Why Knock Rock

This is tape number WP4 in the Springs of Living Water Tape Library. Copies may be had by writing to Springs of Living Water Tapes, Richardson Springs, California 95973. I mean, we could get some good music.

And now think of all the things you'd see, the places you'd go, the people you'd meet, man. All the new scenes, man, all the new celebrities in the country. Why not rock? All around the world, youth are making their presence felt and their voice heard.

The voice of today's youth is the voice of music. Whatever they feel, whatever they experience, whatever they want to say to their world, they will say in music. The radio, record and film industry outlets are the pathways that link young people around the world.

No generation of youth have ever been more deeply involved in the grim realities of life than this one. Young people have picked up a taste for in-depth experience in all levels of communication. And nowhere is this more deeply felt than in rock music.

One 17-year-old rock fan said, I believe our music is the most truthful, realistic music of this or any other generation. Parents who live in the dream world of Tommy Dorothy and Glenn Miller find it hard to comprehend what rock music is all about. Youth speaks to the world through its music.

Are we listening? Society, they long for spontaneous, in-depth, personal experience. Ken Talbot, founder of The Electric Message and narrator on the rock analysis tape, The Mindfenders, points out these two major thought trends of today's rock music. The alienation of the generations and the now ethic.

Youth are looking at their world with new eyes. All across the nation Of The Generation Gap by Bob Dylan and his worldwide hit, The Times Are A-Changing. The mothers and fathers throughout the land And don't criticize This alienation of the generations is not, however, just a simple breakdown of communication between youth and their parents.

Young people are on a search for personal identity that the previous generation has failed to give them. With their hopes and their dreams, they roam the nation, searching for a personal destiny. I'm going to be born in America Adults find it hard to understand, sometimes, just how lonely it is to be young.

In an electronic world, it seems to have forgotten how to dream. Beautifully drawn by one of the two young bus travelers, he says to his sleeping sweetheart, Kathy, I'm lost, I'm aching and empty, and I don't know why. Telling your mother that is what she should do.

Is trying to see when to her the world seems out of focus. In the following song, parents have failed to give this girl a sense of reality. Now she has taken the hippie as her prophet, and her crusade for love she has broken from her home restrictions.

The Generation Gap is complete in this song. Mama cries, but she can't reach her. Daddy gets so hot and wild, but she's learned all they can teach her, and now she's no one's child.

In a world thrown out of focus, she is trying hard to see. She's confused, she is seeking help. The ardent church-going woman, to seduce her daughter's boyfriend, she pleads Mrs. Robinson.

Rock music is the now ethic. Faith in the future has been destroyed by the grim shadow of the mushroom cloud, as described by Barry McGuire's agonized song, The Ease of Destruction. It could be summed up in, eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we shall fry.

One group, the Grassroots, whose name suggests marijuana as one of today's answers, tells the young person, we're never meant to worry the way that people do, and I don't mean to hurry as long as I'm with you. We'll take it nice and easy, and use my simple plan, and then suggest sex as an answer to life's emptiness. You'll be my loving woman, I'll be your loving man.

We're never meant to worry the way that people do, and I don't mean to hurry as long as I'm with you. We'll take it nice and easy, and use my simple plan. You'll be my loving woman, I'll be your loving man.

We'll take the most from living, and pleasure while we can. Many people today have inherited the goddess thinking of this age, and have been left without a reason for living. Rationalism has not solved the problem of who we are, with our strange feelings of significance and destiny.

Youth have been told they are nothing but chemical accidents, blind products of matter, time, and chance. That man is only a machine. This evolutionary thinking has robbed our generation of the bible answer for our feelings of guilt and loneliness.

The bible says we are not nothings but real persons, because we are made in the likeness of our infinite but personal creator. That we are lost from his family by selfishness, and need his forgiveness and love. A godless modern man, who feels a sense of beauty, love, or wonder, is in for a difficult mental dilemma.

