Harrison, Fifties star Roy Orbison, former folkie Bob Dylan, Dylan impersonator Tom Petty, and Jeff (who?) Lynne. Fortunately for the band, which is decidedly mediocre, Orbison expired last month, giving it some much-needed cachet.

Mick Jagger, who's pushing fifty, may be the exception, the Eva Gabor of rock. Still boyishly thin, Jaggerwho created the physical language

with a little hel from James Brown and Tina Turner) for the rock star cum sex symbol-can still execute the moves. If he looks a little silly-well, who cares? Jagger is the official godfather to nine-tenths of today's pop stars, from Aerosmith's Steven Tyler to INXS's Michael Hutchence-and it looks as if he has every intention of keeping it up for another twenty years.

Now, a geriatric Jagger still rocking away, the picture of Dorian Gray sprung to life before our horrified eyes, might frighten the horses in the street. But he would still be less bizarre than, say, Sam Kinison, still recognizably a disciplined performer, a survivor.

BUT WHAT are the values that rock purveys? Back in 1966 Bob Dylan told an interviewer, "if people knew what this stuff was about, we'd probably all get arrested." The words rock 'n' roll-in the original patois drawn from the lingo of the blues and jazz players of the early Fifties-were synonymous with the sex act. But in the days of Elvis and Jerry Lee, there was a certain understated quality about the sexual content in rock. And it was plain, old-fashioned heterosexual sex, generally "love," that was hinted at both in the twitching pelvis of Elvis and in the boy-next-door appeal of Ricky Nelson. Not so today. Sex is the main ingredient in rock music, and the artists and producers who crank it out make no bones about this. And we're talking about sex of every possible variety.

Not only is the music scene today rife with homosexual rock groups, like Frankie Goes to Hollywood, that hawk their lifestyle in their music, but the cleverer rock stars (David Bowie, Michael Jackson, Mick Jagger) maintain a calculated androgyny so as to appeal equally to both the boys and the girls. Likewise, female rockers like the lankjawed Michelle Shocked, the bald-pated Sinead O'Connor, and the muscular Tracy Chapman have opted for the androgynous look. And we musn't forget Boy George-the first drag queen ever to achieve superstar status.

This heavy sexuality is not 'ust a matter of atmosphere. Rock has become distinguishable from overt pornography mainly in degree. Snicker if you like, but a brief look at MTV will bear this out. Almost all of Prince's videos feature the half-pint superstar cavorting with a bevy of scantily clad women. Likewise the stubble-faced hunk, George Michael. Female rocker Lita Ford, hanging out of her low-cut T-shirt, gropes her guitar for all it's worth in her recent video. Perhaps the most blatant (and surely the dumbest) sex video on the tube today is "Let's Put the X in the Sex" (just like a muscle and it makes me wanna flex), by the over-thehill glam-rock band Kiss.

But it is music selling itself under the moniker of heavy metal, performed by groups like Slayer, Coven, the Damned, and Cycle Siuts from Hell, in which sex appears in its most blatant and perverse forms. Primarily pushin sadomasochistic sex heavy metal does not neglect occultism, suicide, and murder. You needn't go to a slasher film to see a woman being disemboweled in a satanic ritual-just turn on your local music video station. In short, rock has trivialized evil. Thus, songs like Slayer's "Spill the Blood" and "Mandatory Suicide," or The Misfit's "Can I Go Out and Kill Tonight?" are treated as silly or cute by the rock critics.

This would be still more depressing if there weren't a comedic element here. Just imagine a group of dour-facedpoliticians sitting around discussing the validity of lyrics like "Bend over and smell my anal vapor / Your face is my toilet paper." (For these lyrics were indeed read into the Congressional Record during the 1985 Senate hearings on rock lyrics.)

It is not only the lyrics, however, that carry a strong message of sexual perversity. The stock costume worn by heavy-metal groups features torn T-shirt (or no shirt), leather pants with an ostentatious codpiece, boots, and an assortment of studs, chains, earrings, and other jewelry. Certain onstage antics are also de rigueur. The rocker must leer, grimace, sweat profusely, leap about like a spastic, and emphasize his guitar's phallic potential for all it's worth. Meanwhile, the kids in the audience react on cue: they bash each other, flail about, crush themselves into a painful mass, thrust clenched fists in the air-in addition to your traditional displays of screaming, crying, and fainting familiar from the Rolling Stones fan club in the 1960s (average age: 11).

ROCK music is the quintessence of vulgarity. It's crude, loud, and tasteless," wrote Robert Pattison in The Triumph of Vulgarity. But this vulgarity has a serious purpose: the undermining of traditional values. In order to obscure this fact, of which they themselves may be only dimly aware, rock stars have learned from their brethren in the film industry the value of entertainment doublespeak. Thus, after he was criticized for his highly explicit video of "I Want Your Sex," George Michael dutifully explained that the song was about "monogamous sex" (rock's idea of chastity).

