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A review by tittypete
Season of the Witch: How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll by Peter Bebergal
2.0
Meh.
In this book occult is a vague word. It means magic, Golden Dawn philosophy, theosophy, spacemen, satanism, acid trips, prog-rock and having a pyramid on your album cover. It seems anything can be occult as long as it's not a song about love. And even then that could be construed as some magical otherness that is now certifiably counter-culture and occult. My main complaint I guess is that every topic broached in this book is super duperficial, a passing mention with tenuous ties at best to some cloudy definition of occultness then on to the next barely connected example. Academic it is not. The whole thing seems to be a comment made in passing. I could have used an in depth primer on the history of occult thought and it's non-musical impact before reading that "Yes albums were occult, period."
On the potentially positive side, I am now listening to Yes and Hawkwind.
In this book occult is a vague word. It means magic, Golden Dawn philosophy, theosophy, spacemen, satanism, acid trips, prog-rock and having a pyramid on your album cover. It seems anything can be occult as long as it's not a song about love. And even then that could be construed as some magical otherness that is now certifiably counter-culture and occult. My main complaint I guess is that every topic broached in this book is super duperficial, a passing mention with tenuous ties at best to some cloudy definition of occultness then on to the next barely connected example. Academic it is not. The whole thing seems to be a comment made in passing. I could have used an in depth primer on the history of occult thought and it's non-musical impact before reading that "Yes albums were occult, period."
On the potentially positive side, I am now listening to Yes and Hawkwind.