Dark Music Tones and Voodoo Beats

by Kenneth Francis (February 2024)

The key eras when the ‘greatest’ popular songs topped the music charts were the 1960s to the end of the 1970s. But ‘greatest’ does not always mean morally good or sacred. We often speak about ‘great wars’ but there was certainly nothing great about them.

Many culture observers throughout those two eras often comment on the dark side of music and speculate on possible psyop elements to create unrest and chaos amongst the Boomer generations and beyond. To doubt this is gullible because the persuasive circumstantial evidence is all around us, and not just in the music industry of yore and now, but in many aspects of contemporary life, particularly geopolitical, which I’ll briefly touch upon.

Today, is there a sane person who is proud of and content with the government who rules over him or her? Are some of us so blind and deaf when the elites tell us of their dark tyrannical intentions in advance (‘Revelation of the Method’) while taking the lack of resistance as implied consent (“You will own nothing, eat bugs and be happy”)? And does it bother any worker that they are being taxed out of existence and treated as second-class citizens in their own country? If you believe that the brand of democracy you are receiving is morally good and not metaphorically gang rape of the mind, then feel free to ignore the ‘red-pilled’ musings of this humble lay-theologian.

I believe that it is no coincidence that when the Boomers reached adulthood in the mid-1960s, they looked like they were well-socially-engineered indoctrinated model citizens who unwittingly obeyed the diktats of the State, despite causing some civil unrest (possible staged protests) that was advantageous to the State: Problem, reaction, solution.

If the Boomer “scruffy/lazy” hippies thought they were rebellious and against ‘The Man’ during Woodstock in 1969, as over 460,000 revellers lay in the sun getting stoned and running around naked, they were greatly mistaken. Instead, they unwittingly played into the hands of ‘The Man’ by being distracted en masse and lost in the blindness of their disordered passions, unaware of the misdirection propaganda from a semi-controlled mainstream media (compared to today, it was a ministry of truth).

Yes, the 1960s was a key epoch for ushering in massive social upheaval, mass hysteria (Beatlemania, etc) and herd behaviour against the once-traditional Western culture of Christendom. The result? An anti-culture which has culminated today, where tampon dispensers are installed in the men’s toilets of the Irish House of Parliament.

The situation in Canada is worse. According to the New York Post: “Tampons and sanitary napkins are now available in men’s bathrooms at the Canadian Parliament under a new policy from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that requires all federally regulated employers—including airports and military bases—to offer free menstrual products in all washrooms, regardless of gender noted on the door.”

But back to 1965, the year the Second Vatican Council concluded and right-on nuns and priests started singing “Kumbya.” It was also the date when the Number One hit song that heralded in the year was Barry McGuire’s portentous, aptly-titled “Eve of Destruction,” written by PF Sloan; a year that saw the birth of the Sexual Revolution, two years before the ‘Summer of Love.’

However, one such observer, who sceptically reflected on the music industry of the Sixties and Seventies, was the American researcher David McGowan (1960-2015). McGowan, a liberal, was not religious and came across as being a bit hostile to Christianity. But he was probably viewed by the predator wing of the Establishment as some right-wing conspiracy theorist nut (in plain language: Someone who does his or her own research and questions known liars).

In his book, Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon, McGowan wrote about Laurel Canyon, California, during the 1960s and early 1970s, where an array of musical artists congregated to create the giant musical hits that provided the soundtrack to those two spectacular eras.

McGowan lists the following American bands and singers, who seemed to come out of nowhere and had the ‘red-carpet’ rolled out for them and all the ‘doors greased and opened’: The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, The Monkees, the Beach Boys, the Mamas and the Papas, The Turtles, The Eagles, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, Steppenwolf, Captain Beefheart, CSN, Three Dog Night, Alice Cooper, The Doors; along with such singer/songwriters as Joni Mitchell, Judy Collins, James Taylor, Carole King, Jackson Browne, Judi Sill and David Blue, all of these living together in a small community nestled in the Hollywood Hills.

What seems to be sinister about this jam-packed hippy-type-utopian commune, overlooked by a covert military installation and wandering intelligence personnel, is that nearly all these musicians had military family ties. Also, some of the biggest stars did not make it out alive with such short-lived careers, while their deaths, many aged 27, to this day, are shrouded in mystery.

But, hey, that’s all just a big coincidence and we know that the devil, who loves and runs the music industry, hates conspiracy theories. The devil is also instrumental (no pun intended!) in the negative effects of the music genre, especially rock, rap, jazz, R&B, etc.

