On the subject of "Devil music".

I know this is an ancient topic but I was just thinking about it and I felt I needed to put it to bed. When I was a tiny, greasy, be-pimpled teen I, like many of my friends, listened to what in the Mid-West was referred to as " Devil Music". Anthrax, Megadeth, Flotsam and Jetsam, M.O.D., S.O.D.(Storm Troopers of Death and not that more recent band of the same initials), many others, I will include Metallica but only pre-Black Album and that is barely even counting , And Justice for All, which I felt was the downfall of an already mediocre metal band on it's downward slide. For a metal band to achieve such a household acceptance means only one thing, not selling out as much as just becoming wuss music, a GAP band, pure radio play list filler but, back in the day they were still considered "evil". If you are wondering why I am skipping Slayer, that is because out of all the bands I listened to, they were the ones that were most likely and truly, wicked evil. Then you had the Hardcore bands of the 80's and 90's with there insightful, anti-establishment, anti-authoritarian messages, they weren't considered "Devil music", is a much that they just scared people who had the false idea that they had some authority. In that vein they were added to the realm of evil music. Well one day I came home and my sister and my mom had gone into my room and thrown out all my tapes and albums (yes this was pre-CD era) that they thought were evil. This happened to several of my friends, an organized parental strike on our music. "That music makes you into devil worshipers", they would scream. We were told how the music would turn our thoughts dark, some of it would inspire us to fight, some of it would give us an unholy urge to have sex outside of wedlock (the phrase "wedlock" probably being one of the first things that tipped me off to the fact that marriage is more a trap than a beautiful arrangement between two people but I'll write about that later). Of course no one mentioned to anyone that we were teenagers and with all the hormones running through our bodies, if we didn't want to fight something, we more than likely were considering the logistics of having sex with it. The funny thing is that everyone of the parents left behind one album which made the irony bogey men stand up and creep into my head. The album that was left behind was Led Zeppelins, Houses of the Holy. Why is that ironic? Simple, Led Zeppelin was founded by guitarist Jimmy Page in the early 70's after his split from the The Yardbirds. I asked why many parents spared Houses of the Holy, I was told because it seemed like that band had no evil lyrics and their seemingly religious pictures didn't seem like something bad. That is the good part. Jimmy page, you see, owns one of the worlds largest collections of Crwleyana, which are things once belonging to Ming the Merciless lookalike and all around creepy satanist Aleister Crowley at one time Page even owned and lived in Crowley's Boleskine House, which is said to hold an alter to the devil and everything. Drug use was also considered evil in those days and the sad humor in my mom burning my Minor Threat albums, who were a straight edge band and letting me keep Houses, after Page had admitted that he used so many drugs in the 70's that he could barely remember the decade. That was what I was thinking about, it is just kind of funny, that full grown adults, even to this day just do what they are told to do by religious leaders or government "officials", instead of reading the lyrics to what the were burning. Now no one really talks about Devil Music and we live in a world full of it. Repetitive, mind numbing, simplicity, we are saturated with it and it makes us slow witted and wholey uninteresting. The face of the devil is in the faces of boy bands and all the Christina's and Brittney"s of our world, take heed, burn the evil ones and sell there breast implants on e-bay. Bye.