Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
Before I drop into this, I want to stress that I’m not asserting any kind of authority here when it comes to musical taste. It’s merely my anecdotal way of getting from Thought A to Point B.
Music from childhood has a strange way of sneaking up on you. I was sitting in my office in the very early morning hours before anyone else had come in. I pulled up a playlist on my computer that promised a random assortment of 1980s into early-’90s songs and sat back for a while basking in memories. I swear the room literally changed temperature. The air thickened. A synth pad bloomed like neon in fog. The drums didn’t snap with algorithmic precision; they thudded, slightly off-kilter, as if recorded in a warehouse that still smelled faintly of sweat, cigarettes, and possibility. Oh, if I could express the memories that flooded back through listening to those tracks.
The playlist included a little Def Leppard (wisdom teeth extraction), Journey (middle school expulsion and a summer re-read of The Lord of the Rings), Pat Benatar (a relative’s wedding), Queensryche ([censored]), and even some Wham rolling around (teen love and heartbreak) with Damn Yankees (first semester of “real” college) and both Rick Springfield and early Sarah McLachlan (the first year with my bio mom and brother) in the mix.
There was grain in it all. Not grit for the sake of grit, not lo-fi affectation, but genuine texture. Sound that carried fingerprints. Imperfection as atmosphere. You didn’t just hear those tracks—you felt them. They brushed against the skin.
But what struck me and started me thinking down this path was Warrant, the hair band of bad boys that threw out songs like “So Damn Pretty (Should Be Against The Law) .” Do you remember that one?
Come on and spread your wings / Come on and let me in / You know it really ain’t dirty / And not a sin / To have to hold / Love to squeeze / Come on and be my baby / Get down on your knees / Oh yeah, pretty, Pretty please
I laughed in the subtle darkness of my office. I remember where I was when that album came out. The next song in the playlist was Def Leppard.
Your kind of woman got a heart of stone / But watch it break when I get you alone / Take a chance, come lay down with me / Oh, I wanna make it / Slow and steady never lost the race / Don’t stop runnin’, I’m a fool for the chase / Play the game, surrender to me / Baby, I don’t wanna fake it.
Desire in that era—it just moved so differently. It was obvious, sure, and yet lust wasn’t barked at you like a karaoke threat in a club bathroom. It lived in tone, in velvet suggestion. A singer could murmur about being taken “all night,” lips parted with a sound lingering between hunger and prayer, and the imagination did the rest. (The brain is, after all, the biggest sex organ we have.) Silk, leather, the shimmer of spandex under stage lights, eyeliner streaking in sweat at two in the morning. Everyone was a little dangerous, a little androgynous, a little mythic. It wasn’t clean. It was theatrical. It was poetic, in a strange way. Sexuality walked with a strut and a wink; it seduced rather than itemized. The decadence had symbolism. Even the sleaze carried the perfume of legendary storytelling.
Compare that to the blunt force era that landed sometime after 2005, when lyrics began announcing themselves like a press release from someone who swallowed a thesaurus of bodily functions. I think of Cardi B’s lyrics as an example:
Yeah, you fucking with some wet-ass pussy / Bring a bucket and a mop for this wet-ass pussy / Give me everything you got for this wet-ass pussy / Beat it up, nigga, catch a charge / Extra large and extra hard / Put this pussy right in your face / Swipe your nose like a credit card / Hop on top, I wanna ride / I do a Kegel while it’s inside / Spit in my mouth, look in my eyes / This pussy is wet, come take a dive
Not erotic charge, but anatomical accounting. No mystery, just mechanics. The same human longing for touch and adventure, but stripped of metaphor, stripped of any poetry, flattened into something you could scroll past without even registering the pulse behind it. It’s sonic compression that is also cultural. (Hell, even our illicit affairs were different by the mid-2000s: sterile, mechanical, soulless, and cruel.)
But this isn’t some old guy’s complaint that “music used to be better.” It’s that music used to breathe. It invited you inside a world. It gave you texture. It created an unmistakable ambiance in the moment. There was room for imagination, for implication, for tension. A song could feel like a half-remembered dream—or like the kind of night you only talk about in a low voice years later, when you’re older and wiser and still not entirely sure if it really happened the way you remember.
And then there was that clip from Damn Yankees—Can you take me high enough / To fly me over (fly me over) yesterday / Can you take me high enough / It’s never over / Yesterday’s just a memory—that really made me stop the track mid-chorus and start writing: what I miss isn’t youth itself or the memories of younger years and stupid mistakes. It’s thickness. Layer. Atmosphere. The friction that gives form to meaning. The same thing I crave in spiritual practice, in art, in community. The same thing that vanishes when we sand down mystery in the name of safety or sterilize devotion into online discourse or treat creativity as a consumable product rather than a living current.
Thelema, at its best, has always been textured. It isn’t supposed to be glossy self-help dressed in Egyptian cosplay, and it isn’t a posture for people who mistake rebellion for liberation. It’s a living current that hums, and sometimes growls, with density. Not a slogan-brand spirituality for the algorithmic marketplace, not a “vibe,” but a living weave of symbol, ritual, poetry, philosophy, ecstasy, argument, experiment, and the simple human messiness of people trying to become themselves in the presence of something vast. Thelema never promised smooth edges. It promised fire. And fire is never frictionless.
