Prince, Michael Jackson, and the Use of Music to Corrupt American Youth

by Dr. William L. Pierce

ROCK “music” is one of the most manifest symptoms of the West’s decline. Like modern “art” it is a cultural excrescence of a demented civilization which has turned on itself and is tearing madly at its own vitals. (ILLUSTRATION: “Prince”)

The daubings of a Pollock, a Rauschenberg, a Rothko, or a Chagall, however, for all their malicious ugliness have had relatively little influence on the average denizen of this dying order, other than to convince him that art is irrelevant and artists are crazy.

Rock has had a far more destructive effect on the psyche of the West — especially that portion of the Western population born since the Second World War. A generation and a half have been immersed in this throbbing, screeching medium practically since birth.

For many it has formed an ever-present sonic background to childhood play and socializing, to adolescent dating, and to adult leisure. Often they do not escape from it even during the times set aside for study and work. Some are so conditioned by it that they become restless and uneasy whenever the beat stops.

Social psychologists may have explanations for this phenomenon in terms of the arrested character development brought on by the permissive child-rearing practices of the postwar era, or in terms of the widespread personal anomie which has accompanied the social dissolution of the period. Regardless of the mass-psychological factors involved in the ascendancy of rock, however, there can be no doubt that it has been the most lethal weapon in the cultural arsenal of the West’s internal enemies. They have used it, with cold-blooded deliberation, to break down the racial, sexual, and cultural identities of young Westerners.

Although there was a time when the promoters of the rock phenomenon were more careful to conceal their motives, they now boast openly of what they have wrought.

Elvis Presley, they say, was their foot in the door: they used him, the “White boy with Black hips,” to introduce Black music to America’s White youth during the 1950s.

Songs being sung to Black audiences by Black performers, such as the utterly raunchy and openly homosexual Little Richard, would be given to Presley to sing to White audiences, after the lyrics had been slightly sanitized. In England the Beatles served a similar purpose, taking their music from such Black rock performers as Chuck Berry.

Saturation exposure to Presley and the Beatles through the electronic media so accustomed Whites to Black forms and styles in music that it was not difficult for the media masters to take the next steps: the omission of the sanitizing, so that the non-White values in rock lyrics became more explicit; and then the gradual transformation of the unquestionably White and male rock stars upon whom the kids looked as idols to the racially and sexually ambivalent stars who reign today.

Two of those new reigning stars are Prince and Michael Jackson. In a recent article on them the New York Times gloated:

. . . Both mix black and white idioms in their music and both have shattered race barriers in the record business. . . . [A]nd both play coy with conventional racial and sexual definitions. As Prince sings in “Controversial”—“Am I black or white? / Am I straight or gay? / . . . Was I what you wanted me to be?”

. . . Mr. Jackson seems able to float effortlessly from pop to funk to rock, singing everything from gentle soul ballads to hard-driving rock and roll. And with “Purple Rain” Prince succeeded in fusing soul, gospel, rock, and funk into an idiom that transcends all color lines.[1]

The New York Times then goes on to describe Michael Jackson’s racial and sexual “metamorphosis”:

. . . Thanks to plastic surgery and cosmetics (plucked eyebrows and lots of eyeliner), his features have become more “white” and more feminine. In the “Off the Wall” (1979) album photo, he looks like a pleasant, but quite ordinary young black man; in the “Victory” (1984) album photo, he looks somehow different—delicate, pretty, almost angelic.

There follows a description of a Jackson video production called “The Triumph”:

. . . [T]he Jackson brothers appear as messianic spirits charged with leading people over the rainbow, into a better world. Floating over the earth like seraphs, the Jacksons begin to sing, and as they do all the people below — blacks, whites, and Asians — join hands and see a vision of a peacock in the sky. “The peacock is the only bird that integrates all the colors into one,” Mr. Jackson explained once, “and that is what we are trying to represent through our music.”

In view of the extremes to which the media masters have gone in promoting such filth as Prince and Jackson, it should not be surprising that there has been a grass-roots reaction even among young Whites already acclimated to rock. In Britain several “skinhead” rock bands have for the past couple of years been performing music which has expressed in very explicit lyrics the pent-up racial resentment of working-class White youth against that country’s growing hordes of non-White immigrants — and against the media-church-government establishment which favors those immigrants at the expense of White workers.

Now the reaction is spreading to America. Southern California is the home of a number of rock bands imitating Britain’s skinheads and bearing such names as “SS Patrol” and “Aryan Justice.” Performances of these bands are regularly accompanied by beatings of any non-Whites who make the mistake of being present.

Even New York has a rebel rock band, “N.Y. Skins.” Its fans, who shave their heads in the manner of their British namesakes, have trounced bystanders who looked Jewish or seemed to have homosexual mannerisms.

A group of undergraduate students at Cornell University is promoting a rock band calling itself “Skrewdriver,” and this band’s lyrics are explicit indeed. A tape cassette of Skrewdriver songs being sold by the students contains such selections as “Hail the New Dawn,” with several phrases borrowed directly from the “Horst Wessel Lied,” and “Race and Nation,” which begins:

I believe in the White race.
I believe in my country; it’s where I belong; it’s where I’ll stay now.
Race and nation, yeah, yeah.
Race and nation, yeah, yeah.
Race and nation!
This nation’s in the hands of fools,
Who are using Negroes as political tools. . . .

Note

[1] New York Times, September 2, 1984, section 2, page 1.

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Source: National Vanguard magazine, no. 102, December 1984, pp. 7–8; transcribed by Anthony Collins