Maybe Led Zeppelin isn't your music, it isn't mine. Maybe you aren't a professor someplace or other, I am not either. But this morning's twofer is how Andrew Goodwin and Slate magazine show us why the top down media is simply a vehicle for the puerile fact free rants of a small group of people whose talent is worming their way in, like a grub, rather than anything that could be taken for, well, thinking. Let alone writing.

Andrew Goodwin is not a serious scholar, and he is a smug fool who obviously hates a particular song. He's entitled to hate the song, write about hating the song, and agitating for it not being played at a concert. I think there are whole groups of recording artists who the world would be better off without. But what he feels he is entitled to get facts wrong, engage in bad scholarship, and a... hmmmm... crass? I like crass here... crass misreading of texts from a patriarchal point of view. Let me say it, Andrew Goodwin is a sexist.

Fact free low quality sub-blog standard rants being published in the well paid top down media is not noteworthy, in fact, one could argue that it has spawned blogging as a cottage industry. Confused cultural studies professors are also not noteworthy, but sometimes, alright often, I suspect it is a requirement for being a professor of cultural studies. But we don't often get someone like Andrew Goodwin who piles on the score, proving that there is virtually no aspect of logic, scholarship or good habits of thinking and argument that cultural studies, combined with the preening vanity of those who are paid to rant which cannot be dispensed with.

Let me start with the absolute error of fact, because it is on this that everything else turns. People with a jumble of letters after their name can get away with sleeping with their undergraduates, plagerism, vulgar distortions of text and so on, but making a mistake on facts removes the ability to look down on the rest of us and chant their expertise. Experts get basic facts right, in the world I live in anyway. I'm not sure that world includes the United States of America in the present, however.

"Stairway to Heaven" remains the closest thing Zeppelin has to a hit, as it was their policy not to release singles.

This is an outright lie. Not a fib, not a point of argument, just simply not true. The proof is in the numbers. While it is true that LZ did not release singles in the UK, in the United States, it did, and more over, before Stairway to heaven it had had a top 10 hit in "Whole Lotta Love" and another top 40 hit in "The Immigrant Song." Led Zepplin IV would spawn a top 40 hit in "Black Dog." These are, in the vernacular of pop music "hits."

One can say that the situation is complex, and it is the job of scholars to guide people through complexities, not simply lie about them. He could have easily, and clearly written:

It was Led Zepplin's policy to not release singles in the UK, and they did not release Stairway to Heaven as a single. It is, never the less one of the greatest hits of radio airplay, because radio stations in the then nascent format of Album Oriented Rock went into Beatles territory and played the entire song without cuts.

The irony that the band's most iconic song would not be found on a list of Billboard "hits" should not be lost on a cultural critic who is engaging in an Adorno-esque anti-kitsch rant. But it is inconvenient to his general and continual dishonesty, and would reduce the leering smirk off his face.

Andrew Goodwin, for a nobody, is very free with invective and insults, and he accuses the song of being "the index of a confused mind." Now pop lyrics, like Italian Opera and Bush Presidential Press conferences, don't have a great reputation for clarity. Many simply do not make much in the way of sense, but here is his argument:

It also doesn't help that the lyrics appear to be an index of a confused mind. If, for instance, the lady at the beginning of the song is a fool (she believes, after all, that she can buy a stairway to heaven), then why at the end of this long and winding lyrical road is she shining white light and showing us how everything still turns to gold? Some critics have turned themselves inside out trying to prove that this must be a different lady. Cultural-studies theorists will see this is an "open" text. Industry bean counters will notice that its ambiguity is the key to its popularity.

This, is flunkable even in an undergraduate context. What makes this argument craptastic? If you are going to accuse an author, not simply a text, of being "a confused mind," then you need not merely to prove that there are tortured readings of the text, because, let's face it, there are tortured readings of almost every text as people try and make things fit their preconceived notions, but that there is no clear reading of the text that is plausible. A text can still be bad art and be clear, mind you, but that many people intentionally misread a text, as I will show that Goodwin has, does not mean the fault lies in the text.

Let's quote the portions in question, shall we? I mean it's important to cite sources, even if Andrew Goodwin does not cite his, it is something that real scholars do, so that people can judge the quality of the debate.

There's a lady who's sure
All that glitters is gold
And she's buying a stairway to heaven
When she gets there she knows
If the stores are all closed
With a word she can get what she came for
And she's buying a stairway to heaven

The song does not say she is a fool, it says that she believes that money can get her what she wants, and that visual finery is gold. She's got some evidence for it too: if the stores are all closed, she can still shop. This is part of the reek of sexism in Andrew Goodwin's thrust. It isn't the first, last or only place where he privileges his... well I think we all know what he is doing and with which apendange ... position as a man. One of the reasons the song works, is that it has an authenticity of understanding about the illusion of consumerism from a woman's point of view. She's spoiled, and knows it, and believes that that will always carry her through.

