Q:
What is wrong with rock-and-roll music?
A:
And the answer is, what’s wrong with drinking? Drinking is not wrong in itself. You could take a little bit of drink, sometimes it’s a mitzvah too. Make a l’chayim, make kiddush. But when you get drunk on music, then that’s a vice.
Rock-and-roll is a kind of music, the way it’s practiced is to make the participants violent. Not only violent in throwing bottles at each other and causing sometimes even loss of life. By the way, more life has been lost from rock-and-roll gatherings than from nuclear installations. All the people with “no nukes” on them have killed more people in rock-and-roll than nuclear installations. So rock-and-roll should be abolished. No rock-and-roll. More people are killed in rock-and-roll concerts than any other kind of gathering.
But not only that, it’s violence against morals, violence against decency. The rock-and-roll people are being trained by this violent music to throw off all inhibitions. A human being, however, cannot function without inhibitions. You must be decent. You must be temperate. You must have restraint in order to be happy. And the rock-and-roll people are all unhappy. They’re all intensely unhappy. The fact that they come is only to seek relief from their unhappiness, because happy people don’t go there. They don’t need it. And the people who are sad, who are distraught and are looking for something in life they can’t find, so they go to wild places, and they go crazy for a while, and they get drunk on music.
And therefore, what’s wrong with rock-and-roll? Everything is wrong with rock-and-roll music.
(February 28, 1985)