According to psychologist Dr Laura Sanger, in her research into the music industry: Since the 1930s, sound engineers and physicists, hired by anti-Christian people in ‘High Places’ (Ephesians 6:12), have been examining how music frequencies can be used to stir-up negative emotional responses in the mass behaviour and hysteria within audiences, causing people to act in certain programmable ways; stripping humans of their humanity by defiling them in the pursuit of the total domination of humanity.

She said: “Part of their strategy is to use sound and music to control humanity. The international tuning of ‘A’ was changed [in the 1930s, from 435 *Hz] to 440 Hz.” She said the Nazi Joseph Goebbels, who ran the radio stations, was involved in this transformation in June 1939. (*Hz, hertz, is a unit of frequency equal to one cycle per second. It is abbreviated Hz, and is commonly used to specify the frequency of radio waves.)

“This is a destructive frequency. And what it does is entrains our thoughts towards disharmony, disruption, and disunity. It stimulates our brain into disharmonious resonance,” according to Dr Sanger. She added that some Christian musicians are lowering the tone by a few notches to counteract this.

In an article in Global News back in 2018, Alan Cross wrote: “There is allegedly something sinister and evil about 440 Hz. It is said that the Rockefeller Foundation had an interest in making sure the United States adopted the 440 Hz standard in 1935 as part of a ‘war on consciousness’ leading to ‘musical cult control.’ Without going too far down this rat hole, this theory says that tuning all music to 440 Hz turns it into a military weapon.”

But it is not just tones. There is also the beat of drums worth considering. Rock-and-Roll legend, Little Richard, has testified that rock music is demonic: “My true belief about Rock ‘n’ Roll, and there have been a lot of phrases attributed to me over the years, is this: I believe this kind of music is demonic … a lot of the beats in music today are taken from voodoo, from the voodoo drums. If you study music in rhythms, like I have, you’ll see that is true. I believe that kind of music is driving people from Christ. It is contagious.” (Little Richard, quoted by Charles White, The Life and Times of Little Richard, p. 197). He added: “I was directed and commanded by another power. The power of darkness … The power that a lot of people don’t believe exists. The power of the Devil. Satan.”

Mind control is the main method used in voodoo rituals. I’m reminded of Mick Jagger singing “Sympathy for the Devil”, and the voodoo drum-beat accompanied by demonic, primitive screams. A song that was sung during a Stones’ free concert when a man was stabbed to death in 1969 at Altamont, USA.

There has been some speculation over the years by Western intellectuals writing on culture, that major figures in modern music projected their own immorality into the melodies and lyrics of popular songs and tunes. Such works were allegedly inspired by Wagner, Nietzsche, and Arnold Schoenberg (divisor of the unaesthetic twelve-tone music), the latter creating twelve-tone music that, in my opinion, is intentionally ambiguous and delayed, and sometimes frustratingly avoiding the resolution of the dissonance, thus the release of emotional tension: Catharsis.

If there was, and still is, a deliberate attempt to subvert the effect of catharsis, then it would appear such an anti-Christian narrative showcasing the absence of a cathartic resolution of emotions could possibly sink below consciousness and influence potentially rebellious-type audiences to embrace secularism and despair.

As Secular Man is driven by endless, unachievable desires; and with no higher destiny, besides music, we can also see such despair in the Absurdist Godless plays of Samuel Beckett, as well as atheist philosophical literature, music, Surrealist art and cinema: from the Godless Schopenhauer, Wagner, Nietzsche, to Max Ernst and Luis Buñuel.

Finally, the Bible makes it clear about the devil’s musical abilities, as Lucifer was a minister of music in Heaven before he got kicked out due to pride and rebellion against God. In Ezekiel 28:13: “…The workmanship of thy [Lucifer] timbrels and of thy pipes was prepared in the that thou was created.” Also, Isaiah: 14:11-12: “Thy [Lucifer] pomp is brought down to the grave, and the noise of thy viols [stringed instruments] …”

As for musical lyrics: I have already written about that in New English Review essays entitled, Idolatry and Sin in Love Songs and The Beatles and the Dark Side of the Road. An example not included in those essays is when the First Commandment was broken so smoothly and romantically in the opening lines of The Delfonics’ classic, “Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time)”: ‘I gave my heart and soul to you girl…’ I’ll give the song a pass on the ‘heart’ lyric … but the ‘soul’?

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Kenneth Francis is a Contributing Editor at New English Review. For the past 30 years, he has worked as an editor in various publications, as well as a university lecturer in journalism. He also holds an MA in Theology and is the author of The Little Book of God, Mind, Cosmos and Truth (St Pauls Publishing) and, most recently, The Terror of Existence: From Ecclesiastes to Theatre of the Absurd (with Theodore Dalrymple) and Neither Trumpets Nor Violins (with Theodore Dalrymple and Samuel Hux).

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