The unfortunate fallout of the Bakker and Swaggart scandals continues to victimize the church—with Christ’s latest victimizer being popular music.
The news media’s reports of Jim Bakker’s one-night stand with Jessica Hahn and allegations of misuse of PTL funds came first. Then talk-show hosts Johnny Carson and David Letterman bashed the Bakkers for months, and Playboy and Penthouse pitched in with tell-all interviews and nude photo layouts. Ditto when Swaggart’s relationship with a prostitute was revealed.
Now, pop stars from the U.S. and Britain who were busy writing songs and making records during the months that Tammy wept, Jessica stripped, and Jimmy repented, are getting in their licks with songs and music videos that pound away at the disgraced preachers.
Leading the pack is heavy-metal artist Ozzy Osbourne, whose loud, abrasive rock is permeated with images of death, demons, and debauchery. Osbourne attacks Swaggart with ghoulish glee in a song called “Miracle Man”—“Now Jimmy he got busted with his pants down / repent ye wretched sinners, self-righteous clown”—and a video that has Osbourne, wearing a Swaggart mask, performing the song in front of a “congregation” of swine in a church in London. The church was “deconsecrated” before the video was made, according to a spokesman for Columbia Music Video Enterprises.
Less vicious but no less outrageous are artists such as Little Feat (“Business As Usual”—“send in the funds / keep the faith alive”), a West Coast band whose recent reunion LP was one of the year’s best-selling CD’s; Britain’s Thrashing Doves, whose song “Je$u$ on the Payroll” was released shortly after the Bakker scandal broke and is still being played on a New York rock station; and Danielle Dax, whose song “Big Hollow Man” (“with a fistful of sham”) appears on her new LP.
Anyone for a boycott of the record industry?
By Peter Crescenti.
