Kilroy Was Here!
During World War 2, “Kilroy Was Here” described a type of graffiti that American soldiers chalked on walls wherever they went.
In 1983, the phrase gained a completely different meaning. That’s when the band Styx developed a rock opera and concept album—complete with a ten-minute dystopian science-fiction film—in response to accusations that Styx had encoded Satanic messages in their song “Snowblind.” These accusations influenced legislation from the Arkansas State Senate that required rock records that included backward messages to be labeled with warnings. This caused Styx keyboardist and vocalist Dennis DeYoung to envision a future in which rock music was outlawed and robots served fried chicken to former rock stars. In the rock opera that resulted from DeYoung’s vision, Kilroy became the surname of Robert Orin Charles Kilroy (whose initials, completely coincidentally, spell “ROCK”), a rock musician imprisoned in the not-so-distant future by the Majority for Musical Morality.
In this episode, Garrick Bailey and Timothy Paul Jones explore the history of Styx and consider how Christians should—and shouldn’t!—engage with artistic artifacts and cultural expressions. Along the way, your intrepid cohosts talk about plexiglass toilets, backward masking, and Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority. In a special segment of “Behind the Covers,” the dynamic duo considers a song that’s been covered way too many time and begs every musician listening to the program never to cover Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” again
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Styx, Mr. Roboto, and the Metanarrative of God