The fear of Satan was always present in my childhood. Whether hiding in a movie, influencing the narrative of a book, or snuck into the lyrics of a song, he was always there, waiting to steal my soul.
I have already told of the fear of his presence in the Star Wars movies had made the point of ridicule among my classmates. I wish I could say this irrational fear had stopped there, but it didn’t.
With the forming of the PMRC - Parents Music Resource Center, my mother had found a very unlikely ally in her fight to keep me from falling victim to the evils of secular music, Tipper Gore.
Finding 2 people who were farther apart on political ideology than my mother and Mrs. Gore would be difficult. My mother, a staunch Republican, would never give any credence to the ideas of a member of the Democratic party. They were viewed as tools of Satan, driven by a desire to turn the country into an atheist wasteland.
Somehow, the crusade that Tipper was leading against the music industry grabbed my mother’s attention and drew her in.
In short order, every time music was heard being played in the house, it was questioned.
What are you listening to?
Who sings it?
Are they Christian?
On and on and on the questioning would go.
The fear of music lead to my parents purchasing a VCR so they could replace the cable box with a device that let them program in the stations they permitted me to watch.
Needless to say, MTV did not make the cut.
ABC, NBC, CBS, CBN, CNN, The Weather Channel and PTL were the only stations we had to choose from.
Next, my AM/FM stereo radio with cassette deck was replaced with a cassette only, single speaker device. Just when one thought Christian rock couldn’t sound much worse, it suddenly did.
As the Senate hearings began, our church turned its attention to Ozzy Osbourne as the vilest of all musical offenders.
Having never heard the song, I could readily tell you that Suicide Solution was written as a directive from Satan for all who heard it to kill themselves. Hordes of demons had been dispatched to help encourage the listeners to follow as directed by the most-evil deliverer of this message of self-destruction.
Needless to say, Ozzy didn’t have the best reputation in the church as a whole and was the poster child for Satanism and Satanic possession to many Pentacostal churches.
The title of the song was all we ever heard when the church would bring in up, either in Sunday school class or junior church. The lyrics were strictly forbidden, due to the overwhelming power they had to cause innocent teens to kill themselves.
My mother was certain that if I were to hear this song, even one time, I would surely take my own life. There was no way to stop this from happening than to make sure she did all she could to keep me from being exposed to it.
Eventually her focus turned from music to the heartbreaking case of Ryan White, the innocent teen who contracted HIV from a blood infusion. Her views on his situation caused me to feel bad for him. In time, I began to question my own Christianity due to my belief it was not his fault that he had been infected with HIV, even though my entire church was convinced God was punishing him for his sin.
As time passed and new dangers to my soul arose, the events of 1985/86 passed into memory, and the dangers of a song and one kids unfortunate circumstances faded from the present danger that threatened to steal my soul.
Eventually I was old enough to drive and listen to music without the overarching censorship of my mother’s fear.
What I discovered was a world of musical talent that I never dreamt existed. While I was bombarded with pop music from people I worked with, I soon found myself gravitating to the classic rock station 102.5 DVE out of Pittsburgh.
This was like a breath of fresh air.
One day, as I drove down the highway on my way to the mall with a couple of friends, the DJ began to introduce the next song. One of the most misrepresented songs in rock history, a cautionary tale of alcohol abuse and the dangers this lifestyle holds, here is the legendary Ozzy Osbourne with Suicide Solution.
As I listened intently to the lyrics, trying to decipher what he was saying, it soon became clear to me the church had once again been lying to me.
Wine is fine but whiskey's quicker
Suicide is slow with liquor
Take a bottle and drown your sorrows
Then it floods away tomorrows
Away tomorrows
Evil thoughts and evil doings
Cold, alone you hang in ruins
Thought that you'd escape the reaper
You can't escape the master keeper
'Cause you feel life's unreal, and you're living a lie
Such a shame who's to blame and you're wondering why
Then you ask from your cask is there life after birth
What you sow can mean hell on this earth
Hell on this earth
Now you live inside a bottle
The reaper's traveling at full throttle
It's catching you but you don't see
The reaper is you and the reaper is me
Breaking laws, knocking doors
But there's no one at home
Made your bed, rest your head
But you lie there and moan
Where to hide, suicide is the only way out
Don't you know what it's really about
Ah, now people, you really know where it's at
Ah, ah you got it, fox
Get the flaps out, Satan, Satan, Satan, ha ha ha
Wine is fine but whiskey's quicker
Suicide is slow with liquor
Take a bottle, drown your sorrows
Then it floods away tomorrows
Take me away
Oh, oh, tomorrow
It's never gettin' fixed, no flaps, nobody, no flaps, nothing?
Hearing those words come from the speaker, along with the powerful guitar, I could tell from the opening lines that I had been lied to all those years before. The message this song told was one of caution against letting alcohol take control of your life, leading down a path of ruin and early death.
This was just one of the many lies I learned I had been told over the years in church.
As the years pass, it becomes clearer every day that if the church ceased lying, it would have nothing left to scare its members with.