Customer Reviews

Dionysos Rising: The Birth of Cultural Revolution Out of the Spirit of Music

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Jones traces the work and lives of Wagner, Nietzche, Schonberg, and rockers such as Jagger to demonstrate the fall of culture and the rise of rock 'n roll. From the barricades in Dresden in 1849 to Woodstock and the death at Altamont in 1969, Jones shows that classical music and culture did not die a natural death: the demise was plotted by sexual revolutionaries as a direct attack on Christian morality. The Stones said it all: Sympathy for the Devil.

My difficulty with reading this book the first time as a Yale grad student in 1994 was that I had a conservative worldview when it came to everything but music. I knew deep down inside that Jones was onto something, but I couldn't bring myself to admit it, because I was so close to my music. Now that I am a bit older and have gone back and re-read the book--and now that I am further from adolescence and from my music--I see that what he was saying is on the mark. If you start with a more liberal set of cultural assumptions about culture and the arts, you will disagree with Jones. However, if you have a basic conservative worldview and don't like this book, it's probably because you're going with your heart and not your head.

. . .but important nevertheless.

In his first book, Jones postulated that much of the decay of modernism could be traced to the sinful rationalizations of evil behavior by Freud, Jung, and others. In this volume, Jones tackles the role of modern music in this societal decay. The chapter on Wagner was very good -- although not nearly enough was said about the importance of Wagner's later work (which caused an irreparable break with Nietzche.

The chapters on Nietzche and Schonberg were informative -- but one got the impression that material was being repeated over and over. A bit of editorial direction would have helped here.

When Jones gets into modern pop music, his argument is both strengthened and weakened. Strengthened by the truly uncontrolled behavior of many of today's rock musicians (to say nothing of the lyrics). Weakened in the attempt to lump pretty much ALL jazz and pop into one category -- a serious mistake in my estimation.

All in all, however, a good book -- but not as good as his first.

A very well researched book and work connecting Wagnerian ideology and modern (and post-modern) music.

Many things are very revealing in this book and made me want to read the source material behind it. If nothing else it piques a much-needed discussion about modern music: what it is and why it isn't simply a matter of taste to dis-approve of it.

While sometimes repetitive (especially during the Schoenberg chapter) Jones does an excellent job of portraying both the composers own ideas and feelings as well as the way in which their music was accepted by the world around them.

All in all, an excellent read especially for those interested in musical history and origins.

Amazing book--informative and eye opening. You will never think about music or those who have influence in society the same way after this fasciinating read. E. Michael Jones "Rocks" --boldly revealing the truth about the music scene and Post Modernists

Not a single example is given for the accusation contained in the first paragraph of this review.
As to the material on the Bacchae - there is no inherent contradiction between what the reviewer says and what Jones says (very briefly right at the end of the book). Jones is chiefly concerned to portray impiety and is interested in particular in what Dionysus represents. He does not address the wider issues of the play but I believe nothing he says contradicts them - read again what Jones says.
Perhaps the reviewer, instead of hurling around acusations of "fuzzy" thinking (+ re. the Medjugorje review - no evidence given yet again) should try to back up what he says and address the central theses of the books he claims to have read.

The negative reviewers have a point; Jones' rough-and-ready version of history fails to fill in the gaps of the entire lives of his subjects. However, they too, in their lack of historical comprehension fail to see (the critical) something: that his basic theses, that these revolutionary men (the former reviewers do not even understand this _historical_ term!) had a profound effect on our culture, and were in turn profoundly affected by their vital deviancies, are correct. Shame on them for writing such poor reviews.

E. Michael Jones has written much on the problems of modernism and the modern world. Gropius and his cohorts have given us an architecture that is bland in the extreme. The sexual revolution has caused untold harm. I admire and respect some of his earlier work, but I really must disagree with Jones with respect to Arnold Schoenberg.

Schoenberg was in many ways a traditionalist. Despite his often groundbreaking work, and with exceptions such as the Five Orchestral Pieces, he kept Brahmsian rhythms and more or less worked in classical forms. This is especially true of Schoenberg's last period. Schoenberg did not see himself as a revolutionary. He saw himself as one carrying on the Austro-German school of composition, a school that he viewed as absolutely central to music as a whole. It was his hope that his new theories of composition would maintain the dominance of the Austro-German school for at least a hundred years.

This has not happened. If anything, Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern are the summation of the Austro-German school of composition. Schoenberg was at the heart of the Austro-German school.

Jones, in stating that Schoenberg ventured into atonality because of an unfaithful spouse, really is taking things too far. I don't think that he adequately understands Schoenberg's place in music. It is a pity because rock music and other forms of popular music have been terribly destructive as he rightly points out. Unfortunately, Jones does not posess an adequate understanding of the traditionalist roots of Arnold Schoenberg.

A friend of mine encouraged me to read parts of this book because he knew I enjoy critiquing Jones' reasoning and writing. Jones usually attempts to discredit people and ideas, for example, by arguing "guilt by association" (his book about Medjugorje is full of this). If a person (X) is acquainted with or knows another person (Y) who acts in a morally questionable or immoral manner, Jones will assume that both people (X and Y) are morally corrupt and that their ideas are completely tainted and unacceptable. Clearly this is a form of ad hominem argument. Consistent use of the "guilt by association" argument would discredit Christ himself.