This is a spiritual current that gives you a Book that reads like scripture, poetry, prophecy, private joke, and mathematical riddle all at once, and then has the audacity to say “interpret this yourself.” It offers you a Holy Guardian Angel, not as a doctrine to recite, but as a relationship to wrestle with, to court, to dance with in the wild interior chamber of your own becoming. Thelema announces that you‘re a Star and asks what you’re going to do with the gravity it exerts on life all around you.
The Work isn’t clean. It isn’t linear. It isn’t supposed to be. It’s imperfect practice, ecstatic breakthroughs, confusion at three in the morning when a line from the Book of the Law suddenly lands like lightning in the sternum. It’s the texture of failure and return, of ritual that feels profound one day and ridiculous the next, of magick that sometimes works in ways you didn’t intend and sometimes fails precisely because you tried to domesticate the Mystery.
And community—real Thelemic community—isn’t supposed to look like a sterile lecture hall or a marketing funnel. It should feel like stepping into a living temple or an underground club or an artist’s loft where incense, candle wax, chalk sigils, philosophical argument, laughter, and genuine vulnerability mingle in one charged atmosphere—and so many times we get stuck on one extreme or the other: the stuffy darkened ritual space or the frivolous hedonistic rave. Instead, you should feel the hum. You should feel the sense that people are not performing a personality, they’re risking one. They’re experimenting with being alive in a way that modern culture rarely permits. They’re building meaning with each other, not reciting it at each other.
Thelema doesn’t thrive in conditions of compression. It dies when it becomes a soundbite or a badge. It suffocates when reduced to “Love under Will” on a coffee mug, or weaponised as an identity shield for those who replace revelation with rebellion. Thelema breathes in ambiguity, in friction between perspectives, in the shared commitment to individual sovereignty that paradoxically makes genuine fellowship possible. A star isn’t threatened by another star. Texture isn’t frightened by difference.
The magick isn’t the spell. The magick is the atmosphere. The imaginative voltage. The tension between surrender and sovereignty, silence and song, solitude and communion. That’s what gives depth. That’s what gives weight. That’s the hiss before the downbeat—the anticipatory shimmer that says something holy is about to happen, and it won’t look like what you expected.
What I hear in those tracks from my adolescence is what I crave in modern spiritual life: not polish, not posturing, but presence. Mystery that doesn’t rush to resolve. Ecstasy that isn’t embarrassed to be earnest, to be poetic, to be raw. Complexity that invites participation rather than passive consumption. A faith that breathes like analog tape: warm, alive, a little unstable, gloriously human, and yet reaching for something more than human in every beat.
I found a new track by One Desire several weeks ago in Apple Music’s random “discovery” play. They have this hair-band kind of feel to their sound—a “modern ‘80s,” if you will. It’s been refreshingly nostalgic.
You’re good to be around / I love it / And it’s been good to find / That you’re just like me / So if you’re good when my day goes down / Just turn another way / I wanna go down and dirty, oh / But do I dare to let you know
If music now is rediscovering texture through vinyl revival, tape loops, modular synths, glitch, and imperfection reclaimed as art, then maybe spiritual culture can rediscover it too. Not by pretending we can rewind history, but by remembering that the sacred has always thrived in thick atmospheres—silence, tears, contradiction, laughter, awe—and in the hum of living myth through life itself.
We don’t need a retro aesthetic; we need honest complexity. We need rooms where the air vibrates because people are doing the Work, not curating it. We need texture in our gods and texture in our friendships and texture in our willingness to let life strike sparks off us again.
Press play, but not just on the music. Press play on the hum of the sacred in your ribcage—the breath, the unrefined prayer, the recitation of holy desire. Texture is how the soul remembers it has depth. Texture teaches the spirit to listen again.
And perhaps that’s what we hunger for most now: a spirituality you can feel against the skin; a song of becoming with enough grit in it to hold the light; something more than the clean explanations and platitudes of pop occultists and the polished commodification of grifters.
Give me the hiss of tape, the breath before the note, the line in scripture that refuses to explain itself, the ritual that feels like stepping into thunder. Give me communities that hum with strangeness and sincerity, where creative tension isn’t feared but cultivated, where mysticism isn’t reduced to content but cultivated as an atmosphere—and you can feel it, like bass you feel in your bones before you hear it in your ears.
We don’t need to go back to the ’80s or ‘90s to get that texture again. We need to remember that creativity—whether in music, magick, or meaning-making—thrives where there is room for mystery. For danger. For tenderness. For the emotional warmth of being human together, not just optimized individuals performing at one another across digital glass.
Press play on something imperfect. Let it pop and skip. Let it haunt through your memories. There’s a lesson in that hum: life thickens when we stop compressing it. Texture is presence. Texture is aliveness. And the world is starving for it.
Love is the law, love under will.