By his non-christian thinking, he should reject his feelings as meaningless, as he is, after all, only a machine. Or he must try to live, like his unchurched parents, in two worlds, thinking one way and living another. This is, however, only another form of the same hypocrisy he says he despises in the previous generation.

Today's only non-christian answer is a mindless jump into meaning. In a world full of contradictory living and phoniness, few modern young people want to think like atheists or live like machines. This dilemma has spawned a whole new way of looking at life, as if fact and meaning are not part of the same reality.

Today's young person sees nothing strange then in disregarding facts, in his search for reality. All he has known of facts without God, have been hard and cruel, and have left him without hope in a world of emptiness. So he has divided facts from his life experiences.

His search for meaning is thus simply a search of personal happenings that need have no connection with logic or fact. He goes through life playing a role to the stage of the world for meaning. Goals for life have been exchanged for roles in life.

This then is the philosophy lying behind the non-rational search for meaning among youth, that takes many forms in rock tunes, but most commonly, experiential religions, sex, and drugs. Before looking at some of the lyrics of today's tunes that demonstrate this thinking, we must consider key psychological effects of certain kinds of rock music. Music is misleading.

It is a psychological fact that certain kinds of music can have a direct effect on the emotional and nervous system. Music has power to reinforce existing emotions without conscious control of the master brain. The thugs, one of today's political rock groups, recognize this when they paraphrase William Congreve's classic line of the 1690s to read, Dr. Howard Hanson, director of the Eastman School of Music in the University of Rochester commented, can be soothing or invigorating, ennobling or vulgarizing, philosophical or orgiastic.

It has powers for evil as well as for good. It is important to recognize the dangerous powers of certain rhythmic forms. There are three basic elements in music that can be highly destructive to the listener.

These three forms have no parallel in the Christian experience and contribute to the destruction of moral and spiritual values in the minds of the listeners. The first of these, and the least harmful, creates the feeling of loneliness and despair. It is a blue note or minor key.

Bring across to the listening audience the idea of meaninglessness. She said you don't understand what I said, I said no, no, no. Possibly the most dangerous form of all is the second, the high energy body pulsed beat.

Pavlov's research showed that this could be used as an indoctrination tool to bring lyrical suggestions across to a point of compulsion. Notice in the following example how the driving bass and drums create an excitatory reflex tied into the human pulse rate. This neurosis sound is often used in songs of anarchy and sex and is here done by the Rolling Stones, who have sold over 40 million records on the sex theme alone.

According to Pavlov, the subconscious part of the brain can obey impulses that produce feeling or even bodily action without conscious control by the master brain. If subjected to excessive excitation by such a pulsed beat sound, the mind loses temporary control of its ability to judge or resist suggestion. Under such a continuous conditioning pulse, belief can be implanted in the mind.

This is what Jimi Hendrix means when he uses the term electric church to describe the power of music to hypnotize for action and plant revolutionary suggestions in the subconscious. This hard rock beat can be and is often used as a subliminal hypnosis tool. Besides this, these special low bass tones have complex medical effects on almost all the vital functions of the body, draining the system of energy, burning out the calcium ion nerve relaxants and psyching up the whole nervous system sexually, emotionally and unavoidably.

In Pavlov's account of using this technique to produce an artificially neurotic state in his animals, he writes, Now as we produced the neurosis, the dog became extremely excitable, experiencing a chaotic condition of the nervous activity. The animal was intolerant and uncontrollable. Pressure build in the auditorium when he shouts, Do you feel it? Do you feel it? Then pulses the lyrics also to intensify the total effect.

To meet the devil through the use of drugs. Find control for Lucifer, angel of light to attack. Rock songwriters today combine this triple attack on the senses and nervous system with well chosen lyrics.

