Pop records have been burned, concerts banned, performers vilified and lyrics censored, all in God's name.
From the scandal aroused by Elvis Presley's hips in 1956 to U.S. congressional hearings this year on the explicit content of gangsta rap, rock has been "the devil's music" for five decades.
Yet God keeps turning up with regularity not just where the listener might expect - in gospel and other explicitly religious rock- related music - but also in the more traditionally godless mainstream of rock. It's one thing for a hit album of Gregorian chants by the Benedictine monks of Santo Domingo de Silos to beseech the divine, quite another for songs by Nine Inch Nails and Snoop Doggy Dogg, whose world view is a good deal less pious.
On Snoop's Murder Was The Case, the narrator seeks solace as he lies dying, the victim of a gang shooting, by conversing with a supernatural voice. And on Nine Inch Nails' Closer, the ravaged singer declares to a lover: "My whole existence is flawed/ You get me closer to God." In the same song, the singer acknowledges an "absence of faith," unable to reconcile his suffering with the idea of a benevolent creator.
The iconoclastic attitudes typical of rock-era performers extend to their ideas about religion and faith. Sam Phillips, for example, abandoned a career in gospel music in the mid-'80s because "the audience basically wanted to be told what they believed over and over again, and tried to convince others to believe what they believe. I had a brush with fundamentalism and found that it is a human tendency, no matter what religion - New Age, Muslim, Christian - to reduce spirituality to a bunch of rules."
Yet her post-gospel music is obsessed with spiritual matters. On her recent album, Martinis and Bikinis, the singer exposes the vapidness of what she calls " 'Hef' culture," as in Hugh Hefner, the Playboy magnate.
"I hear a lot of sentimentality in popular culture," she says. "In the song I Need Love, I say, "I need love, not a sentimental prison.' It's a false emotion, very dishonest. Television, movies, greeting cards, the way we talk to each other - the country is saturated with sentimentality. I think of people crying over AT&T commercials . . . .
"I don't think the purpose of art is to teach but to inspire you to get at a different place, get past our minds," she says. "Or as one philosopher put it, "the point beyond all words into the silence.' "
Humans have addressed the silence in song throughout history. As Canadian singer-songwriter Bruce Cockburn says: "Love and the spirit, God and reproduction are the two main themes of human endeavor and art. Once you start reproducing, you're gonna produce death. That's an inescapable connection, and that's where God comes into it for a lot of people."
For Smashing Pumpkins' Billy Corgan, those sometimes conflicting connections are at the core of his music. The singer wears the symbol of a sacred heart as a medallion, and the back sleeve of the band's first album, Gish, shows a heart bound by thorns.
"Almost every song on the album deals in contradictions, and the sacred heart is a contradictory image," Corgan said at the time of the album's release in 1991. "The story of Jesus is bound in such contradiction. He said these things and he lived this life and then he died a painful, horrible death . . . .
"I'm not a religious person, but I feel there's something beyond this drab life we walk through, something beyond the obvious. That's what makes me want to live, things that are behind what we see."
Corgan is talking about transcendence, but the most potent and popular strains of rock and rap are mired in a reality that verges on nihilism. Kurt Cobain, Dr. Dre, Trent Reznor, Scarface - their music is a soundtrack for lost youths making their way in a godless society. At their most explicit, their songs offer precise, unflinching visions of a particularly nasty reality, with virtually no opportunity for redemption.
Their often powerful and moving music also calls into question the traditional notion of art as the repository of truth and beauty. Their music may be truthful, but much of it isn't beautiful.
"I like people to tell what they think is true, regardless of what it is," says Cockburn, whose music is suffused with Christian imagery. "It doesn't matter if it's a pretty truth or an ugly truth. Art's not a movement, it's personal. The kind of truths that art can get at best are the truths that are organic to the individual producing the art."
The music of Cockburn, Phillips and others can be seen as an alternative to the "alternative" music of Cobain, Dre, et al. As Bob Dylan recently said, "Art shouldn't reflect reality. Art should subvert reality." And in the present musical climate, what could be more subversive than the embrace of spirituality?
For many rockers, the central question is: Is there a God? Songs by artists ranging from XTC (Dear God) to John Lennon (God) bluntly suggest that there isn't. Ted Hawkins spent most of his 57 years doubting it. On weekends performing at Venice Beach in Los Angeles he would make barely enough money to pay the rent. Abused as a child, a criminal as a teenager, suicidal as an adult, Hawkins kept making soulfully searing folk records that no one heard for decades.
"Things started working for me when I was walking one night and I started talking to the one who created this Earth," he says. "I had been to church once as a child and never went back. I never prayed, but I said: 'Whoever you are, whatever you are, I'm talking to the one who calls man to walk around, who hung the stars and made the sun . . . . I ain't got no friends. Let's you and me be friends.' "
Hawkins says his good fortune began that day, and he was recently signed to DGC Records. His new album, The Next Hundred Years, is about that spiritual quest, a search that ultimately leads the artist back to himself.
"I don't have any problem reconciling the bad things that happened in my life with the fact that there is a God who considers us very precious," Hawkins says. "He gave us all a brain, didn't he? He gave us the mind and capacity to make it.
God gave us everything we need, the rest is up to us."
For Richard Thompson, who became a Muslim in 1974, the relationship between his faith and his art has become "a more natural thing, more internal. At some point I suppose I saw it as something out there, to go and get, and now I see it as something you have to go in here for," he says, pointing to his chest.
Thompson says he feels little moral kinship with most pop performers, whether they be Madonna or Dr. Dre, but his songs are hardly feel-good anthems. On the contrary, they explore the pettiness and perfidy of humankind with unsentimental lyricism and guitar solos that venture into and out of darkness. When the divine is invoked, it's inevitably to illustrate what's wrong with the world, as in God Loves A Drunk.
"The spiritual people in this society are very often people who can't deal with it, so they have to numb the spiritual place inside themselves," he says.
That sense of human vulnerability and frailty makes the personal quests of these artists universal. It's why the search for God seems only to grow more desperate in the bleakest rock and rap. And it's why there's something almost consolling about Dylan's recent album, World Gone Wrong (Columbia), an unflinching series of traditional blues and folk tunes about the lure of wickedness. In the end, the Lone Pilgrim is serene in the face of death:
"We go crying, we come laughing/ Never understand the time we're passing/ Kill for money, die for love/ Whatever was God thinking of?"
The question is unanswered, but its elusiveness is why so many songs have been written about it.