Rock Me Sexy Jesus: The Reverend Dick Lays Bare the Smutty Soul of Rock 'n' Roll

Sexy Jesus: What are you crazy bitches doing?
Cray Bitches: Unto you as we would have
you do unto us.

Next week, the big dick playas of the music industry will gather in Los Angeles for their annual self-congratulatory circle jerk.  So today, I decided to check out the official 2012 Grammy Awards website and take a look-see at the nominees.  Surprise surprise, not a single one of the artists on my year's ten best album list were nominated by their peers for the music industry's most prestigious award.  As consolation, I did come away from my browsing experience with some knowledge I didn't have before.

For example, did you know that Eddie Vedder released an album of ukulele music last year, which got him a Grammy nomination for best folk album?  I sure as fuck didn't.  Rumour has it that on one one track, he's joined by David Lee Roth on recorder and Zach dela Rocha on triangle for a grade five music class-style rendition of "Alive."

Maybe guys, but just barely.

To celebrate her recent Grammy nomination,
Babs had her personal assistant, Ms. Pompon
bring two of the kidnapped children to her.
 And then made them love her in exchange
for food.

I also discovered, much to my dismay, that Barbara Streisand put out a new album last year.  Barbara Streisand?  "Fuck," I thought, "is she alive, too?"

"And if so, why?"

Perhaps even more disturbing than Babs crawling up out of her crypt of cultural irrelevancy to menace humanity with her sounds-of-the-slaughterhouse vocal stylings, is that, instead of constructing a giant, fire-breathing robot to attack and rid the world of her forever like on South Park, the music industry decided to reward her reappearance by giving her a Grammy nod.

What the fuck is the matter with these people?

Um, I don't.

Despite all this, let's face it, watching awards shows can be fun.  It helps us answer important questions like will Christina Aguilera wear a weight-appropriate evening gown?  Or, will Kanye make a caucasian co-presenter uncomfortable by not reading off the teleprompter and ad-libbing a simple-minded political message instead?  Or, perhaps most importantly, will the villainous Kool Moe Dee come out of hiding to renew his feud with longtime foe, and this year's Grammy host, LL Cool J?

Nowadays, such things seem to matter.  Tune in February 12 and find out.

I would, too, but Sunday's masturbate in the bubblebath night for the Reverend Dick.

Anyways, when I've watched these sorts of music awards shows in the past, one thing I've often wondered about is this:

why the winners almost always attribute their victories to God rather than to their own talent?  Or to the executives at their record label putting the fix in?  Or, even to mankind's seemingly insatiable yen for shit?  Why?

The cynic in me wants to chock it up to the desire to pander to an audience of millions, most of whom are believers themselves, but I don't think this is actually what's going on.  Your typical winner appears genuinely convinced that God is personally responsible for his or her success and wants to give credit where credit is due.

After leaving the Holograms,
Nicki Manaj broke her ties
with Jem and Kimber but
took with her their love of pink
and off-kilter sense of style.

This has always struck me as strange.  I mean, even granting the existence of a supreme being, it seems unlikely to me that He'd bother involving Himself in the affairs of say, Nicki Manaj for any reason other than maybe to smote her ass down.

Please God, please kill
that skinny bitch.

Are we to understand that Adele is sitting around right now wondering whether God will bless her with the Record of the Year Grammy for "Rolling In The Deep?"  Or, maybe she's worried that He, like every other man out there, will pick that skinny little bitch, Katy Perry instead?

Don't worry, Adele.  Jesus Christ, girl, look at the year you've had!  You've shot to the top of the pops like a... like a plus-size model to the front of the buffet line!  The big Guy loves this sort of Disney movie shit.  And he loves you, too.

God's on your side, babe.

The boys begin running out of patience
 waiting for the Rohypnol to kick in.

Come to think of it, the mere existence of most of this year's Grammy nominees (and that of most past nominees as well) may, in itself, be a compelling reason NOT to believe in a higher power.  Personally, when I envision a world created by an all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-loving creator, it is one without all the terrible things that have plagued us.  It is a world without war, without poverty, without AIDS and spinal meningitis, and most importantly of all,

It is a world without Motley Crue.

But that's not the world we live in.  We live in a world where, for example, one might, without surprise, watch a Gangsta rapper thanking the Lord for the Grammy he just won for a song in which he brags about how many bitches he's infected with gonorrhea.  And in seeming good conscience, to boot.

But why?  Why do our pop stars seem completely oblivious to the dissonance between what they preach from the award show podium and what they practice in their actual work?

I came as the Lamb,
but I return as a member of Megadeth.

One answer is that they're a bunch of fucking hypocrites.  This is true in part, but not the whole story.

