FeedsMusic Elitists Try to Ruin Music for Everyone
Led Zeppelin recently had a reunion concert for which a million people attempted to get 20,000 seats. They are also considering a whole reunion tour. Instead of celebrating this fact, Andrew Goodwin over at Slate wondered if they would play Stairway to Heaven, or as he put it, "the song that almost destroyed them". One might be taken aback by such a bold statement - Stairway to Heaven is the most requested and most played song ever on FM radio in the US, all despite it never being released as a single and is the best-selling sheet music ever.
Why does Andrew Goodwin (who is a professor of media studies at University of San Francisco, clearly known the world 'round as a bastion of music criticism) hate Stairway so much? According to the article:
It also turned Zeppelin into a joke. It was "Stairway" that branded Zeppelin as spaced-out mystics. It was "Stairway" that drove them to the madness of the absurd fantasy sequences in their movie The Song Remains the Same. It was "Stairway" that sold them to a mass audience that found it amusing to hold lighters aloft throughout the song, perhaps under the understandable impression that they were attending a concert by the Moody Blues.
For someone who supposedly knows Led Zeppelin well enough to teach a class about them and write a book about them, these statements seem remarkably uninformed. Led Zeppelin were spaced-out mystics long before Stairway and their spaced-out mysticism was an integral part of their music. One need not look any further than the song before it: Battle for Evermore, a bizarrely constructed reference to the Lord of the Rings, where "the ringwraiths ride in black". Lighter-waving fans are no stranger to Led Zeppelin, or other bands in the genre and they didn't originate in Moody Blues concerts, but the Doors and Woodstock.
He later says that the song is not only atypical, but unique in that it "privileges melodic/lyrical development at the expense of rhythmic exploration and timbral/psychoacoustic experimentation", never mind the very rhythmic and psychoacoustic ending of the song, nor the melodic and lyrical songs that preceded Stairway (Tangerine comes immediately to mind). In fact, Stairway is such a perfect piece of Led Zeppelin because it beautifully mingles their best qualities - mysticism, amazing, yet nonsensical lyrics, great melodic development, rhythmic exploration. Stairway captures a little bit of everything.
We can see a bit of the true reason behind this Zep enthusiast's hatred of Stairway when he says, "It was "Stairway" that sold them to a mass audience..." There's nothing so unusual about Stairway, other than the fact that it was immensely well-liked by a wide range of people. Certainly, other Zep songs have been top hits, but Stairway is in a class all its own. Mr. Goodwin hates that fact, as all music elitists do. The Decemberists just turned to shit once they signed with Columbia. The Shins have been a bunch of sellouts since they were on Garden State. People who became Ben Folds Five fans after Brick just aren't as cool as those who dug Philosophy and Underground. The list can go on and on.
This attitude is not just elitist, but pig-headedly wrong and hurtful to the artists elitists supposedly love. Artists, one can I think safely assume, want people to hear their music. They also want people to like their music and to pay to listen to it and attend their concerts. Being wildly popular should be celebrated, not condemned as the death knell for a band who has just begun to rise. The fact that there were 4 more albums after Stairway, each of which reached platinum, goes to show that Stairway did not come close to ruining Led Zeppelin. Like most commercial successes, Stairway turned a much larger audience on to Led Zeppelin and created new fans. Elitist snobs who whine about their bands' commercial successes should rather celebrate them as one of the bands' best accomplishments.
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Comments from site editors have a darker background than comments from everybody else.Once this blog gets as popular as Stairway to Heaven I'm going to say that it's ruined and a sell out. Of course, by then, God willing, it will be.
To be fair though, when something gets very popular it can get pretty horrible. Just look at Digg and Reddit, not to mention the cult around Apple.
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Digg and Reddit are a bit different, as their content depends entirely on who uses them.
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Yes, but you can make the transition to other situations. Going to concerts, finding like-minded listeners, etc. It's also a bit of a social thing, you know?
But regardless I think that this holds true for 90% of the situations.
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Nice insight, James!
certainly the music industry does a fine job of pushing complete crap by soulless hacks all the way to the top of the charts, but that doesn't exclude the opposite from being true as well.
Sometimes talent and quality rise to the top and gain mass popularity on their own merits: It's good, so lots of people like it. That seems reasonable. Whereas the opposite, "this music has a limited audience, therefore it must be good," doesn't always ring so true.
Wouldn't it be interesting to apply this "elitist" theory to literature, given that many classics still outsell contemporary works. (Most book-sales lists exclude classics from their rankings).
I can't say that I don't sympathize a bit with Goodwin, however. For example, I hate Lance Armstrong. His success and popularity turned a small-time but beautifully bohemian-dominated sport like cycling (in the U.S. anyways) into a horde of clueless weekend warriors and egomaniacs.
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Likewise, after worshiping Vladimir Putin as a saint became so popular I find that I just can't do it anymore. The field is just so crowded.
(is anybody actually taking me seriously here? If so, who the fuck are you and what planet did you grow up on?)
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I love you Michael.
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OK, I don't really hate Lance Armstrong.
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perhaps you missed the latest controversy swirling around Putin
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/19/man-of-the-year/
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I don't think I would ever compared somebody that looked like this to something from Harry Potter, but then again, I don't really want to die from polonium poisoning. (okay, I kind of do, but only it's from Putin)
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I call your sinister looking KGB Putin and raise you one shirtless fishing Putin
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Good one Pat. The only review that I read on the Zepplinn kickoff mentioned specifically that Plant kept his shirt on.
For which we are all tearfully grateful.....
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