Root Of Moral Decay Traced To Hidden Effects Of Rock And Heavy-Metal Music

A few months ago we wrote about the demonic root of much rock-and-roll music: the actual dark underpinning that began with blues music in the South and progressed through the explosion of new sounds in the Sixties and Seventies -- eventually reaching the extremes of rap and heavy metal.

Behind the scenes, it was shown, most major musicians in those "movements" were involved with occult-like past-times or strange beliefs like UFOs, which we believe are a spiritual deception.

The connections between rock and the dark side -- and later offshoot music, such as "gothic," "industrial," and "grunge" -- are legion. No doubt, musicians fall into traps as we all fall into traps, thinking the dark side to be "cool" and even dabbling with black magic along with drugs, which allow demonic infiltration.

See the Rolling Stones. See Ozzie Osborne. See Led Zeppelin.

In some cases, rock musicians have even used the pentagram or pronounced the name of the devil.

"He was really into that stuff," one groupie testified about a major rock guitarist. "I believe he was very into black magic and probably did a lot of rituals, candles, bat’s blood, the whole thing."

The point is that there is a spirit -- a deceptive spirit -- behind much of today's music, and that spirit has had vast repercussions.

To varying degrees -- in ways we often don't recognize -- rock and other hard music has affected us all, says an activist named Andrew Pudewa of California, leading in large part to the "dumbing-down" of the West and by implication causing violence and other aberrant behavior through effects that are subliminal as well as spiritual.

"In the 1970s there was a researcher in Colorado named Dorothy Retallac who published a booklet about the sound of music and plants and showed how plants respond positively to classics and baroque music -- faring well and actually leaning toward the speakers, growing toward the speakers when the music is classical, but react very badly -- don't root as deeply, don't produce the fruit, and lean away from the speakers -- when exposed to the rock music of the 1970s," says Pudewa, a home-schooling father of seven who currently serves as director of the Institute for Excellence in Writing and has produced an enthralling audio presentation called The Profound Effects of Music on Living Things.

In the 1980s, notes Pudewa, another researcher named Harvey Bird studied the brain cells of mice that were exposed to certain kinds of music and found that classical sounds such as a waltz caused rodent brain cells to be more "organized" and "connected" while a voodoo drumbeat caused "a pathological growth pattern." The voodoo beat is at the origin of early blues music -- which inspired much of rock and roll.

Played such music all day long, the mice, says Pudewa, would "start to attack and cannibalize each other."

In 1997, a high school student who later won the state fair for his research exposed one group of mice to Mozart, another to a heavy-metal group called Anthrax, notes Pudewa -- and found that mice listening to Mozart were able to greatly improve how quickly they found their way through a maze -- lowering their time from ten minutes to under two -- while those played heavy-metal music from an especially harsh group aptly named "Anthrax" went from taking ten minutes to get through a maze to thirty -- in addition to killing each other, when the music was played all day long.

They were confused. They were dumbed down. Their mental abilities decreased dramatically.

Art is supposed to imitate nature, says Pudewa -- it is supposed to have a good spiritual underpinning -- and when it does not, there is chaos. It was Thomas Aquinas who said that the Bible was the second Gospel -- that nature is the first.

A while back, we carried an article about a researcher in Japan who has photographs showing that various moods and spiritual settings apparently affect the formation of ice crystals. The researcher, Dr. Masaru Emoto, claims to have seen astounding results -- crystals that are beautifully formed when they have been in the presence of classical music or the sounds of praying and ugly, malformed, and unformed structures when tension was expressed in the room during crystal formation or there was heavy-metal music.

Emoto claims that Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony resulted in "beautiful and well-formed crystals" and that the same was true of Mozart -- while rock jangled water as much as it jangles our ears.

All matter, argues Emoto, is energy vibrating at the atomic level. It is at that threshold that there is the spiritual dimension, he asserts. Does our environment affect us far beyond the physical?

"All the classical music that we exposed the water to resulted in well-formed crystals with distinct characteristics," the Japanese researcher said. "In contrast, the water exposed to violent heavy-metal music resulted in fragmented and malformed crystals at best."

