33 1/3: the decay of aura

Music: Japan: Oil on Canvas At the interview almost two weeks ago, the reporter pulled a small book out of the kind of flap-bag you'd expect to see a reporter carrying. It was Erik Davis' contribution to Continuum Book's brilliant Thirty-Three and One-Third series, an in depth analysis of Led Zeppelin's fourth album (I've always called it four, but apparently the proper album title is the unpronounceable series of sigils each band member branded himself with at Jimmy Page's insistence). The reporter said he thought I would really dig it. We has right. Davis' book is witty, smart, and wonderfully perverse. I love it.

I also picked up the volume on James Brown's Live at the Apollo and Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures, but neither are as good as Davis' clever reading of Zeppelin's famous album cover, the reputation of the band members (especially Page's rep as a minion of Old Scratch), and the way occult rhetoric works in general. His analysis of the "magic" of playing an LP (he argues rock LPs are totems and the experience of hearing them akin to spells) is right on, and I think, better than most occult practitioners I have read (and I've read many), he "gets it":

Vinyl records embody the enchanting power of modern commodities in a particularly potent way . . . . The stylus rides the groovy like a tiny rollercoaster, physically reproducing the fluctuations that shape sound from the air Analog is an analogy, then, a graven metaphor. And what analog is like is the wave, the undulating continuities that everywhere weave the natural world, from the rolling seas to the rolling hills to the petal of the rose. This inscribed analogy is also a kind of "magic." After all, analogy--this is like that--is the basic rhetorical move of spellcraft, which speaks and pictures the hidden correspondences between things, between, for example, planets and plants and the human body.

After a lovely discussion about what Walter Benjamin meant by the "decay of aura" and its relation to the rock LP of the early 1970s, Davis then moves to a discussion of the mystique of the album cover, teaching the delighted reader the basic function of occult rhetoric along the way. The following passage is probably the most lucid observation about occultism written by a journalist (!) in the last decade:

When confronted with such inscrutable signs [the Zeppelin sigils], our natural impulse is to decode them, to "know what they mean." But when it comes to [Zeppelin sigils], strict meanings are neither their nature nor their function. These sigils, and the musical sounds they announce, don't mean stuff so much as make stuff happen. And they make stuff happen by frustrating the conventional processes of meaning. And this, by the way, is one of the basic procedures of the occult. The signs on the wall are unclear, so they draw you in, like strange lights on the horizon. And by the time you see that they're nothing like you expected, it's too late: you have already crossed the threshold.

Well, he's got it right all right. I hate to admit it, but this little $10 book does a much better job explaining modern occult rhetoric than my too-long tome that costs four times as much. Davis' little treatise on Four is a delight to read and I recommended to anyone with an interest in the occult. I'm not terribly enamored by Led Zeppelin myself, though I do appreciate Four much more having read Davis book too.