On Popular Music

Greetings Toadies.

  Our topic for this lecture will be popular music in modern America. Most of your patients will think of this as pop music though a few may refer to it as “rock ‘n roll”, “that awful stuff the kids listen to these days”, or even (especially in the south) “the devil’s music”. You will all have heard the stuff by now; it plays non-stop on American radios, sound systems and their myriad portable listening devices.

  The first thing I want you to be clear on is that this stuff really is music. Whatever the opinion of some of the elder humans and however little most of it may resemble the truly noxious miasmas Bach and his ilk used to produce, it does remain… music. As such it bears all the… unpleasantness that entails. Music fundamentally creates order and beauty out of sound. It speaks to that part of a human which still, subconsciously remembers and yearns for their maker. Whenever a human creates music (or nearly any of their so called “arts”) they are reenacting on their own miniscule level what the enemy did when he… created their material world. He took what was perfectly, dynamically formless and dark and he made order and… and beauty out of it. Were it possible, our Father would not suffer a moment of it on the earth. It is entirely disgusting, it flies in the face of all the dignity of our miserific anarchy.

     Why any of the spirits were willing to tolerate such a degradation of the spiritual world to communicate beauty to the material, I shall never know.  It is just so very like him to infect everything he touches with his power and nature. It is unnatural and entirely undignified. Music can, if you are not careful, take your patients quite out of themselves all together; a catastrophe to any tempters whose desire is always to see the patient focusing more and more on himself. Music directs their attention outward, we want to direct it inward. More than that, by turning noise into patterns, rhythms, melodies and harmonies which are at once beyond the full apprehension of and at the same time reflected within their little bastard souls. There is something of joy in all music, from the tinniest children’s show theme to the truly painful works of Beethoven.

  Once, quite recently, we thought we might have a foot in the door toward eradicating music from, at least, the western world. We began to put it about among the “artistic” and “philosophical” humans that beauty in art, music and even literature is essentially trite, bland, or uninspired – we taught them to use words like “saccharine” and “formulaic” – and at first the project seemed to be working. (I call it a project but really it was a mere side experiment off of Feuerkrote’s ongoing attack on truth) One of their elite composers began tossing sticks and swinging stings in an effort to “compose” his stuff; their painters and sculptors came close to abandoning beauty altogether. That marvelous fellow Duchamp insisted that the most vulgar things ought to qualify as art. But in the end the public would not buy our cacophonous substitution for music (we have had a little more success with their visual arts). Your patients are great fools, true enough, but we have not get got them so foolish as to regularly prefer ugliness and chaos over beauty and order…. not yet anyway.

  We did have some small success and if you ask Feuerkrote (something none of you will ever get the chance to do) he, of course, will claim that the insipidity of modern art and music are the result of his experiments diluting the human interest in beauty… and I suppose there is something to that. They don’t take it so seriously any more. Certainly if you had been tempting in the old days you would have found yourselves in regular agony being forced to experience the stuff they made and listened to back then. Be grateful that few of you will be forced to listen to some of the really virulent old stuff.

  Still, what the humans may have lost in quality they have made up for in quantity. Where music was once a rare treat for them now they immerse their lives in it. Count yourselves fortunate if you manage to carve out a single 24 hour period without music. The stuff is everywhere and their technology now allows them to pump the stuff out of nearly anything. You might think this very bad, but I prefer to see cause for hope.

  I see this on two fronts. First, weak music in sufficient quantities can produce an anaesthetic effect which may yield highly beneficial effects in some patients. Secondly, increased quantities combined with decreased quality combine to leave humans feeling simultaneously overfed and underfed in terms of beauty.

  As far as the anaesthetic qualities of pop music are concerned, I should think the process and it’s benefits are obvious. By overwhelming the humans with music which doesn’t really speak to their souls much beyond a brief tickling of some emotion or other or (even better) arouses a bit of lust, we are contriving to dull their senses to any real beauty they might run across. If you take this approach, your goal will be to get you patient to the state he is always “plugged in” to some musical source and yet never spends a moment “outside himself” or “caught up on ecstatic beauty”. You don’t want him to hear anything poignant or truly moving; you want him to satisfy himself with “pretty”, “exciting” or even “clever” music.  Of course this is a tricky game. Even the most insipid lullaby has the potential, if they listen in the wrong way, to move them. But the good news here is that even if you do slip up occasionally and let them listen to something really good, they will probably not make a habit out of it and with the right techniques (nearly any of Polsterheim’s 48 Methods  ought to do the trick) it will be a simple matter to misdirect any momentary yearnings.

  And now we come to that aspect of the lecture which I know most of you have been anticipating. You want to know how much good we can accomplish with the delicious lyrics in many of these pieces. Quite a bit. The particularly delightful thing about pop music is that it is quintessentially of its own age. Thus these “artists” are singing about the exact sins we have managed to insert most strongly into this particular culture.  Even more usefully, the humans (never forget that at least one part of your patient is on your side, part of the wants to sin) are mostly likely to enjoy those very songs which celebrate the sins they themselves are most prone to. Men who tend to beat their wives, are more likely to listen to our favorite rap songs. Hormone riddled teenagers are more likely to have pop-hits celebrating unattached coupling on their music devices.

  Now, I have said that music tends to take the humans out of themselves. This is true, and generally it is one of the more unfortunate aspects of music. But we have means of turning even this misfortune to our advantage. If the creatures must be taken out of themselves, let us see to it that they are taken to something which will only damage their souls. I know that certain members of our order have claimed that some musical themes themselves can be used to this purpose but I mistrust that – pure music is, for you far too dangerous a tool, leave it’s use to wiser heads. But the lyrics, the lyrics will be your bread and butter. It is your job to see to it that your patient lives on a diet of unhealthy lyrics. If your patient objects, that is if you are using a song to tempt rather than to merely reinforce an existent sin habit, use the old line “I don’t really care about the words, I just like the beat/music/melody/sound etc…”.  The creatures can’t really ignore the lyrics, no matter how they try and ignore them the message will sink into their souls; desensitizing some bits, corroding others and building up (if you know your work) all the parts we want to see grown.

  You see that you will have to monitor your patients listening carefully.  Work hard to shape their tastes in the directions most harmful to them. Have your jingoistic patients listen to country music (but be on your guard In this genre, it speaks far more than I would like about simple living and… family), have your lustful teenagers feed on a simple diet of the sex song of the week. Patients prone to depression will find excellent listening in some of the harder stuff of the later 90’s. Violet and misogynistic patients ought to listen to nothing but hard core rap (I have seen excellent results from using this genre on certain girls with already low self-esteem; see if you can’t use it to convince them that their only chance at love comes from allowing themselves to be degraded and abused – you will find it very entertaining).

    So you see? Music qua music is never beneficial to our cause. But music as a means of thought and emotion delivery is one of our strongest tools in this era for steeping humans in some of our most exciting, degrading and destroying lies. It jumps right over their conscious thought filters and gets them accepting and feeding on some truly decadent filth.

   For next week, I expect a brief description of your patient’s musical tastes, the areas in which they are already weakest and on which you plan to press your attack; together with an action plan consisting of at least ten pop music songs you will use and how you intend to use them. Remember you are to submit all assignments to professorslubgob@hotmail.com