On a recent podcast, my Special Guest Ben Rubin described how he could no longer bear to listen to Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon. What he now finds untenable are lyrics like “Quiet desperation is the English way” which, with Awake hindsight, he realises is a sly invitation towards existential despair. Here a bestselling album - 45 million copies sold - is being used to programme its audience into that state of apathetic surrender which our Dark Overlords find so beneficial to their controlling agenda.
Obviously, if you are still a Normie, this is going to sound like hogwash. “C’mon. It’s just Roger Waters being Roger Waters. He’s just riffing on Henry David Thoreau’s ‘The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation’. You’re reading too much into this.”
Oh. Am I?
One of my jobs in my twenty-five or so years in the mainstream media was as a music critic. I reviewed hundreds of rock and pop albums, attended many dozens of gigs (including about 15 Glastonbury festivals) and interviewed any number of stars. I shared cocktails at 2am with Jimmy Page in the Beverley Hills Hotel and was so drunk when he agreed to do the interview immediately afterwards that I could barely ask a coherent question. I got abused as a ‘tad journalist’ by Lou Reed. I believed - though perhaps I shouldn’t have - Jon Bon Jovi that the secret of staying faithful to his wife on tour was regular masturbation. I smoked some of Tricky’s predictably excellent weed. I innocently asked Tracy Chapman whether she had a man in her life. (lol). I found Beck away with the fairies. I attended the excruciating premiere of ‘Sir Paul McCartney’s’ Liverpool Oratorio. I pissed off Dave Gilmour by telling him my favourite Floyd album was Atom Heart Mother. I saw REM’s legendary Bingo Hand Job gig. I took Stephen Fry to see EMF play Unbelievable…
But just because I’ve been there, done that, doesn't necessarily mean I had the slightest clue what was going on behind the scenes. In fact I know I didn’t. I was, as most of us are, under a spell. Also, I believed like the reporter in The Man Who Shot Liberty, that ‘When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.’
When you’ve been so deeply immersed in pop culture for so long it becomes hard to quit the addiction. All these heroes - Bowie, Led Zeppelin, Radiohead, Underworld, Eat… - have written the soundtrack to your life. Rejecting them is like discarding parts of yourself, your personal history, some of your most treasured memories. Which is why not just Normies but even many Awake people are so resistant to the notion that, yes, even the music industry is part of the psyop. Indeed not just even the music industry but most especially the music industry. It exists to grab you, sneak under your skin, at the very moments in your life when you are most susceptible: you’ve just broken up with your partner; you’re off your face on drugs; it’s your birthday; you’re bored; you’re cruising down the highway and your brain is wide open. That is why music is so particularly valued by the Dark Overlords. They’re not doing it because they love you, you realise?
Most of us who’ve been down the rabbit hole know this - up to a point. We know how dangerous, evil and manipulative the music industry is. We know what went down at those P-Diddy parties. We know that Lady Gaga is - probably - a bloke. And that so - probably - is Taylor Swift. We’ve probably read Dave Goldman’s Weird Scenes Inside The Canyon, which blew the whistle on the CIA-manufactured origins of the entire Peace & Love West Coast music scene. We might even suspect that Paul is dead…
But still far too many of us supposedly Awake types want to have our cake and eat it. We are afflicted with what I call ‘But Not Kate Bush’ Syndrome. That is, we perfectly well accept that pretty much every star in the musical firmament is a mind-controlled, soul-selling stooge of the beast system. Just not our personal favourite artistes who are magically exempt because their music is so great it couldn’t possibly have been written for them by the Tavistock Institute and because they have such compelling backstories that they must be genuine talents who emerged naturally, rather than having been created by a committee of mind-bending technocrats run by the Illuminati.
I understand this impulse for I too would like to believe that there is nothing weird and sinister and occultist about our Kate. And I’d dearly like to believe the same thing about David Bowie, not least because of the hours I invested of my precious youth getting into him. My brother Dick and I made it one of our projects. Obviously we already liked Ashes to Ashes because it was the top of the charts at the time with that cool video on the beach featuring various New Romantics dressed as nuns and the line we mistakenly thought said ‘I ain’t got no money and I ain’t got no hands’. But we had to work hard on some of the earlier stuff. “Yeah, I really like Life On Mars and Oh You Pretty Things but I’m not such a fan of Quicksand or Bewlay Brothers.” “Don’t worry, you’ll get there. I think Bewlay Brothers is now almost one of my favourites.”
