Why Knock Rock — Winkie Pratney

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.

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 lived in the dream world of Tommy Dorkey 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? This new generation do not reverence past sacred cows. They reject work, war and the machine society. They long for spontaneous, in-depth, personal experience.

Ken Talbot, founder of The Electric Message and narrator on the rock analysis tape, The Mindbenders, 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. There is the problem of the generation gap, which is really not an age but a communication gap, was immortalized by Bob Dylan in his worldwide hit, The Times Are A-Changing.

The alienation of the generation 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. We 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, as he says to a sleeping sweetheart, Kathy, I'm lost. I'm aching and empty and I don't know why. Broken child 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. In 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 that 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. It's confusing to see her seeking her own reality.

It's a further avenue of the alienation ethic. This is Robinson, the ardent church-going woman who keeps up a respectable religious front while she attempts to seduce her daughter's boyfriend. Mrs. Robinson is a phony, and her mask is exposed.

Well, here's to you, Mrs. Robinson. Jesus loves you more than you will know. Whoa, ho, ho, ho. God bless you, please, Mrs. Robinson. Heaven holds a place for those who pray. Way, hey, hey, hey. Predominant in today's 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 Eve of Destruction. What I'm trying to say, can't you feel the fears that I'm feeling today?

If the button is pushed, there's no running away. There'll be no one to save but the world in a grave.

Say, can't you feel the fears I'm feeling today? There's no running away.

With apparently no future other than a radioactive dust cloud, heaven or hell often mean very little to today's young minds. Their philosophy 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. Many people today have inherited the godless 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. That music has no morality, but this 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, Music hath alarums to wild the civil breast. Dr. Howard Hanson, director of the Eastman School of Music in the University of Rochester commented, Music is a curiously subtle art.

It is made of many ingredients and according to the proportion of these components 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 the blue note or minor key. The blue note and minor key are used to communicate the idea of hopelessness, the emptiness of today's generation of despair.

Often it is used to create the idea of an out-of-key world. The blue note and minor key bring across to the listening audience the idea of meaninglessness,. 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 pulse 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 produce the neurosis, the dog became extremely excitable, experiencing a chaotic condition of the nervous activity.

The animal was intolerant and uncontrollable. Surrounded by a flare of pulsing lights that translate the neurosis effect into the visible frequencies, here's his invitation to the girls in the audience.

Listen to the 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. And psychedelic techniques to recreate drug trips and reflects the lack of harmony and wholeness in a life with is an unwitting invitation to meet the devil through the use of drugs.

The use of hallucinogens breaks mind control for Lucifer, Angel of Light, to attack with a lay down all thoughts surrendered to the voice. Meet shining Satan, the white light of an ultimate drug trip.

Often made indistinct on purpose. Special instrumental techniques are used to give this concealing sound. Psychedelics make a perfect generation screen for any parents who might happen to come across the message in the process of changing channels and effectively switch them out.

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. With these words from Sgt 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 revolutionised the recording industry by utilising studio rock, sound generated by special electronic techniques and editing.

It was a milestone in LPs and contains 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 starkest of language,.

The Beatles create a tantalisingly but specifically non-specific scene. What goes on? Why does the narrator inform us in a wry undertone that he crawled off to sleep in the bath?

In Norwegian wood, could that be yet another word for pot?

Besides, 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 trend towards open statements designed to shock and further alienate the straight generation.

Consider these developments in the following Beatle 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 everything. Another year. Now the lyrics are, That's alright, I'll make you maybe next time. The Beatles' last sexual statement in song is an open boast of things that should cause shame.

Who, knowing the judgment of God, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them. Compared with some groups, however, the Beatles' lyrics are mild. Steppenwolf and the MC5, and hundreds of new groups now fill the airways with music that is a hotline to hell.

Spiritism and sympathy for the devil. Boasts about stealing many a man's soul. Hope you get my name. A golden age, and only offers instead nuclear destruction. Young people have returned with messianic zeal to the thousand years old realms of magic.

Drug-induced religions, astrology, horoscopes, and soothsaying are the new sciences of the turned-on civilization. Across the world, a frightening rock revolution is on. Continuous exposure to the subversive ethics, lyrics, 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. While most kids do not even realize what is being done to their minds, the rock preachers of anarchy have set the stage for an open youth revolt and have led growing thousands of angry, bitter young people to shout for total destruction.

Yes, Ruth! Yes, Ruth! You walk down the street and the fuzz comes along and tells you to split. But where do we go and what do we do? They love everything they told us to say. They lie to fight for their liberty, to vote for their hypocrites, to defeat all their enemies, love all their luxuries.

Yes, Ruth! I tell you there's truth. The cities are a hurricane, the people are a battlefield and no one is safe or happy or trusting or willing to listen. Wide revolution of society. It will come. It must come.

Unless Christian young people are willing to stand up for God and do something about it. I'd like this hour. It is a strange and terrifying thing that 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 and songs filled with the spirit of God? The vanilla fudge described this frightening world where every value has gone and now even the hippie is out to make it rich.

Do you care that people you know like this are lonely and lost and far from the love of God? Do you care if they cry to a God they cannot see in the lives of church young people?

Do you care as they weep, God, hey, if you can't help us, you better listen, please?

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?

Picks up her ice in the church where her wedding has been. Lives in her dream, waits at the window, wearing the face that she keeps in her jar by the door. Who is it for? Father McKenzie, writing the words of a sermon that no one will hear.

No one comes near, look at him working, Donning his socks in the night when there's nobody there. What does he care? All the lonely people, we're doing this.

Only a total spiritual revolution from young people sold out to the Lord Jesus Christ 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 Saviour 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 talent, 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 songs of the sons and daughters of God.

Where am I going? Please. God, I wish that I knew. Give me love for those I wronged. Lord Jesus, forgive me.