In the final chapter of his book Backwards Masking Unmasked, called “My Song”, Jacob Aranza describes how he became so virulently opposed to rock music. When read on the surface it has a charm that makes you think this young man was stuck in a bad school that needed to transform in some way; Jesus was apparently that way.

After describing how he got into rock music via his brothers and sisters (who dropped out of school) and drugs (he says, “Psychedelics were in and words like ‘far out, heavy, solid, and wow’ were in their prime. It seemed the whole world was taking acid, snorting THC, and dropping mescalin.”) and the hippie lifestyle (“All the one-time flower children were so stoned that all they could see was flowers.”), he talks about the school he went to.

From the book:

As if all this wasn’t bad enough, they had just started integration in the schools. Because out school was 90-percent Mexican a lot of integration was to come its way.

By the time it was all over we ended up with a school that was 60 percent Mexican, 39 percent black and one percent white! Our school already had problems with drugs, sex and violence. All the integration did for our school was put the match to the fuse of a bomb thatwas already there.

We began to have race riots. All the blacks were running around saying, “We’s (sic) want black power.” The Mexicans were running around saying, “Hey dude, we want Chicano power.” The whites were just running around saying, “We want OUT!”

While Aranza doesn’t say which group he thinks he belongs to, I think it’s fairly apparent he counts himself in with the whites.

Aranza goes on to tell how a preacher man came to the public school and converted 1000 of the 2500 students to christianity.

Our school turned into a rivival center! Instead of carrying knives and chains, they began to carry Bibles! You could see T-shirts throughout the classrooms that read “Read your Bible. It will scare the hell out of you!”

It’s apparent that Aranza took that to heart. His whole way of writing and talking to people is all about scaring you to Jesus. Hardly a smooth sell. In my view, and memory, this might have brought you to the well for a drink, but didn’t sustain you for very long.

As with all scare tactic campaigns, whether it be regarding drugs, sex, politics, or music. It always seems to backfire. Once you find out that the view that has been forced on you is a tad paranoid and unreal, to say the least, you often turn against it and experiment even harder.

In that way, I think I have Aranza to thank for pushing this shit so hard at me and my fellow schoolmates. I mean, seriously, if it wasn’t for him it would have taken me a few more years ot find out about Iron Maiden, Led Zeppelin and the like. I probably wouldn’t have gotten into listening to them at such an early stage, had I not wanted to rebel against everything that my school was trying to shove down my throat.

So, thank you Jacob Aranza for helping me to find all of “Satan’s glory” in the rock music I listened to in the ‘80’s and all the “secular” music I listen to today.