The main reason is because American music, which is to say, the Blues, Jazz, Rock 'n' Roll, Country & Western, R&B, and even Hip-Hop, is basically religious music.  And the people who do it well, or at least well enough to become rich and famous from it, tend to get this, whether consciously or not.  Think about other awards shows for a second.  You don't often see people thanking God at the Emmys or at the American Comedy Awards, do you?  Music is different.  That's because God, in his Holy Spirit persona, is the main ingredient in pretty much all American popular music.  The reasons for this are largely historical.  Almost all American music of any importance comes from the South, and the one thing the people on the losing side of the Mason-Dixon line have in common besides their racial animosities and affinity for having sex with immediate family members is the Gospel music of the Baptist and Pentecostal churches.  It is, for lack of a better word, the soul of rock 'n' roll.

Right before his first fall,
Our Lord cried out: "My hands are shaky
and my knees are weak.  I can't seem
to stand on my own two feet."

In his 1968 Comeback Special, no less of an authority than the King of Rock 'n' Roll himself described what he called "our music," as a mixture of rhythm and blues, country, and most importantly, Gospel music.  And it's not just rock 'n' roll that's inspired by Gospel.  This southern church music is the rosetta stone of American musical culture.  You cannot really understand it without it.  In a sense, it IS American music.  It's its essence.  It's where it's foundational aesthetic comes from.  It's in the Blues.  It's in Jazz.  It's in Country & Western music.  And its definitely in R&B, Funk, and by extension, Hip-Hop.  When we talk about music having soul, this is where it comes from.

But there's one other ingredient that Elvis, cagey devil that he was, certainly knew about, but failed to mention.

Sex.

American music is religious music, yes, but with the fucking put back in.  This is the great paradox of the music and has often been a source of torment for its artists.  Jerry Lee Lewis, for example, whose cousin was the evangelist Jimmy Swaggart, was convinced of his eternal damnation and throughout his life wobbled between abject despair and an almost Satanic revelry in his uncleansable sinfulness.  Many others abandoned secular music and returned, repentantly, to the bosom of the church: Little Richard, Son House, and Al Green even became ministers.

The soul of rock 'n' roll?

Those who rocked on, had to maintain a balancing act between the sacred and the profane: the Bible in one hand; their cock in the other.  The American troubadour became a latter-day Rasputin.  A kind of inspired imposter, half con artist, half Real McCoy.  He'd come to your town, preach the Good Word, whip everybody into a frenzy, and then take off in the middle of the night, stinking of cash and poontang, leaving the townfolk wondering, "was any of it even real?", before they ultimately realized that it didn't matter to them one way or the other.  They only wished that he'd come again soon.  

Is it Fake?  Real?  I don't know.  Who fucking cares.  Like Mick Jagger says, "it's only rock 'n' roll (but I like it!).

Anyways, here's a little Godrock for you, kids.

Enjoy.


















Johnny Cash: "God's Gonna Cut You Down."

One of the best things about believing in God is the hope that He will purge the world of fucking assholes.  Jesus may have been all about the love, but his Dad was fucking Old Testament, man.  He'd smote your ass down for masturbating like he did to Onan, or even for just touching his shit like when Uzza handled the ark of the covenant.  The moral is a comforting one for those righteous motherfuckers who still always seem to get the shit end of the stick.  They can look out at their more sinful, successful neighbours and think, watch out fuckers, like Johnny says, "sooner or later God'll cut you down."

The Beach Boys: "God Only Knows."

It's hard to believe now, but in 1965, Brian Wilson's taking the Lord's name in vain in the title of his legendary love song to God was considered radical.  Despite being in violation of the seventh commandment, this is, in my humble opinion, one of the most beautiful pieces of religious music ever written.  

Stevie Wonder: "Evil."

Stevie Wonder personifies the darkness here and sings to it with all the soulful passion of a heartbroken lover to his cruel mistress.  And for Stevie, evil is indeed the cruelest mistress of all, one whose very nature is to destroy both God and Stevie's love.  And in the end, like the cruel mistress that she is, Evil leaves Stevie totally fucking baffled and defeated.

Blind Willie Johnson: "I Know His Blood Can Make Me Whole."

Unlike a lot of bluesman, Blind Willie Johnson remained in the church, eventually becoming an ordained minister.  His music brings the sinewy, overtly physical power of the blues slide guitar to what are mostly otherworldly-themed songs of redemption through Christ.  On a sad note, in 1945, the little church in which Blind Willie lived and preached burned to the ground.  Being blind and having nowhere else to go, he stayed there in the ashes, sleeping on a wet mattress until he died of pneumonia.

And people think Stevie Ray Vaughn had the blues?  Give me a fucking break.

Pharoah Sanders: "The Creator Has A Master Plan."

The original version of this piece is over a half an hour long, but this 15 minute version will give you the gist of it.  Sanders is a bit like Coltrane in his mastery of both the super lyrical and super skronky capacities of his instrument.  Where their music differs however, is in Sanders use of sweeping, hypnotically repetitive arrangements from which to set off on his melodic explorations.  Such things take time, much like the Creator's master plan.  Some may find it's slow development boring, but I think this is some super-groovy shit, man.  Give it some time and just let it wash over you.  The Pharoah works in mysterious ways.