Similarly, to show its concern for suffering humanity, Spin magazine (which emits constant attacks on traditional Judaeo-Christian values) features in each issue an AIDS column, which is not exactly up to New England Journal of Medicine standards. The November column, for example, tried to dissuade its readers from believing the "propaganda" that AIDS is a virus; rather, according to Spin's experts, AIDS is a form of syphilis that can be easily cured by a simple injection of typhoid vaccine. The November Spin also had a first: a condom inserted between the pages of each copy. According to publisher Bob Guccione Jr. (right-his son), the condom "a statement . . . an attempt to do something about safe sex."

Indeed, rock as a whole has mastered the art of turning depravity into good PR. Witness the numerous rock stars who have jumped onto the RAD (Rockers against Drugs) bandwagon. The basic schtick is simple: become an addict; then, after years of abuse, come clean (or at least say you've come clean-who checks, anyway?) in a heartfelt public statement. If this proves impossible, paying homage to a former bandmate who has died of a drug overdose will do in a pinch.

You might therefore be surprised to find that rock has its own code of ethics. In rock mythology, we are all brethren-one people-spiritually united with the cosmos. Punk, hard rock, minimalist rock, art rock-it matters not: this belief lies at the core of each of them. However, the rocker feels that we are kept from this-our "natural" state of oneness with the Universe-by "them": the government, teachers, politicians, our parents. All the usual suspects. "We Are the World," whose lyrics were written by Michael Jackson, was the most direct testimony to tbe pantheist-globalist basis of rock.

In celebrating this formless pantheist ideal, rockers follow in the great liberal tradition of grandstanding their humanitarian ideals. Let's see . . . we've had the Concert for Bangladesh, Live Aid, Band-Aid, Farm Aid, Hands across America, Human Rights Now! -not to mention innumerable benefits for AIDS (though no AIDS-Aid) and -oh, yes-Nelson Mandela's Seventieth Birthday. How much money or food actually gets through to the celebrated victim? Who knows-or, apart from Bob Geldof, cares? What is clear is that the events themselves present tremendous opportunities for publicity. And we've yet to see multi-millionaires of the Springsteen/Sting ilk donating any significant percentage of their yearly incomes to the causes that are so beloved by them. Until that happens, I'm inclined to agree with Allan Bloom, who, in The Closing of the American Mind, writes off rock's humanitarian efforts as "a smarmy, hypocritical version of brotherly love."

Indeed, the true god of the rock belief system is the self, transmogrified into some vast collective cosmos. Rock pantheism is Me writ large.

Once rock is viewed as a New Age system of thought and ethics, we are not surprised to find it anti-rational and obsessed with the present moment. In Bloom's words, "When the pantheist equates self and God, he demotes thought to a secondary role in the universe and elevates feeling as the fundamental way of knowing. . . . he does away with history and inaugurates a perpetual now. Rock follows this tradition. It is not only not reasonable, it is hostile to reason." Rock stands essentially for the liberation of emotion from the tyranny of reason. It is a revolutionary proclamation from the Id.

The politics of rock derive naturally ftom this theology. It is hopeless to expect any support for an ordered society from a set of emotional responses to the latest stimuli. Being a conservative and a rocker, for instance, is not really possible. (I concede that quite a number of conservatives act as though this were not the case.) Conservatism-a doctrine of balance, moderation, and restraints upon appetite (a "manly, regulated liberty" in Burke's phrase)-is and must be anathema to rock.

Marxism-also, in its way, a doctrine of order-bas a more ambiguous attitude to rock. Sixties Marxists in the West were, of course, rockers all. They loved-still do love-to profess belief in the classless society. It sometimes seemed that Che Guevara had a string of hits rather than a string of revolutions to his credit. But Marxists in Marxist countries are fiercely hostile to rock, regarding it as a form of ideological poison. The contradiction is easily resolved, comrade, if we see rock as a disintegrative factor, undermining authority, spreading harmful practices and dividing families and generations.

Also, as Bloom says, "the Left has given rock music a free ride. Abstracting it from the capitalist element in which it flourishes, they regard it as the people's art, coming from beneath the bourgeoisie's layers of cultural repression." This is of course an illusion. Rock is created by writers and musicians who are largely middle-class in their origins and bourgeois in their view of money (if not in their lifestyles), and promoted by capitalist methods in a capitalist economy. The stance of rock may be anti-bourgeois, but as Eugene lonesco points out, "All bourgeois are detestable, but the most detestable kind of bourgeois is the anti-bourgeois kind of bourgeois."

Is rock, then, "liberal"? Liberalism, it is fair to say, is helpless before any assault by rock on conventional moral standards. Hooked on an extremist interpretation of the First Amendment and on a wholly subjectivist notion of taste, liberals simply have no basis for resisting the wilder excesses of heavy metal. Equally, however, the liberal stress on "sensitivity" to the feelings of others, notably other groups, is often uncomfortable with the crude, hostile, and vicious elements in rock. Liberals prefer Masterpiece Theatre. Nor can feminists wholly approve the sexism in rock, as illustrated by, e.g., Jessica Hahn's erotic tumbling.