Here is the song's summary on what is wrong with that:

If there's a bustle in your hedgerow
Don't be alarmed now
It's just a spring clean for the May queen
Yes there are two paths you can go by
But in the long run
There's still time to change the road you're on
And it makes me wonder

Your head is humming and it won't go
In case you don't know
The piper's calling you to join him
Dear lady can you hear the wind blow
And did you know
Your stairway lies on the whisperin' wind

The first verse is a fairly clear metaphor for feminine sexual arousal, pregnancy or menstration, or all of the above. All accounts are that the members of Led Zepplin were engaged in intensive field research in that area. The in the symbolism of the song, visual things are false, "all that glitters is gold," and audible things are true: bustles in the hedge row, forests echoing with laughter, whispering winds. It isn't an unsual trope in song, which is, after all, the home of people who believe in sound. Bob Dylan's "the answer my friend, is blowin' in the wind" is another famous example of this.

Goodwin laughs off the marriage song aspect, which is a good indication that he is busy laughing off women in general, since the song makes it fairly clear that it is written from the point of view of a young man trying to convince this princess that while sequins and shiny things may glitter, her destiny is to be in a mystical and romantic union. It's definitely a sophisticated guy trying to get laid argument, but it wouldn't be the first that worked either... I am pretty sure there have been others since then too.

There walks a lady we all know
Who shines white light and wants to show
How everything still turns to gold
And if you listen very hard
The tune will come to you at last
When all are one and one is all
To be a rock and not to roll

I know it is a reach in this day and age to expect any one to read something so obscure as the myth of Midas... ummm right, sorry, too catty. This verse is a clear illusion to Midas' curse, where the fact that everything he touched turned to gold, and a refutation of the lady's belief. She wants to believe that even after people have heard the truth that is pantheistic and primal, that her glitter will still be taken as gold.

The lady then, isn't a fool, nor is there any need to invoke there being two, but instead an object that the narrator is pointing to in explaining to a third person why she should avoid the road of visual glitter and follow the piper that calls... which is to say the fertility bustle in her aforementioned hedgerow...

It really isn't this hard, it just, like a dirty joke, takes a good deal longer to explain that it does to get. Simple summary: "See her over there with Armani outfit? She's a mammal just like us, so let's just get it on and dispense with the glitter."

In otherwords there is a simple, fairly clear, present in the text, reading, one that when checked against the life of the author and his, umm, hobbies, makes perfect sense. It's tribal sex rock, and only someone willfully trying to presence himself in the other won't understand that. You've got to be really pphallocentric to not get a really phallocentric reference like the piper calling a woman to join him, you know?

So where are we. Well first it is pretty clear that Andrew Goodwin does not care about facts, the mess up about hits shows that. This strips him of the privilege of credentials, since those were supposedly granted for mastery of facts. Then he turns the corner into outright patriarchy, that is a pervasive misreading of things which could only be done from the male point of view. Now the original text isn't going to win any feminist theory awards, but it is egalitarian in its celebration of naturalistic lust over consumerism and money.

One of the long standing arguments of cultural studies, one of the good ones, is that there are male artists who, by having an overt sympathy for the feminine point of view, engage in a kind of seduction. This androgynous quality, seduction by proving chameleon like, is something noted in say, scholarship on Chopin and Sartre. The ability for a man to show he has, one some level, listened and reflected the female, is, paradoxically seductive to him as a male. To miss this about this song is... well you fill in the blanks.

Andrew Goodwin is a clod, he could very easily have ridiculed a production of electric pop culture and studio glam rock manufacture, a group loaded with glamor as a substitute for gold, for promoting simple naturalistic hedonism, when in fact the band members were the ones who were using words to get what they wanted from otherwise closed doors. He could also have noted the irony that by defying the conventions of the music business in not releasing a pop single, that this message became a radio standard that is a good candidate to be the first billion-air song some time around 2300...

Anyway, I am not a professor, but I have passed a class or two that required interpretation of text or artifact, and getting things like historical context wrong, basic sale price of a painting wrong, clear literary allusion wrong and then proceeding to launch into a tirade against a well known work... well it won't go over very well.

But that's cultural studies and the top down media. Facts? Scholarship? Good writing? What? Are? Those? Instead all that matters is being able to stand up and bellow at people from a podium.

sigh.

It's pretty bad when we can't even interpret "Heh baby! let's fuck!"