Stephen H. Webb has some interesting remarks in his review of Christopher Partridge’s book, The Lyre of Orpheus:

Partridge seems hardly aware of how pathetic it is that heavy metal has devolving into specialized sub-genres like death, thrash, sludge, and drone, each with their own code of conduct and their own lines of fashion accessories.

Without Christianity, rock’s agitations become spume and splutter, which suggests that rock cannot be essentially transgressive. Transgression is always derivative, secondary, reactive, and thus essentially conservative, secretly in service to the hegemonic order it seeks to overthrow. Dissonance is dependent on the natural appeal of harmony, just as Satan’s activities are possible only due to God’s providential permission. That is why rock, when it tries to be overtly blasphemous, ends up being overly impressed with its own puerile histrionics.

Rock is a threat to Christianity not because it is essentially transgressive, but because it too often acquiesces to modernity’s distancing of art from truth. The result is a mindless numbing of the emotions …

The honesty of rock is in its vocal yearning, not its electric thrashing. The alternative to transgression is transcendence, not docile submission to social order. Rock was born out of blues, folk and Gospel, not sexual aggression and gender bending. There is nothing inevitable about rock’s demise, although it might take a miracle for rock to rediscover its voice.