 Mad at the World Mad at Sex?
by Brian Q. Newcomb
Everyone from Madonna to
Color Me Badd seems to want to "sex you up" and Roger Rose is once
again Mad at the World. On the band's fourth album for Alarma Records, Boomerang,
he asks "Isn't Sex a Wonderful Thing?" "The song is a statement," said
Rose recently at his label's Southern California office, "but it's
actually more of a question. I have known a Christian who had been
sexually molested when she was younger, and I had heard how this
created all these emotional scars in her. I thought sex is supposed to
be a wonderful thing, I had even written that in 'I Don't Wanna Go
There,' 'But wait til you marry to go there.'
"I know sex is God given and
it's supposed to be wonderful, but is it really wonderful? Fathers
molest their daughters, marriages fall apart because of affairs or
incompatibility -- I know selfishness and sin are the actual causes but
sex plays a part in there. In the song I talk about the bad side of sex
as it's been misused in our world, and in the last verse I go back to
the idea that it's given by God, but I don't answer the question. I'll
answer it now: sex is a wonderful thing if it follows God's rules --
which is purity before marriage, fidelity after marriage -- where sex
gets God's blessing. I think sex isn't a wonderful thing when it's
outside of God's blessing and plan."
Mad at the World debuted the
song during its performance at Cornerstone '89, and the song was
scheduled for release on its 1990 release, Seasons of Love.
Rose says, "The record company thought it was too controversial, they
thought the only thing anyone would remember is the hook line which
says 'isn't sex a wonderful thing?' People might assume I was promoting
promiscuity, and not get the point. That whole record was trying to
right a wrong, I tried to respond to people I had seen write off the
whole concept of love as 'that was that theory I had when I was a kid,
when I used to think that love will make you happy, and I believed in
such a thing as true love. But, I've since had a few relationships and
I've come to believe that love is a joke, and love rips you off.'
"I tried to write about
every aspect about love that I could think of, including the good and
the bad, the broken hearts that come. I wrote it to myself and to
others as a reminder that the only way to find real love is to keep
feeding your faith that love will be there."
For Rose the important
ministry Mad at the World offers to fans of today's rock scene is this
kind of corrective to what he considers erroneous and even dangerous
thinking. "We've always taken this or that aspect of life or attitudes
or morality and tried to talk about the world's redefining of it, and
then talk about a godly or Christian perspective. We've tried to do it
in a way that doesn't isolate non-believers, we try to do it in a way
that's intelligent enough, honest enough, real enough for people to
relate to whether they're Christian or not. I've never tried to shape
my lyrics for a members-only club."
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