My dear friend Linda, a/k/a “the hippest chick in Utah,” has annoyed me greatly. She is, as devoted followers of this blog will remember, a music critic for The Standard-Examiner, and the occasional weekend dj on KRCL (See The Nasty Gidgets, Part I). As I outlined in that earlier post, she also writes and produces a podcasty thing connected with the paper, called “The Beat Beat.” Those brief pensants on musical topics -- the music of Haiti (made me cry), a salute to the late, undersung Ellie Greenwich ("she put the words the to Wall of Sound") -- are knowledgeable, inviting and bite-sized.

These little 'casts hook you, indeed. And herein lies the annoyance. Her most recent Beat Beat outlines songs we would gladly never hear again, one of which, for her, is Led Zeppelin's “Stairway to Heaven.”

Well, it is for me, too. I mean, my God. If you had grown up, as Linda and I did, as the hippest chicks in Kirkwood, Missouri (in an underground, unacknowledged, downtrodden, beleagued, wise before our time, why are we here in the basement listening to records on a Saturday night sort of way) getting high on vinyl and despairing at the garden-variety musical taste of our classmates and neighbors, then you, too, would have hated “Stairway to Heaven.” It had all the ersatz, faux-Renaissance, “we come off as quite deep if you’re stoned” and “wot ya think, guys, a flute might be cool here” crappity-crap of 70’s British rock BUT WAS, TO BOOT, always voted #1 in the best songs round-ups of local FM radio stations. (To which Linda and I would listen, as touchingly anxious as an Oscar contender, as though we had some stake in it, hoping for recognition for our favorites).

So, yes, I agree that “Stairway to Heaven” should be included on my list of music I would gladly never hear again for the rest of my life (along with the entire oeuvre of Aaron Copland, Celine Dion and a certain New Yorker whose initials are BJ).

But did Linda, in her audio report, have to quote the lines:

"If there's a bustle in your hedgerow, don't be alarmed now, it's just a sprinkling for the May queen ..."

and then play them as sung by Robert Plant, and then question their meaning? Now I have an earworm (from the German Ohrwurm, meaning a goddamn musical phrase -- usually involving a flute -- that you can’t get out of your head)?

The meaning of these innocuous lyrics is not mystical, or Tolkien-like, or a reference to World War II, as some devotees (who need to move on with their lives) have avowed. The infamous “bustle in your hedgerow” mystery means only, “If the wind is rustling the bushes, it doesn't mean something scary is in there, like a possum or a really large possibly rabid raccoon, it just means spring is on the way.” I have this on the greatest authority. My own.

But what I also have is an earworm.

posted by Elizabeth at 11:37 AM