Bob Larson asserts in Rock: Practical Help for Those who Listen to the Words and don't Like what They Hear that Satan created rock 'n' roll music and wrote its shadier lyrics, using rock stars as his mouthpiece, in order to exploit the innocence of unsuspecting youths, and lead them toward those sex-and-drug-dead-ends down literal "highways to Hell". Larson earnestly warns his readers that if they think they're one of the lucky ones who've listened to rock music for years and have successfully evaded its evil influence, then they better think again! For if that raunchy rock music isn't glorifying God, goes Larson's inflexible rationale, freed as it is of those pesky complications that can arise with more nuanced hues of meaning not strictly demarcated by black or white, then exactly who is it glorifying? Uh huh, nobody else but that tireless tempter, Satan. And those who listen to rock music might as well be Satan's supper. Burp.

Larson, with all the misguided sensationalistic melodrama his puny and puerile reasoning can muster, unmasks (or so he presumes) the purported demonic disguises of more than just the usual backward-masking-suspects like Black Sabbath or Led Zeppelin, who are typically attacked in vindictive tripe-tirades like Larson's, and takes maladroit aim at bands whose alleged subversive lyrics combined are about as benign as Mister Rogers, these proverbial wolves in sheep's spandex: Journey, REO Speedwagon, Styx.

Styx!

Larson ain't kidding. He's not kidding because can't anybody else besides him see how brazenly Styx christened themselves after the very name of the mythological river that flows through the fiery bowels of Hell! Shouldn't the band's name alone prove once and for all the satanic source of their music's inspiration?

That Bob Larson, itinerant evangelist, possessed enough faith in his ability to deliver that promised "practical help" for supposed victims of rock music, speaks more to his own astounding irrelevancy believing such a book as his was ever necessary in the first place. So, Bob, "those who listen don't like what they hear" do they? then stop listening to the music, Morons! end of story! no lame or condescending book by Bob Larson with its dumb, clunky, unedited, non-creative title needed! -- than it does to his imagined powers of mighty spiritual warrior persuasion. Larson spewed nonstop 200 pages of laughable illogic and called it "practical help" when in fact it's just another of his conspiracy-fueled delusions. Consider too how dated, how embarrassingly out of touch with rock's contemporary zeitgeist the book was by the time of its regrettable publication. Could Larson have honestly expected that his teenage audience, religious or not, any sixth-grader with half a brain, would consider the book's absurd premise and ridiculous paranoia anything but the hack work of the pompous propagandist that it is? That they would consider its borderline libeling of rock icons too numerous to list with anything other than profound incredulity and profounder disdain? ( )