Leonard Cohen - "The Future"
Don't say that Leonard Cohen did not warn you :)
As an amateur student of comparative religion, I think that what we call evil is a manifestation of the good, not equal to the good ( as in Zoroastrianism ) but a shadow left when the light of good is obstructed.
Music has its dark moods, and rock has its share of "evil" themes. In the fifties, some songs were banned from airplay because of their suggestive lyrics; many of these lyrics are tame by today's standards. I remember when I was much younger, during the British invasion, the Beatles were the clean cut good boys, and the Stones projected themselves as the bad boys of rock 'n' roll ( the song "Sympathy For The Devil" being their ultimate homage to the Prince Of Darkness himself ). The Kinks, The Animals, The Zombies, etc., were somewhere in the middle spectrum of good vs.evil, depending upon the themes of their songs.
In the later decades, many songs were written to project a darker mood, and although I consider myself to be one of the "good guys", there is an interesting appeal that these songs project to which I admit I am sometimes attracted; some religions would call this temptation, but I call it "the shadow". I remember my roommate from college said that when he died he wanted to go to Hell, because that's where all the cool parties would be:) I think much of that appeal for me is a hiatus from the "sunshine and flowers" love songs that have dominated the pop music charts. Some of the most interesting lyrics come from rock artists who introspectively describe the dark forces of addiction that they have experienced, hopefully before they arrived at some kind of graceful recovery, or not...
The few songs I have included here are obviously not conclusive ( for example, a dark tune by "The Doors" is strangely absent ) but only indicative of what I am trying to convey by "dark" --- but evil ( like porn ;) is hard to describe; you know it is when you hear ( see ) it...
Hey, lighten up, I'm just trying to have some fun here ! :)
Songs From The Underground
I am writing this as a kind of postscript about the songs I selected. I usually select the first songs that pop into my head, after clearing my head as if one were preparing for a Remote Viewing session ( which I do not actually know how to do ). Looking at the songs I selected, I think I chose Santana's "Black Magic Woman" because Santana sounds like Satan, and of course the title sounds "evil". Similarly, Sade's name ( which is not the singer's birth name and is actually pronounced Shah-DAY :)probably reminded me of Saddam Hussein or sadism, and one of the lyrics of the song is "love for sale" a possible reference to pimping or human trafficking. Then the word "underground" possibly triggered the choice of a few Velvet Underground tunes. Coincidentally, the movie "Natural Born Killers", one of the most "evil" films I have ever seen, had used a couple of these songs in their soundtrack. The human mind's memory is associative, and we often do not understand the infinite links that produce what we call memory. These songs and many more appeal to the base chakra and the dark side of the mind, the aforementioned "shadow".
Cowboy Junkies - "Sweet Jane"
Lou Reed - "A Walk On The Wild Side"
Sade - "Smooth Operator"
Santana - "Black Magic Woman" ( w/ lyrics)
