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A review by a_monkey
Season of the Witch: How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll by Peter Bebergal
3.0
I really wanted to love this book. Bebergal is a lively interviewee with a clear passion for both strands of this story. But much of the narrative felt very introductory and there was a lot of padding-material rhapsody regarding the righteous riffage of rawk that I can only hope might have seemed less perfunctory to younger audiences less steeped in these sorts of cliche.
One chapter will skim through occult theory or musical ephemera so lightly as to make the book itself seem bored with the subject matter; then the next will meander deep down interesting side-roads without managing to bring things back to the matter at hand. It felt underedited — again, Mitch Horowitz, the book’s editor, is a big name in his field with a fascinating command of the subject matter — and unsure of its own remit. And it’s a hard story to fuck up, and hard to imagine any reader coming away without at least a couple of new things to think about or listen to.
But like, we know David Bowie is good. Surely a history like this can do better than that!
The top review on Goodreads points out that this is a real sausage fest, and light on the sort of arcana that anyone picking up this book should safely be assumed to gravitate toward. I’d definitely agree with those assessments. If anyone reading this can recommend any more insightful or indepth excursions into the same sort of wheelhouse, I would be all ears.
One chapter will skim through occult theory or musical ephemera so lightly as to make the book itself seem bored with the subject matter; then the next will meander deep down interesting side-roads without managing to bring things back to the matter at hand. It felt underedited — again, Mitch Horowitz, the book’s editor, is a big name in his field with a fascinating command of the subject matter — and unsure of its own remit. And it’s a hard story to fuck up, and hard to imagine any reader coming away without at least a couple of new things to think about or listen to.
But like, we know David Bowie is good. Surely a history like this can do better than that!
The top review on Goodreads points out that this is a real sausage fest, and light on the sort of arcana that anyone picking up this book should safely be assumed to gravitate toward. I’d definitely agree with those assessments. If anyone reading this can recommend any more insightful or indepth excursions into the same sort of wheelhouse, I would be all ears.