Dancing with the Devil

Rock and roll has a storied history with the Devil.

It’s not difficult to see why—the Devil is the ultimate rebel without a cause, a celestial James Dean, the original anti-authority figure.

Our modern conception of hell—ruled by Satan, Lucifer, Beelzebub, or whatever you’d like to call him—has taken a few thousand years to evolve.

The Devil doesn’t figure much in the Old Testament, beyond the Book of Job, where a faceless ‘adversary’ is given permission by God to test his most loyal believer and finds him unbreakably devout.

Interestingly, the word Satan in its Old Testament use shares its etymology with the word for a Persian delegate, which makes sense, as the Persians were conquering much of the ancient world for a good chunk of history, including the lands of the Jews.

Fast forward to the New Testament, and we come across the name Lucifer, the morning star, the light-bearer, whom Luke’s gospel describes as “falling from heaven like lightning.”

However, much like in the Old Testament, these passages seem more likely to refer to a Babylonian king than the Devil as we conceptualize him today.

There’s some typically fruity stuff in Revelation, and Christ does mention hell a few times. But again, the Hebrew word he uses is Gehenna—an actual, real-world site of former child sacrifice and pagan ritual a few miles outside Jerusalem.

The reason I cover all this theological ground is because it speaks to what I find so interesting about the devil: he’s a creature of apocrypha.

We find the sparse beginnings of a satanic mythology in the Bible, but it’s other writers and thinkers and theologians and artists who have fleshed out the Devil we know today.

Most famously, Milton and Dante.

John Milton was one of England’s most fascinating writers and, maybe, one of its most fascinating humans. By his mid-forties, he was a blind official serving under Oliver Cromwell in England’s first revolutionary, republican government.

His epic poem Paradise Lost is partly written from Satan’s point of view, imagining, with complete linguistic majesty, his rebellion against God, his fall from heaven, and the revenge he wreaks in the Garden of Eden.

Unsurprisingly, Satan becomes the most sympathetic character in the poem, far more relatable to his inevitably flawed readership than the naive Adam or the perfect Christ.

He gives us the immortal line: “Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.”

And if you can’t see the eternal truth hiding in those lines, then you’ve never met an alcoholic, or an impoverished actor, or an unfaithful wife, or any other self-sabotaging member of the oddball cast of this endless human drama.

Dante, in his poem The Inferno, really lays out the blueprints of hell. Guided by the spirit of Virgil, the ancient Roman poet, he descends through nine circles, each filled with different sinners and tortures, their malevolence increasing with every step toward the center.

At the bullseye, Satan reigns in a frozen lake of ice, chewing on history’s most famous traitors (for Dante, loyalty was clearly a big deal)—Brutus, Cassius, and another of history’s most interesting villains, Judas Iscariot.

Since then, we’ve had countless contributors to the Luciferian legend, from Goethe to South Park, from Dostoevsky to Adam Sandler, each adding their own layer of paint.

And plenty of those have come from popular music.

Here are five of my favorites:

1. American Pie - Don McLean

I’ve played this tune in more bars than I care to mention, but I never make it as far as verse four, where the devil makes his entrance.

You could write a master’s thesis on the potential allegories hidden in the lyrics of American Pie, but there’s a fairly common consensus about the fourth verse.

In case you’ve forgotten, it goes:

Oh, and there we were all in one place
A generation lost in space
With no time left to start again
So, come on, Jack be nimble, Jack be quick
Jack Flash sat on a candlestick
'Cause fire is the devil's only friend
Oh, and as I watched him on the stage
My hands were clenched in fists of rage
No angel born in Hell
Could break that Satan's spell
And as the flames climbed high into the night
To light the sacrificial rite
I saw Satan laughing with delight
The day the music died

McLean is telling the tale of the Altamont Free Concert of 1969, staged by The Rolling Stones (more on them in a minute, as I’m sure you’ve already guessed). At the concert, hired Hells Angels, acting as ‘security,’ violently killed several members of the crowd while Jagger sang Sympathy for the Devil, and the halcyon, countercultural dream of the sixties came to a fiery end.

2. Sympathy for the Devil - The Rolling Stones

Speaking of which, this is another of the greatest rock lyrics of all time.

Inspired by Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, this song and The Rolling Stones represent the perfect fusion of art and artist. Mick Jagger, embodying the urbane, calculating Lucifer of “wealth and taste,” - who has been poking mischievous, bloody holes in human history from the execution of Christ to Hitler’s blitzkrieg - delivers one of the most iconic vocal performances in recorded music.

3. Running with the Devil - Van Halen

None of the sophistication of either of the above, but all of the hot, sweaty, late-teenage feeling.

There’s no grand theology here; just humid Californian nights, sticky leather car seats, and youth and freedom and recklessness.

4. Gotta Serve Somebody - Bob Dylan

Dylan is one of the only popular musicians I can name that philosophy takes seriously.

I recently listened to Jordan Peterson’s seminars on the Book of Exodus, and it was a kick for me, as a huge Dylan fan, to hear the iconic refrain of this tune quoted over and over again by prestigious doctors of theology from around the world.

'It may be the devil, or it may be the Lord, but you’re gonna have to serve somebody...'

Their point, and I think Dylan’s too, is that everyone acts in pursuit or emulation of an ideal.

Whether we like it or not, we’re all serving some idea greater than ourselves, be it the trends of twenty-first-century capitalism, the trauma of our childhoods, our belief in grand modern narratives like environmentalism or the inalienable rights of man, our religious text of choice, or just the hedonic desires of our animal nervous systems.

For Dylan, at least the Dylan of the 1980s, this can be boiled down to a straight choice between two diametric masters—the devil and the Lord.

For me, that isn’t quite so clear; but the song, and its Grammy-winning vocal performance, is profound nonetheless.

5. The Devil Went Down to Georgia - The Charlie Daniels Band

Obviously, this list couldn’t fail to mention Charlie Daniels’ epic story of Johnny, the fiddle player, and his musical duel with the devil.

Daniels pulls his vision of Satan straight from the pages of Faust—the devil is a confidence trickster; a purveyor of bad bargains.

But, in a triumphant twist, Johnny outplays him at the crossroads and sends him tumbling back to hell with his golden fiddle.

I love the way this song reaches back and forward through history; back to the myth of Robert Johnson—the legendary blues guitarist who sold his soul at the crossroads in exchange for musical genius—and forward to Jack Black and Tenacious D (featuring a glorious cameo from Dave Grohl) in Tribute, defeating the devil once again with the greatest off-the-cuff rock song ever written.

So, why is the devil such a mainstay in pop music?

I think it’s because the devil represents something we all wrestle with—temptation, rebellion, the push and pull of moral choice.

He’s the perfect spectre of the crossroads, where we go to grapple with the darkest, most dangerously thrilling aspects of ourselves.

Pop music, at is best, is a sort of crossroads too; a mystical space where styles and influences, rhythm and melody, characters and voices get together to do something subversive.

Let me know what I’ve missed.

And, as always, keep dreaming.

Rob