But I think we need to be honest with ourselves, we Awake Bowie fans and judge our hero according to the same rigorous criteria we apply to all the other conspiracies out there. Are we really to believe - honestly? - that the guy who began one of his songs ‘I’m closer to the Golden Dawn/Immersed in Crowley’s uniform” and concluded, gnostically, that ‘Knowledge comes with death’s release’ was one of the goodies?
There’s a reason why we pored over those gnomic lyrics. Because they were meant to be pored over and mulled upon and eventually absorbed into our vulnerable adolescent consciousness. It wasn’t an accident that they messed with our heads and made us feel weird and rebellious and dissatisfied and alienated. That was the whole point.
Same goes for Pink Floyd. I’ve watched so many documentaries about the Floyd, read so many books, listened to so much of their music that of course I can give you the fanboi/muso chapter-and-verse on their early experimental days at the UFO club, the tragic tale of Syd, the miraculous marketing power of their sleeve designers Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell and so on and on through the floating pigs and on to The Dark Side of the Moon which (if you don’t count The Bodyguard soundtrack, which I don’t) is still the world’s biggest selling album after Michael Jackson’s Thriller and AC/DC’s Back in Black. But so what? Given what we know about the music industry how are we to trust a single word of what it tells us about itself? Remember that quotation about printing the ‘legend.'
It’s the stuff They don’t - and won’t - tell you about the music industry that we should focus on, not the stuff They put out in press releases and back-slapping, chin-stroking retrospective documentaries on the Sky Arts channel. Obviously it’s rarely going to be spelled out for you, except in stuff that occasionally slips through the net like the obscure interview where Dylan ruefully describes his pact with the ‘chief commander.’But it’s not as if They don’t offer plenty of clues - because of that Satanic/Luciferian obligation They have to ‘reveal the method’ and to hail the object of their true allegiance.
That Wish You Were Here cover, for example. Designed by Hipgnosis (geddit?). What’s all that about, do you reckon? Well the official narrative, of course, encourages you to focus on the crazy creative genius of Storm Thorgerson, or the difficulty of setting up the shot with the stunt actor in the flame retardant costume. But the real meaning is obvious when you see it, as someone kindly explained to me in the comments on my Substack the other day.
The deal-sealing handshake with the flaming man? Yup. It’s about the same thing Bob Dylan is on about in that interview I mentioned. And the same thing Freddie Mercury is singing about in Queen’s most famous track Bohemian Rhapsody. Sure, Bohemian Rhapsody spent weeks at number one because it’s incredibly catchy with some sublime vocals from Freddie and some great guitar breaks from Dr Poodle Hair Badger Botherer and its air of cod-operatic, kitsch sophistication. But it also got there because that’s what They like to do: to shove their clandestine message right in your face so as to mock you with the obviousness you are yet too stupid to understand.
“Beelzebub has the devil put aside for me.”
Gosh. What can that possibly mean?
We all know that to get a record deal you have to sell your soul. It’s a part of music lore.
But the reason it’s part of music lore is because they want the secret hidden in plain sight. That is, by telling you about the pact with the devil, they want to make the mature, discerning, rational part of your brain to go: “Well of course they don’t mean literally a pact with the devil. It’s just a trope. A metaphor. Goes back to the days of Robert Johnson etc. etc.”
Meanwhile, selling their souls to the devil is exactly and, yes, literally what all successful musicians have done in return for their career and to which they cannot help alluding now and again because, as they often come to appreciate more as they get older - see eg late career Johnny Cash - it’s not necessarily the most edifying or long-term beneficial of exchanges.
Before he was cast out of heaven for leading one third of the angels in rebellion, Lucifer was in charge of music. Or so I’ve heard and it does make sense. It’s no accident that Stairway to Heaven sounds so moreishly addictive. Nor Hotel California. That music was personally supervised by his Satanic majesty, the god of this world, patron of axe maestros from Jimmy Page to Keith Richards, and deliberately, through sundry cunning wiles and much diabolical skill, made so attractive in order to make you want to take more drugs and have more sex with lots of unsuitable partners.
