This never-before-seen photo provides definitive proof that "Yes, Satan had help."

Ever since the first stuffed shirt pronounced rock and roll "The Devil's Music," evil and rock have been intimately associated in the public imagination. When current metal bands like Slipknot or Mudvayne tirelessly insist that they are "evil," they're really just filling their role as the latest (and most laughable) face of the parent-scaring "evil rocker" tradition that stretches back through Black Sabbath and the Rolling Stones to Jerry Lee Lewis and even before.

The fact is, though, that rock and roll has never really been about being evil, per se. No, rock has always really been about being young - pissing off your parents, getting horny, spazzing out, and even, in moments of world-crushing seriousness, indulging in the most idealistic, romantic, and - well - moral of philosophies. Punk rock, for instance, may have scared the living shit out of tens of thousands of parents, but at its core - leaving aside atypical variants like racist Oi! - it's really music about improving the world around you and being a good person instead of being society's sold-out automaton.

Real evil - as Hannah Arendt pointed out when she famously described holocaust war criminal Adolph Eichmann as a bland middle-aged functionary thoughtlessly doing his job - is banal. Boring. Normal. And when the kids who once rocked out to Sabbath in smoky basements across America grew up, they discovered this banal evil, in an adult world all around them choked by coercion, compromise and decrepit morality. Suddenly the horrifying metallic zombie-robot protagonist of "Iron Man" seemed almost quaintly benevolent in comparison, and those kids-cum-adults were faced with a choice that had as much to do with their souls as it did with their ears: to remain faithful to the youthful thrill of rock that the "Iron Man" represented or to "pass him there" (perhaps while thinking "why should we even care?") and finally give in to the dark forces of that great aesthetic compromise of adulthood, Soft-Rock.

Because the truth is that if any one musical genre can lay full claim, if not to evil, then at least to total moral dissipation, that genre is soft-rock. Soft - not hard - rock is the true "devil's music." The blood now drained from what was once its throbbing hard-on of youth, energy, and idealism, soft-rock dwells in the flaccid, bankrupt, and sold-out nether realm of numbed complacency and total moral deflation. Soft-rock is rock compromised, corrupted, perverted, and ruined.

Want an example? Look no further than the "Satanic message" controversy that once swirled around the Eagles, those pioneers of soft-rock who happily provided the soundtrack to a whole generation's comfortable slide into narcissistic apathy. At the same time as "Hotel California," their signature song (and the anti-"Iron Man") was sweeping the national pop charts and slackening the aging face of rock, religious zealots were eager to point out that, when played backwards, the song contained lines like "Yes, Satan had help. He organized his own religion, it was delicious. He puts it in a vat and fixes it for his sons and gives it away." The backwards voice could just has easily have added "or he occasionally sells it on 12" slabs of vinyl."

On a more serious note, the central message of soft-rock is a definitively "adult" one, and is best embodied in the three little words that title the first track of the Eagles' first record; to wit, "Take It Easy." Don Henley's three-word mantra struck an immediate chord in thousands; its core complacency and anti-intellectualism contrasted starkly to much of the rock music of the time, which was still absorbed in protesting the Vietnam War, fighting for Civil Rights, distrusting politicians and money men, and being - in short - difficult. Henley's message, expanded, was "Hey man, relax! Your life is good, right? So don't worry about everything else so much. What can you do, anyway?" 17 years later, soft-rocker Billy Joel would revisit the site of Henley's radical detachment, and, attempting a similar form of soft-rock lyrical abdication, mindlessly reel off an out-of-sequence litany of the global cataclysms Henley was implying his listeners should ignore. Mentioning Evil Everyman Adolph Eichmann alongside "Lebanon," Palestine," "AIDS," "Crack," "Russians in Afghanistan" and "The H Bomb," Joel sang "We didn't start the fire. It was always burning since the world's been turning," implicitly washing his hands of any responsibility for the crassly-positioned images of point-blank executions and naked children being burned by napalm that decorated his video-shoot stage.

The great hypocrisy is that many of these soft-rock artists' self-congratulatory reflections are far from deserved. Jackson Browne, for example, is famous for both co-writing "Take It Easy," and brutally beating his wife, Daryl Hannah, while soft-rock figurehead James Taylor was hardly soft on Carly Simon. Easy-listening patriarch Glen Campbell was a notorious wife-beater, and John Denver, my favorite soft-rock artist, is semi-infamous for being unremittingly cruel, if not physically abusive, to his wife Annie Martell of "Annie's Song" fame. Not surprisingly, the pantheon of soft-rock hits is full of dubious treatises on gender, often disguised as tender love songs. Take Cat Stevens's "Wild World," for example, in which the hardened male narrator condescends to his wife even as she leaves him, sarcastically telling her "I hope you have a lot of nice things to wear," sneering "it's hard to get by just upon a smile," and finally pronouncing her a "child."

Sometimes, the jaded moral numbness in soft-rock rises to the level of campy hilarity. One such moment is the breezy "Take a Letter, Maria," by R.B. Greaves (nephew, notably, of smooth crooner and reported rapist Sam Cooke), whose swingin' Vegas-y production wraps around a song spoken from the point-of-view of a businessman dictating to his secretary the divorce letter he plans to send his wife. The song ends, of course, with the businessman hitting on the secretary. You'd hardly notice, though, for all the Herb Alpert-y horns and soulful background vocals. And then there's the AM radio station staple "Young Girl," by Gary Puckett and the Union Gap, which is hilarious in its Humbert-Humbertesque fever pitch of pederasty. To the accompaniment of swooning strings, Puckett croons to his "baby in disguise:" "my love for you is way out of line. Better run, girl!…Get out of here before I have the time to change my mind!"

"Young Girl" may sound like just another late-60's soft-rock song, but it's actually the sound of the skeletal hand of compromised decrepitude reaching out to seize, and extinguish, the light of goodness from the world, and then suddenly hesitating. Beneath its overripe surge of strings, "Young Girl" is the ultimate testament of a devoted minion of soft-rock who, in a brief and violent spasm of humanity, blurts out the most important message we could ever possibly hear about his chosen genre: "better run!" Who knew Gary Puckett would be soft-rock's secret traitor, its most effective purveyor of truth? Don't let his message fall on deaf ears. Better run.