Dionysus Rising is, like all his other writings, full of Jones' fuzzy thinking. My favorite portion, near the end of the book, uses ancient Greek playwright Euripides' "Bacchae" to illustrate that Dionysus is the destructive "spirit of the antichrist" who would destroy both his worshippers (Jones says Agave represents Dionysus' worshippers) and his opponents (Jones says Pentheus represents Dionysus' opponents).

There are many important points about Euripides' "Bacchae" that Jones conveniently ignores. Perhaps the most important is explained by Dionysus himself in the prologue: both Pentheus AND Agave oppose worship of Dionysus, and it is for the sin of impiety that Dionysus punishes them BOTH. Euripides' characters are not "damned if they do [worship Dionysus], damned if they don't" as Jones claims. The only "damned" characters in the "Bacchae" are damned for their impiety, their refusal to worship real (as Greeks believed) divinities.

Thus, when Agave laments "Dionysus has destroyed us" (which Jones quotes), her father Cadmus responds that she justly deserved punishment for her impiety toward the gods (which Jones conveniently fails to mention).

Jones also fails to mention that although Pentheus is convinced that the Bacchants indulge in all manner of sexual immorality, the play makes it clear that they really do not. Men are not even allowed to join the Bacchants. A virtuous woman, Tiresias explains, would not be so corrupted by Bacchanalian revelry.

I am not writing this to defend the worship of Dionysus. Obviously Christians do not believe gods of the Greek pantheon really exist. But Euripides' "Bacchae" is not entirely alien to Christian values, because Christians agree with Greeks that impiety and denying worship to Him who is truly divine are disordered and unjust. It was, in view of this moral agreement, that a Byzantine Christian of the middle ages adapted the play to focus on the worship of Christ. E. Michael Jones, however, ignores the true action of the play and, ripping portions out of context, employs them to "prove" something Euripides never wrote. It's insulting, but it's typical.

E. Michael Jones, a once-lapsed Catholic Boomer described by observers as "more Catholic than the Pope", wrote the controversial "Degenerate Moderns" as an attempt to show that modern culture is almost without exception a product of rationalised sexual misbehaviour in the writers' private lives. Despite the extreme views of his thesis, it stands as an interesting read.

To follow "Degenerate Moderns", Jones turned to modern music with "Dionysos Rising: The Birth of Cultural Revolution out of the Spirit of Music". In "Dionysos Rising", Jones argues that modernism in music has been responsible for the birth of the sexual revolution and other cultural changes. He argues that the elimination of the consonant or relatively consonant scale systems that had typified Western music up to the time of Wagner in favour of highly dissonant chromaticism meant that by the 1920s Western music was either completely intellectual (as with Schoenberg) or completely emotional (as with jazz).

In Jones' viewpoint this polarity automatically led to the growth of jazz and later rock and roll as the dominant musical forms in the West. Jazz and rock and roll, through their appeal to the emotions, are argued by Jones to have helped cause the sexual revolution. Jones also says that Nietzsche's and Crowley's aggressively self-centred "superman" philosophies were critical to the development of rock and roll and can be likened, as the book's title indicates, to the ancient Greek deity Dionysus.

There are a great many problems with "Dionysos Rising: The Birth of Cultural Revolution out of the Spirit of Music", however. The arguments about the relevance of Nietzsche and Crowley to the evolution of rock and roll date back to the first wave of anti-rock criticism in the 1960s, and thus are not really original. A more serious complaint, though, is that, as James MacMillan showed in a 2003 Guardian article, most of the important classical modernists have been extremely religious in an overwhelmingly atheistic European culture. Having once read the music of a composition by Messiaen and seen how its chromaticism combines with a totally Catholic theme, I simply cannot accept that other parts of "Dionysos Rising: The Birth of Cultural Revolution out of the Spirit of Music" can be totally accurate. This alone is enough to make Jones' claim about Schoenberg and Wagner having begun a "cultural revolution" very difficult, but even within jazz, one can consider Albert Ayler and see an intensely Christian vision (which Jones of course fails to consider because of its origins in Pentecostalism).

When it comes to criticism of rock music, Jones' thesis was very dated in 1994 in the wake of the cultural upheavals of the Bush Senior era. "Dionysos Rising: The Birth of Cultural Revolution out of the Spirit of Music" goes only as far as Led Zeppelin and their alleged "satanic backmasking" discussed many times before. Although he certainly could have done so, Jones fails to consider the much more vehemently anti-religious songs of the Sex Pistols, AC/DC and Slayer. In addition, I imagine that if he had considered thrash metal seriously Jones might have said some things that were both revealing and interesting given that extreme chromatic dissonance is a defining feature of the genre. There is also not a word on rap music and only a couple on its origins. I imagine that if Jones used the knowledge he had from his previous book he could say a great deal about how rap music created a cultural revolution in the wake of the collapse of Stalinism during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Especially interesting I think would have been a decent discussion of the effects of electric amplification and the development of synthesisers and amplified guitars. From what I can gather has probably dome much more towards a "cultural revolution" than the changes in compositional method that "Dionysos Rising: The Birth of Cultural Revolution out of the Spirit of Music" argues to be the cause.

All in all, this is a very disappointing and completely out-of-date book that makes assertions that evidence contradicts quite easily. "Dionysos Rising: The Birth of Cultural Revolution out of the Spirit of Music" is also very dated because it only considers half the history of rock and roll even up to the point it was written, with the result that Jones fails to arrive at what were when he wrote the book the limits of his thesis.