Does "Rock music is evil / of the devil" have racist roots?

Bob Dylan certainly thinks so: https://medium.com/cuepoint/like-it-is-bob-dylan-explains-what-really-killed-rock-n-roll-f6a4b6587a1a

His take is that Rock n Roll was bringing white and black people together and so the establishment sought to shut it down.

I've never heard anyone blame the drums before. Usually it's thinly veiled "rock is blues, blues is black, black is bad"

Also sometimes "too left wing. Damn commies", sometimes.

[some are] convinced that rock music is evil and will lead people to engage in witchcraft and draw pentagrams all over their home.

I think that it's pretty safe to say that at least some people around you are stone-cold fundamentalists. This sort of discourse doesn't come from non-fundamentalists.

That said as stupid as "rock is [from the d]evil" claim is, I don't think that it's rooted in racism. Instead I think that it's because some values often followed by rock bands, singers and fans clash directly with some values of Christianity.

Note that some sort of percussion pops up in almost every musical style, across the eras.

Slaves. They created the guitar

This was already addressed, but... come on, acoustic guitars are from Middle Ages Iberia, and they backtrack all the way into the lutes of the Ancient Egypt and Anatolia. (Probably. It's so old that the origins are hard to determine.)

Pretty much anything that takes followers away from the church is likely to be labeled evil.

Tangential to the question, but Elvis was famously censored from the waist down in an early TV appearance for being too sexy. Then, of course, lots and lots of rock in the 'free love' 60s and 70s was explicitly about drugs.

Going from 'sex and drugs' to 'of the devil' is a pretty short line to draw for some people.

Funny how just the first few lines of your post clearly establishes that you are from the US

Along a different track of thinking, from where did rock music originate? Slaves. They created the guitar because slave-owners didn’t allow them to make music with drums.

What the flying fuck? The guitar is one of the oldest mediterranean instruments. Naturally it evolved from antiquity, but just how did you think that?

That attitude stems, naturally, from association with sex, drugs and pacifist rebellion with rock music. Organized religion often supports sexual morality, is suspicious of drugs (when it doesn't incorporate their usage), and considers the social hierarchies to be of divine root, thus going to war would be the right thing to do and pacifism would be the opposite.

The core of Abrahamic religion is based around an in-group / out-group ideology. When you dove-tail off that premise it is clear that Abrahamic religion uses labelism such as "evil" or "from the devil" in order to obfuscate their suppression and opression of the out-group.

Show them some Christian Rock and watch their heads explode.

Yes. Rock-and-roll is an embellishment of blues, which was the spooky music of black people. Blues and Jazz were both topics of moral panics. Elvis himself was the segway, being famous, popular with young folk and had sexually explicit hips. He also brought blues to the television, so everyone could catch the beat.

The 60's music revolution of London and the electric guitar secured the place of Rock. It was here to stay with the first yeah! yeah! yeah!

So was ragtime, though while we associate rag with Scott Joplin (who was quite black) I haven't explored rag to know if it was regarded as black, but it was absolutely colonial and anti-monarchy and regarded as vulgar in Europe.

But also so was classical romanticism which broke all the rules of baroque and classical (the stuff sponsored by and patronized by aristocrats). Romanticism came with the Pianoforte (The Piano) which allowed a player to be more emotionally expressive with key velocity changing the tone of a note (and volume) but it was also about breaking the old rules. Getting mathematical. Bringing accompaniment instruments to the forefront. Making the audience feel feelings! The affrontery.

Infamously Paganini was such a good violinist, the church believes he bargained with demons to gain his skills (fiddle lessons for souls!). He was denied a sanctified buriel for fifty years based on this assumption. His caprices are used today as bravura pieces in violin contests.

Back to the present, angry gangsta rap killed the Satanic panic regarding metal (which mostly leaned into the Satan thing). Rap isn't Satanic, rather it is purely furious, knows the hood was dealt a bum deal for centuries and is mad as fuck about it, and on the verge of riot and revolution. And all the pearl-clutchers wish we could just go back to when metal was calling on Satan.

Now we have the internet, which means we can look up where the music we like comes from, and as much as they clutch pearls, we know that they always are annoyed at poets speaking truth to power or challenging the norms. And what we listen to today will be classic in a generation, and quaint.

I don't think so, at least not for everyone.

My grandfather (born round the start of the first world war) was hideously racist, not overtly religious, but neither of those seemed to figure into his horrified disgust and moral panic at "rock and roll". Seriously, he'd be less shocked at someone wiping their ass with a slice of bread and eating it, than he would be at them playing rock music in the house. If it featured on a TV ad, or came in the window from someone driving past, it was like he was under siege.