One analyst said, Ambiguity of various kinds has always existed in rock and for the most elemental reason. To sell a pop song it had to be meaningful, but to get on the radio it had to get by disc jockeys who had a more rigid sense of propriety than the most blue-nosed censor. Composers developed a profound awareness of slang and its implications and learned to express the forbidden in the context of the permissible.

Rock lyricists today try to invest their slang with a depth of ambiguity that allows their words to be heard equally well on all levels right down to the underground. What would you think if I sang out of tune? Would you stand up and walk out on me? With these words from Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Beatles introduced a new era to their listening audience. They are asking young people to stay with them if they tune out the establishment and turn on to the drug scene.

This album revolutionized the recording industry by utilizing studio rock, sound generated by special electronic techniques and editing. It was a milestone in LPs and contained many veiled references to drugs. Double meanings are often used in the titles of songs to give a clue to the content.

For instance, take the first letters of this song, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds and you will not have to be too brilliant to figure out what kind of trip The Beatles want you to go on with them. In Norwegian Wood, The Beatles combined sex and drugs in a set of ambiguous lyrics with obvious connotations. Using only the start of the sex scene.

What goes on? He crawled off to sleep. Please change sides for the second part of Why? Another major theme in the now ethic is sex. Recently, lyrics have undergone radical changes.

They are no longer subtle suggestions but and further alienate the straight generation. Consider these developments in the following Beatles tunes written over the past few years. At first, The Beatles want to do nothing more than to hold your hand.

The beat goes on and gets deeper. After a hard day's night, his girlfriend is now giving him... The Beatles' last sexual statement in song is an open boast of things that should cause shame. Who, knowing the judgment of God, Romans says, not only do the same but have pleasure in them.

With some groups, however, The Beatles' lyrics are mild. The Doors, Steppenwolf and the MC5. Horoscopes and soothsaying are the new sciences of the turned-on civilization.

Across the world, a frightening rock revolution is on. And psychological conditioning of hard and acid rock has made thousands of young people the willing victims of a subconsciously planted idea revolution to destroy all existing forms of society. With thousands of record station shrines, DJs and pushers as priests and musicians as preachers, the revolutionary religion of rock is sweeping the world.

The only ones unchurched youth will listen to the youth of the Christian church have nothing to say and are coming instead to the searching rock musician for answers. Where are the young people of God who have something to say to the rock generation in songs filled with the spirit of God? In Season of the Witch, the vanilla fudge... People you know like this are lonely and lost and... Do you care if they cry to a God they cannot see in the lives of church young people? Do you care if they weep, God, hey? You who say you love God, what about you? You who say you love Christ, what is it that captures your dreams and heart most? The thing your thoughts turn back constantly to. The person or thing that you are most excited about.

Because whatever that is, that is your God and the world knows it. It will do you no good to say that Christ is your comforter. When you get a problem and put on a record instead of praying.

You will never fool your cynical friends into believing you find satisfaction in Christ. When you must also turn for satisfaction to Hendricks or Steppenwolf. Never have the young been so hungry for the bread of life.

Can you offer only the stones? They turn to the church for an answer and what do they see? Can affect the course of history now. There is no longer room for the uncommitted in this last generation. You cannot afford to be half-hearted.

You are faced with a choice between two revolutions. The rock revolution of hell that is urging our generation on to annihilation. Or the supernatural revolution of love that is founded on the rock of ages, Jesus Christ.

God is about to do something incredible for those who will dare pay the price of total commitment. To his son as Savior and Lord. The Holy Spirit is about to be poured out in the most incredible period of all times.

The preparation for the invasion of the Lord Jesus into this planet. To you I issue this challenge. If you dare go with God no matter what the cost.

First sever all connections to your old way of life. Destroy all the hotlines to hell you have on your record player. Then go before God and give him all you have.

Make an honest unconditional surrender of your time, your talents, your life, your all. Then let him use you to begin a revolution of love. That will come out in a new sound for a generation that has never heard the song of the sons and daughters of God.

If I live well, praise where am I going? Am I here? Please God.