That’s the devil’s job. To entice you towards sin. And he’s really, really good at it. If sin were easy to resist we’d have no trouble resisting it. Unfortunately, sin is very closely aligned with all the things our fleshly bodies find most agreeable and which, by spooky coincidence, pop music tends to celebrate: rhythmically-enhanced hedonism, gluttony, profligacy, druggy abandon, alcohol abuse, degeneracy, rebellion (let’s not forget who the first rebel was…) and, of course, lashings and lashings of sex.
“How could something that feels so good be so wrong?”, people are wont - half tongue-in-cheek - to enquire. But the answer is contained in the question.
So, all those ‘fundamentalist’ Christians we were encouraged to mock were right all along. Pop music is the work of the devil. Once you understand this, everything about the music industry - the characters it promotes, the behaviour it encourages, the effects it has on you - makes so much more sense.
I sometimes used to wonder, for example, why all the music I used to love listening to - and I really did have excellent, recherché taste: In The Aeroplane Over The Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel, that kind of thing - made me sort of happy but never, ever so happy as I would have liked it to have made me. There was always something in it that was slightly off, something that said: “Yes, of course you are enjoying this but you realise the best is over, don’t you?” You get this feeling especially, I find, with my all-time favourite rock band Led Zeppelin. And the reason for this, I suspect, is explained in this superb essay:
https://ursulabielski.substack.com/p/stairway-to-hell-the-spiritual-and
by Ursula Bielski - Stairway to Hell: the Spiritual and Cultural Costs of Led Zeppelin.
Bielski is a Christian, a Catholic more specifically, so is equipped to understand the supernatural warfare being waged against us through songs like Stairway to Heaven which, it appears, may have been dictated to Robert Plant from the spirit realm.
It was 1970, and Jimmy Page was sitting in an old country house with bandmate Robert Plant, a fire flickering in the hearth. A storm rolled in outside, the wind rattling the windows, shadows shifting in the corners. The two musicians had been writing, playing, waiting for something to emerge. And then, without warning, it came.
Robert Plant, in a trance-like state, picked up a pencil and began to write. Words spilled onto the page as if they were being whispered into his ear. He barely remembered thinking them, barely recognized his own hand as it moved.
He pushed the page over to Jimmy. In the flickering light, Page read the words aloud:
"There’s a lady who’s sure all that glitters is gold…"
Later, the two would try to describe how the song—“Stairway to Heaven”--was not composed in the usual way. It was not labored over or refined.
It was received.
The Devil, infamously, cannot create (which is God’s prerogative), all he can do is imitate. I wonder whether perhaps that isn’t the problem I’m trying to identify with the work of Led Zeppelin. It’s a simulation of divine ecstasy, but it’s not the real thing.
There may be other factors at play too, here, one of them being pitch. We discuss this on my podcast with Conspiracy Music Guru, one of several Awake musicians to have noticed that music tuned to 432 Hz has warm, healing qualities whereas the current industry standard of 440 Hz unsettles you. And if you really want to go down the frequency rabbit hole, I commend this eye-opening essay by Agent131711, but read this one first. In it, Agent131711 argues that the chord sequences in different music genres are calculated to cause specific ill-health problems in their target audiences. Hip hop is designed to destroy your immune system; rock and country is designed to cause cardiovascular disease and cancer. Apparently. It’s a good read anyway.
Anyway, to return to the point from right at the beginning: yes, I agree with Ben Rubin that there is nothing innocent about albums like Dark Side of the Moon. Anything that is allowed to get that big - same rule applies to movies, books, celebrities - does so with the full approval of our Dark Overlords. And what is good for them is definitely not good for us.
Does that mean, then, that when Roger Waters sat down and wrote that line ‘Quiet desperation is the English way’ he was going ‘Mwahahahaha! This will destroy them, those poor ignorant hippie fools! How little they understand our Satanic masterplan!’? No, of course it doesn’t. Rather I think the creative process here was not dissimilar to the one that went into the composition of Stairway To Heaven. Once artistes have made the Pact - as Waters would certainly have done by this stage of the Floyd’s career - they tap in to a kind of Satanic consciousness. It gives them a creative helping hand (the devil, after all, has all the best tunes) but at the same time it exerts a slily corrupting influence and steers the product in a particular direction.
It’s what people don’t understand about conspiracies. The line you’ll often hear expressed by Normies is: “But look, people just aren’t that competent. No one could ever arrange a conspiracy on such a scale.” And they’re right, up to a point. No one human could…