Part of it was the sex-and-drugs angle, I'm sure, but I think even that was a small part of the whole.

I think the biggest part was that it was a symbol of counterculture, of men growing their hair long and rejecting the order and authority of the world he was born into. He experienced a fuckton of social change in his lifetime, he couldn't navigate the culture any more, and this left him lost, angry and afraid. There were these people pissing on all the symbols he understood, and waving around a bunch he didn't, while rejecting all the values he'd been taught - and dancing about it, like (from his perspective) a horde of crackheads ransacking a library and smearing shit on everything for lulz.

I mean, I wince and block channels with any kind of 'reaction videos', and I'm only genX. I get it, to a degree - though I'm trying at least to ensure that when I get irretrievably stuck in the past, it's at least from this century. But the change I've been through only stretches from Kojak to Skibidi Toilet whatever the fuck that is. His stretched from before cars or refrigeration to the internet itself. I don't think I'll see as big a transformation as he did in his time; I hope I cope a shitload better than he did with what I do see, but who knows?

I have not heard this. Speaking from the perspective of a person whose parents considered pretty much everything to be satanic I just assumed it is because it is new and new must mean bad.

Be a cold day in hell before I respect a single aspect of Christianity

I think we're ignoring the bigger question: what kinda music DOESN"T have drums? like, literally EVERY FORM OF MUSIC uses drums, or some machine playing back a drum beat.

I only recall seeing rock n roll start receiving hate after Elvis Presley became big because prudish Christians didn't like the way he gyrated his hips in most of the things I've seen covering the history of rock.

I think if that argument holds any water it's that rock music was originally an offshoot of blues music, which was predominantly an African American music genre in it's beginning.

Look up the satanic panic

Most definitely but ageism was a big part, rock music coincided with the birth of youth culture, which was seen as a threat against the establishment

That's a completely different perspective than I've ever heard in church. I grew up in a fundamentalist household and the whole "rock is of the devil" attitude was fueled mostly by artists like Black Sabbath and Danzig, where they have a demonic stage presence, and lyrics which are worldly. Danzig used actual devil imagery and pentagrams in his media, and Ozzie was known as the Prince of Darkness, so the Christians weren't really reaching to say that the artists were opposed to Christianity. Your interpretation probably has much older roots in Southern Baptist movements, which aren't prevalent in all denominations.

As long as there has been popular music, there have been people who say it is evil. Many classical composer where consider controversial. Mozart’s Leck mich im Arsch (Lick me in the arse) aside, anyone who challenged the status quo was considered “evil” but many.

In rock and rolls case, I would say no it is not inherently racist, and it has nothing to do with drums. But I can see how you could draw that conclusion because pre-Elvis rock and roll was considered “race music”. However, that fact that record companies found success with white washed versions of it, would indicate to me that they didn’t consider rock and roll itself evil. Of course, there were always those who hated it no matter how watered down Pat Boone tried to make it and considered it evil. But that’s no different than really anything that goes against the status quo.

As the 60s rolled on, there were minor conflict between rock and roll and the church. Most famously, John Lennon saying the Beatles were more popular than Jesus. In the late 60s bands like Black Sabbath were seen as evil, but I don’t think that applied to rock and roll as a whole. However, into the 70s with bands like Alice Cooper, New York Dolls, Kiss, and then the emergence of punk, more people started thinking of rock and roll in general as evil.

Then comes the 1980s. The Reagan years. Where you have the rise of the Moral Majority, the Satanic Panic, and PMRC, which loved to label things as “evil”. Make things us versus them. I don’t think it had anything to do with the actual music. It was more of the anti-establishment messages and decadence that was associated with the rock and roll lifestyle. It didn’t help that many bands purposefully adopted satanic symbols for shock value.

But, in true 1980s fashion instead of talking to their kids, boomer parents just labeled it as evil and forbid it.

Some blues guitarist back in the day sold his soul to the devil to become the greatest guitar player of his time and with his powers he wrote a album and invented rock n' roll. He died at age 27 and since then lots of great rock stars have died at age 27. Its called the 27 club. Personally I think that's fucking cool and it makes me like rock n' roll even more 🎸

Short answer: Yes.

No. Seeing how "Rock music is evil." thing started with Elvis Presley. Then in the 70's you had people going for rock bands like the Rolling Stones for singing about sex and drugs. They moved to metal bands in the 80's. Marilyn Manson was the big name target in the mid-late 90's.