--Norman Mailer
When you're into making rock music and you're a Christian, you have to ask yourself the big "why" question (because your Grandma is going to ask anyway, or at least wonder silently why you don't want to get a real job). In certain circles, it's tempting to begin answering the "Why rock'n'roll?" question with the typical youth-director response, "Well, it's what kids are listening to these days. Popular music is very influential on young people and Christians need to be relevant to today's culture...", but that's a weak weak response.
Before being able to answer this question as a Christian rock'n'roll band, it is important--no, not just "important", a matter of life and death!--to deal with the problem of rock'n'roll being the devil's music. Rock'n'roll promotes savage, carnal, "uncivilized", behavior. The very name "rock'n'roll" refers to the sexual movement of the music, the "devil's beat". Sure, now it has become safer, more civilized-- trained security teams, inflated ticket prices, strict limits on alcohol, bans on moshing, etc.--but one of the chief values of rock'n'roll has always been to shake things up. It's not helpful for Christians wanting to do rock music to ignore the roots of rock or pretend that what it once was doesn't apply anymore. Instead, we have to be very clear about what was and still is so great, amazing, world-shaking about this particular music.
Many of the restrictions that have been put into place to control the seemingly uncontrollable masses who had become a problem at Woodstock, Altamont, and Woodstock '98 make rock'n'roll seem different than it once was. It no longer seems as dangerous. When Eminem shoots off a rhyme about wishing the president were dead, people aren't really that surprised or shocked. They smile and say that such a provocative statement makes for good marketing. And the law-loving Pharisees of our day and age are oblivious to the rule-breaking power of rock music. Music industry analysts use dry bones statistical practices to categorize and track music's effect on people from a marketing, rather than a spiritual, standpoint. That way, they can be sure to reduce the risk on their investment. All of this threatens to make rock'n'roll less dangerous and more boring.
If anything is un-rock'n'roll, it's reducing risks. And that's why we love it and are scared by it at the same time. How do you know if what you're doing is going to work? How do you know that this thing you've been working on for three years is ever going to sound like you think it should? And then, if by some slim chance, your pipe dream becomes a reality, what makes you think anyone will like it? These are all the questions of dull reality, of the world that must continually be disrupted by the bold, risk-taking spirit of rock'n'roll. The Devil can go to Hell. Satan is not the lord of rock'n'roll. The liberating power and joy of rock music cannot be reduced to the sexual revolution or all the stuff surrounding the late sixties' rock story. Now, as the spirit continues, long after the first death of rock'n'roll, we should acknowledge that the joy and freedom of rock'n'roll has gospel origins. It's our music. The joy, the freedom, the vitality, the hand-clapping, ass-waving, foot-stomping, trumpet-blaring, orgasmic shouts of praise--all that came from the churches of the South and penetrated deep into the music of the blues. The joy of our salvation, an escape from the dull and painful reality of life in a sinful world, the feeling that suffering is not the way things ought to be was carried along in the blues and those same feelings excited the white kids of repressed British society and is still beating at the very center of rock'n'roll.