So if rock is neither conservative nor Marxist nor liberal, that leaves the anti-authority doctrine of anarchism. This is nearer to the mark; rockers routinely denounce "the system"-governments, parents, teachers, etc. However, they usually do this while driving around in limos, talking on car phones with managers, lawyers, and accountants. Ask any young rocker his dream and you'll find that it involves wealth, fame, and power.

Rock politics, in short, is a sort of parasitic anarchism. Rockers are comfortably aware that the hated system will doubtless outlive them, continuing to provide its despised benefits. A.t the heavy-metal extreme, this becomes a form of hypocritical nihilism in which all the normal values of civilized decency are sneered at and-in everyday business transactions-relied upon.

Thus, while rock professes a love of freedom, it is quick to attack any belief system that opposes it. The two most powerful rock magazines, Rolling Stone and Spin, consistently feature articles hostile to conservative thought. In a recent Spin article entitied "Music under Siege," Adam Greenfield whined for 1,500 words about a bill (introduced by the "notorious reactionary" Senator Strom Thurmond) that would punish producers of child pornography and other pedophile-oriented material. Greenfield calls the bill (which might well affect certain record prod"a beachhead for right-wing brownshirts and geeks" and warns that it not only would have disastrous effects on groups like Screaming Cocks and Scraping Fetus Off the Wheel, but would "virtually deplete the entire content of modern culture." (That's how rock intellectuals talk.)

Most conservatives who work in the business (and there are some) remain in the closet. Mark Frejulian, manager of a stable of popular rock groups, puts it bluntly: "If you're in the business and you openly espouse right-wing ideals, you're out. If you're a conservative, you learn to keep your mouth shut." Frejulian related an incident in which a group wanted to inject a moral message into a particular song. The record-company exec blew up. "Listen," he seethed, "the fans want sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll. If you're not prepared to give it to them, you might as well get the hell out of the business."

Former Chappell Music staff writer Eric Apoe openly admits his conservative beliefs. "This business's idea of ethics is having an AIDS benefit and singing songs like 'I Want Your Sex,' " Apoe scoffs. "It's absurd!" Though he agrees that the business can be tough on you if you're openly conservative, Apoe says he feels a moral responsibility to the audience. "I'm not going to be coerced into writing porn-rock," he states flatly. "I need to be able to look at myself in the mirror every day."

But rock has learned how to immunize itself from criticism by employing the standard liberal methodology. The moment you call rock's ethics into question, you are branded an enemy of "freedom of expression." Put rock down and you're "anti-art." At worst you're simply labeled "uncool." When Tipper Gore's group tried to get labels affixed to LPs simply warning buyers of the sexual content of lyrics, the rock world-led by Frank Zappa -howled en masse. All the usual labels-"fascists," "book burners," "Nazis"-were flung about. No one ever mentioned the aggressive tactics of the rockers themselves.

Rock music is junk food for the soul-a diet of sex, drugs, and non-stop pleasure-seeking which all too often is a deadly poison. I am not speaking figuratively, as witness the list of dead rock stars. Two of them-Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison-choked on their own vomit while in the throes of drug overdose. The King, Elvis Presley-his 280-pound body polluted by the drugs he had lived on -was found dead at the foot of his toilet bowl, his pajama bottoms around his ankles. One would be hard-pressed to call that a graceful exit.

Of course, dead rockers fit nicely into rock's philosophy. Courageous men and women who died in the full flight of creativity . . . shining stars who burned brightly, if only for a moment. Alas, the truth is less appealing. Rockers live in search of the impossible: an ever-fleeting pleasure that's always just out of reach, illusions of a perpetual youth that fades away, adoration from a fickle public that inevitably casts them aside in favor of a newer model. In the end, rock proves to be a cruel mistress.

"Rock 'n' roll will never die!" the rocker boasts, thrusting a clenched fist into the air. But the truth is, rock 'n' roll is already dead. It died in 1977 with its first god, Elvis Presley. What exists today is something else-a cheap imitation of theoriginal model. In place of the musical vitality that inspired the pioneers, there is now merely the debased desire to shock and titillate. George Orwell, in his essay on Salvador Dali, "Benefit of Clergy," described the process whereby an artist solves the problem of his meager or failing talent. In doing so, he described the recent history of rock:

There is always one escape: into wickedness. Always do the thing that will shock and wound people . . . throw a little boy off a bridge, strike an old doctor across the face with a whip and break his spectacles-or, at any rate, dream about doing such things . . . gouge the eyes out of dead donkeys with a pair of scissors. Along those lines you can always feel yourself original. And after all, it pays! . . . You could even top it all up with religious conversion, moving at one hop and without of repentance from the fashionable salons of Pairs to Abraham's bosom.

Nonetheless, rock's ranks continue to swell. It continues to breed new adicts. And why not? Look at what it promeises: eternal youth, bliss, happiness, fufillment for a terminally empty soul. And of course these are, lies-but they're lies that man has been buying ever since Eve too the serpent at his word.