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Soon I discovered that this rock thing was true
Jerry Lee Lewis was the devil
Jesus was an architect previous to his career as a prophet
All of a sudden, I found myself in love with the world
So there was only one thing I could do
Was ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long.
(Jourgensen et al., "Jesus Built My Hotrod")
ndustrial dance band Ministry's 1991 intensely driving dance track "Jesus Built My Hotrod" begins with this spoken word piece, which is followed by several samples of dialogue from John Huston's 1979 film adaptation of Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood. The actor Brad Dourif, as roadside preacher Hazel Motes, speaks these famous lines:
Nobody with a good car needs to worry about nothin', do you understand?
Nobody with a good car needs to be justified.
I come a long way since I believed in anything, and I come halfway around the world.
What are you talking about? Where you came from is gone, where you thought you were going to weren't never there, and where you are ain't no good unless you can get away from it.
Ministry is certainly not alone in their admiration and evocation of Flannery O'Connor's first novel: Wise Blood holds a particular sway over many of the musicians in rock and roll's extreme genre of punk and its subgenre of industrial music. From Gang of Four's 1983 song "A Man with a Good Car," to Corrosion of Conformity's 1996 album Wise Blood,1 punk musicians have found the work of Flannery O'Connor-especially Wise Bbod-to be invoking a particularly masculine, aggressive form of rebellion central to the ethos of American rock and roll.
O'Connor once explained in a letter to Andrew Lytle that "There is a moment of grace in most of the stories, a moment where it is offered, and is usually rejected____This moment of grace [in "A Good Man Is Hard to Find"] excited the devil to frenzy" (4 Feb. 1960, CW 1121). Though many have focused on such moments of grace in O'Connor's work, I believe that it is this concomitant excitement of the "devil to frenzy" in Wise Bbod which has captured the attention of so many who align themselves with the "devil's music," rock...