The best anti-rock tantrum you'll watch all day

 

I always like to post something religious in advance of Easter (also, I like to post something religious in advance of everything), so I started to cut up this 50-minute Christian propaganda flick Rock: It's Your Decision. It's about a kid named Jeff and his struggle with negotiating the morals of rock and roll with his own Christianity. It has a little bit of a cult following, which is ironic on multiple levels. Perhaps you've already laughed at it. Anyway, Rock's porno-level line delivery and all-around melodrama are pretty amusing (watch some of that in the movie's trailer) until the film's last nine minutes, when it blossoms into an indictment of pop music as a whole in church. What you see above is Jeff's epiphany in its beautiful entirety.

You know, the movie almost convinced me of its moral soundness up to this point. Yes, it's awfully concerned and all up in everybody's business, but at least it verbalized the often-mystifying philosophy (and self-imposed squareness) of those who listen to only religious music (people who kept these guys in business). But by the time Jeff gets around to whining about the dangerous pull of a "really good, get-down beat," and the dangerousness of Captain & Tenille, it was over for me. (I even tolerated the casual gay jab!) (Just kidding. It was always over for me.) Leave Barry Manilow out of it, Jeff! He really is mild! There's a willful ignorance of diversity and how it is, at the very least, interesting from a cultural perspective. I'm coming from the opposite end of the spectrum ("Pass the sex! A second serving of Satan, please!") as Jeff, and I didn't catch the proselytizing bug from this movie. (Then again, this movie was short on beats to drive away my bad mood.) I'm one-man proof that we can all coexist and at least be amused by each other!

And laugh I did. "I think you better look at your albums. If three or four or even if only one song promotes sin, then that's what the author is promoting. And if we buy those albums, every album we buy encourages that artist to keep putting out that kind of music!" That is exactly the kind of logic that Strangers with Candy was made to lampoon. Beautiful. (For more on Jeff's speech, check out Agony Booth's lengthy review, which runs down the factual inaccuracies spewed regarding the secular, really not Satanic music Jeff condemns.)

All that is to say, Happy Easter, you devil-sympathizing heathens!

Comments

[kjbxc]

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[Gen]

I just love how right after the Jeff video, YouTube advertised that "Van Halen live "1986" part 14 - Rock n Roll" is up next.

In your face, Jeff!

[RP]

"I go to school with most of you. The other kids at school know that I'm a Christian, but if they don't see me acting any different than they act, then what are they gonna think?"

This is a major pet peeve of mine: Christians who act as if they're a minority in the United States of America. Not all of them, obviously, but more than you'd think considering major Christian holidays are also federal holidays.

They know you're a Christian? Well no shit dude, most of them are Christian too. A lot of people I run into will just assume that you're Christian unless you tell them otherwise. (I'm sure YMMV on people making this assumption depending on where you live)

The rest of it is too ridiculous to really get mad at. This dude fails at logic forever.

[chasgoose]

Unfortunately for Jeff, he lost this battle. Go to almost any church nowadays (especially a lot of the evangelical ones) and I guarantee you at least one mass/service will be done with a rock band. Does it become less Satanic if the really good get-down beat is about Jesus?

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[zamblee]

I feel for the guy who raised his hand to indicate that he was going to have sex with his girlfriend after church. Probably didn't end up happening. What a cock block!

[Julia]

ROCK N' ROLL 4 LYFE [holds up middle finger]. That's my impassioned response.

[Elle]

I kind of wished he had busted out the double dream hands right at the beginning.

[l]

Now I'm not a big rock and roll fanatic. However I do know that it 'is' your decision. Something which this movie seems dead set against with it's ironic title.

All I see this movie saying is "Don't question authority, you shouldn't have free will, 99% of all music ever made is evil." and most of all "Turn into a whiny, personalityless, self opinionated, soap box betty/bob who everyone in school will treat like a pariah."