Since its ascendancy in the early careers of Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, and Little Richard, rock music in its various guises and through its endlessly mutating genres and sub-genres has flirted consistently with an ambiguity essential to both its cultural power and its performativity in the market-place. On the one hand, it has frequently been driven, at least ostensibly, by an aesthetic of dissent from whatever dominant ideological or cultural system is deemed to be in place. On the other hand, albeit with some notable exceptions, those involved in the generation and performance of music are invariably content to enjoy the fruit of their labors within the capitalist regime that enables their promotion and media deification. In this sense, deviance and defiance in Western popular music is generally diverted away from overtly political objectives and directed toward more ambivalent cultural targets. And in some cases—particularly within the genres of death metal, black metal, doom, and alternative country—the target has sometimes become explicitly religious, and indeed, theological.