Monday, December 10, 2007

And your masturbatory wank-off of the week is from this story on Slate.com about how "Stairway to Heaven" ruined Zeppelin:

Page had developed a new approach to rock, based on a multilayered "guitar army" (his words), ragalike uses of sevens and fives in meter, insistent drones drawn from folk music, and hypnotic, shifting cycles that swirled around you (during the elongated endings to "Celebration Day" and "Out On the Tiles" on Led Zeppelin III), and which sometimes sucked you right under (the sublime closing minutes of "When the Levee Breaks")... Does "Stairway to Heaven" possess these qualities? Absolutely not. The guitar army, yes, that is there. But this song is not just atypical of Zeppelin's music, it is unique among their epic tracks in that it privileges melodic/lyrical development at the expense of rhythmic exploration and timbral/psychoacoustic experimentation."

And all this about a song about a bustle in the hedgerow

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