Where do you come from, where do you go? Satanic music with a guy named Joe?
This post is going to have a little religion and a little fireside chat about how society views addicts.
When I was in junior high this guy came to the little Southern Baptist Church where my family attended. He was in his early twenties and his reason for being there was to warn against “the Satanic messages that were laced in and through popular music and rock and roll to warn us of the demonic influences we’d open ourselves up to.”
Stay with me y’all.
Sure he gave the expected 1980’s Christian response to artists like Ozzy Osborne and KISS or as he put it, “Knights in Satan’s Service.” He also told us AC/DC stood for “Anti-Christ/ Devil Comes.”
I guess you could say he had a real appreciation for acronyms and initialisms.
After getting us on the edge of our seats with images of gore and sweat and tattoos and long hair he brought down the hammer.
“The Eagles,” he said, “ have a song called Hotel California and it is straight outta the pit of hell.”
(If that last sentence, but for a moment, made you think about late 80’s West Coast Rap I really want to hug you RIGHT NOW!)
I digress...
The Eagles.
Hotel California.
The. EAGLES.
Now I’m a 45 year old fella and I have to be honest...
Every time I here that opening lick of that song my body does a little tick, as if there’s a short circuit somewhere buried in my receptors or synapses (whatever the brain terminology is) before I remind myself that that dude probably didn’t know what he was talking about. He was teaching something someone taught him and he thought what he was doing was good and pure and right.
In the early 1900’s heroin became illegal after some people died using it. Before that time it was commonly prescribed for several reasons. It was a sort of cure-all. Once it became illegal people who were hooked did whatever they had to do to get what they had to get to feel how they needed to feel.
A massive campaign was spread across our great land to paint these people as “deviant, crime-prone, weak-willed, moral failures.”
Think about that right now.
How do you view addicts today?
What are the images that come to your mind?
Not the ones you’d share in public... The ones that hit right in your gut the second you hear the word?
Do any of the above words from over 100 years ago pop up?
I guess what I’m getting at is some things we are taught early on are hard to shake and the work we have to do to change some of our perspectives is important work.
After all, The Eagles y’all.
Our Kickstarter with Ten/28 is up and ready for your money. We gotta crew up to make this documentary.
Check it out. Share it. Post it. Back it. Change your view of addiction.
