John's Hatesong--Stairway To Heaven

NOTE: I got this idea from the excellent AV Club series "Hatesong", in which comedians and musicians are asked about their least favorite song and why they hate it. In this blog post, I cover my least favorite song--Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven."

Led Zeppelin is a great band. Not a good band, a great band. But "Stairway to Heaven" is an unconscionable pile of dogshit. Worse bands at least have the decency to keep their horrible songs under five minutes--Led Zeppelin cursed mediocre AOR stations for eternity with an eight minute song which is only popular because it's "poetic" by standards of the stoner metal crowd. Holy shit, "Stairway to Heaven" is the worst.

Essentially, "Stairway" is two songs. The first song is pretentious and boring. The second song has a generic yet beloved guitar solo followed by half-assed Robert Plant screams. "Free Bird" basically follows the same formula of slow song followed by fast song, but at least 1. The slow song has something musically interesting about it even if it's not great; 2. The guitar solo is tremendous.

The worst thing about "Stairway to Heaven" is that it's a fucking abysmal taint on an otherwise great album, Led Zeppelin IV. There's the pure protopunk roar of "Rock and Roll", the fun sexuality of "Black Dog", and best of all, the album has the truly epic hard rock brilliance of "When The Levee Breaks", which is probably one of the 25 or so greatest songs in the history of rock. It is an awesome way to end the album, and yet it is the song which ends Side One that lives in history and tops lists of the greatest rock songs. These lists are consistently terrible so this shouldn't be considered a major surprise. Rolling Stone, for instance, says the best Stones song is "Satisfaction" is better than "Sympathy for the Devil." But at least "Satisfaction" is a satisfying song on a dumb-rock level. "Stairway to Heaven" doesn't even do that.

The best way I can know for sure, however, that "Stairway to Heaven" is a terrible song is that even Led Zeppelin doesn't like it. Well, Robert Plant doesn't like it. As a general rule of thumb, fans side with the guitarist in bands in which a singer and guitarist dominate the spotlight (Richards over Jagger, Perry over Tyler, Townshend over Daltrey, Young over Scott/Johnson, and so on into infinity), and it seems like Jimmy Page likes the song just fine. But Robert Plant hated "Stairway" so much that he once pledged to a public radio station in Portland under the promise that they would never play the song. And this is from a guy who WROTE the song.

"And she's buying a stairway to heaven" is a stupid lyric. I have read countless interpretations of what this means and none of them make sense. Not one. But it sure does sound deep! It's about consumerism and it's about spirituality and--no it isn't. It's a random assembly of words. Which I don't mind--LZ had plenty of great, dumb rock songs. But "Stairway to Heaven" isn't a rock song. It's slow and plodding pseudo-folk that Bob Dylan had done countless times in the 60s, but Dylan at least had the decency to throw in lyrics about transients or racial harmony or something. I'm not a Bob Dylan fan but he at least did that much.

When I tried to upload Mothership onto my computer, there was a read error at the end of Disc 1 and it cut off "Stairway to Heaven" after about twenty seconds on my iTunes. God was looking over me that day, folks. Yes He was.