The same happens, it appears, to functions in the brain.

Is this at least partly responsible for the dramatic lessening of school test scores, the deterioration of attention spans, and the epidemic need for new psychological medication?

Has it affected our health?

And spiritually, what has come off such music that so often evokes demonology? What now hovers around our youth? Was it a coincidence that heavy-metal music was prominent in the lives of those kids who killed at Columbine?

"Rhythmic dominant music stimulates the physical body, whereas melodic dominant music connects to the mind and harmonic dominant music opens up the emotions," writes Pudewa. "Most popular, classic rock, alternative, and even a lot of contemporary Christian music is rhythmic dominant, with repetitive patterns and narrow melodic variation. Popular music, even folk music, tends to be repetitive and narrow so that it is easy to sing with or dance to. 

"Unfortunately, persistent syncopated music (with the accent on the off-beat) is not natural, and the mammalian body -- which has a rhythmic heartbeat and pulse -- perceives this persistent syncopation as an attack, and responds with a release of adrenaline and endorphins.

"Our hearts are beating ONE-two-three, ONE-two-three -- but when we listen to music with a stopped anapestic beat, one-two-THREE, one-two-THREE, it creates tension. 

"When used occasionally for a short time as was done during the classical and romantic periods, this creates excitement and tension in music, but when used continually, as is the case with most all popular music, it creates a persistent stress, and the body reacts accordingly. Most definitely it is an unnatural condition, clearly exemplified by the neurological damage suffered by the rodents in the maze experiments."

Why do kids listen to such harsh sounds?

The endorphins and adrenalin are like drugs, says Pudewa; they are physically addictive.

The devil has hooked us many ways.

He opens us up spiritually with the early melodic sounds of rock music (see The Beatles), but then slams with the harsh beat and jangled music and seductive lyrics once the soul is open, he says.

Melodies morph into disturbing, louder, rhythmic, and disordered music.

The result is all around us.

In  1925 -- during the "Roaring Twenties" (which also produced cinema) -- mass- produced electronic recording changed our entire relationship with music, as people went from being music producers -- singing for themselves -- to a society of music consumers -- soon to find little control over the music they heard, and more so today than ever, whether it is music we encounter while waiting on a phone, eating out, shopping, watching the news, or riding up an elevator.

The rhythm and syncopation have led, says the researcher, to seduction, sensual emotions, and sexual energy. Today, says Pudewa, there are Catholic singers who sound like they are singing to a girlfriend or boyfriend instead of God.

"The disordered form violates natural law and therefore spiritual law," says Pudewa. "And this is disturbing -- especially a drumbeat -- during the liturgy."

"I believe the decline of spiritual sensitivity that allows perversion and abortion to continue is a result of the spiritual widening of souls by our media, and the number one change in the media is music," he theorizes. "The sounds we hear are objectively ugly. They are unpredictable and chaotic. This even goes for jazz. Nature has a perfect balance between infinite complexity and variety and structure.

"I propose that the purpose of art is to bring the mind of man closer to the Mind of God, which, when seen in nature, is the perfect blending of infinite variety within perfect structure," he adds. "Every oak leaf, rose petal, snowflake, or human face is perfect in structure, but differs in some way.

"From the smallest cell to vast galaxies, natural creation demonstrates unlimited complexity within consistent structure.

"When art seeks to imitate this balance of structure and complexity, it brings us closer to the Mind of God; when art intentionally diverges from this balance -- either towards chaos or monotony -- it has the potential to draw us away from God's nature.

"Surely, the spiritual sensitivity of the people of this nation has been profoundly undermined, and we cannot discount the very real likelihood that the music of the day has had a significant, even dominant, impact on this decline.

"If our children are to reclaim this country for Christ, they must reclaim the culture -- of which music is an essential part.

"We must pray and consider the role of music in worship. Is it right to use intrinsically disordered (persistent syncopated rhythmic dominant) music in a place where our goal is to become more in tune with spiritual truth?"

Good question. Good question to pose, respectfully, but especially, to those who serve as pastors.

[resources: Andrew Pudewa's website]

9/13/07