Stairway to Heaven (1971)
Kashmir (1974)
Follow-on to From the Top of the List.
Straight to business, I’m not going to blather on about what these songs have meant to the band’s legions of fans, only to crown them the undisputed champeens in their classes. Wanna start a fight? Ask a room of Zeppelin fans which of these is the GOAT’s chef d’oeuvre. It’ll come to blows out of the chute.
The two songs couldn’t be more different: spiritually, lyrically, compositionally, rhythmically, melodically, texturally, everythingly. About the only thing they have in common is their length (8+ minutes) and reputation (if you could build a statue of a song…).
Stairway, the Troubadour, kisses you with a dulcet guitar and breathy flutes; Kashmir, the Hun, drops a cannon ball on your foot.
Stairway, Wesley from The Princess Bride, tells a fairy tale of valiance, chivalry and heroism; Kashmir, Col. Kurtz from Apocalypse Now, meditates on maddening self-discovery in an exotic setting.
Stairway is told in the third (and, briefly, second) person; Kashmir in the first person.
One has a musical story arc; the other just goes hard. Really, really hard.
I won’t pick apart the obvious differences – the instrumentation, the texture, the meter, the sheer volume. Indeed, it might be surprising to learn that for all of Kashmir‘s weight, it has a slightly slower tempo than Stairway, and that for all of Stairway‘s pastoral serenity, it sets a far wider vocal range than Kashmir.
The differences between the two are lain most bare in their melodies.
The motion of Stairway to heaven’s melody is, for its first two verses, as conjunct as a melody can possibly be. Phrased gracefully in four-bar sentences, the movement from one note to the next never jumps a line or a space, not even once. Every note within a phrase is a half-step from its neighbour. Smooth as buttah:
The next two (still unplugged) verses widen the gap, but only very slightly. Phrasing is still four bars, and the biggest leap is a third (from one line to another or one space to another):
[ed. the low E on ‘now’ doesn’t count here; it’s an unaccented soft cadence, and could have been any note, even a repeated A]
Only in the final ‘hard rock’ section does the voice leap beyond itself on ‘a lady’ and ‘white light’, jumping two full lines (five half-steps, or ‘a fifth’):
The opening of the song’s melody, like a chrysalis, over the course of eight minutes of music, is a musically heroic tale. It’s a story arc that takes us from the contemplation of a journey to a place where everything turns to gold and the tune comes to us (at last).
Kashmir‘s melody, no less captivating, plays a very different role. Set over a bedrock of pulsing thrusts, its short, choppy phrases act as more of an opera’s recitative. Its story is told in leaps of thirds and fourths, with rhythms syncopated to the natural declaration of text. And almost as if fighting with its environment, the melody that carries the song’s confessional journal is in both a different key (D-major) and a different meter (alternating 4/4, 2/4 and 3/4) to the clashing D-minor and stubborn 3/4 of the underlying instruments. If you sang the melody first and then played the instrumental accompaniment, you might never know they belonged to the same song:
Never mind the brilliant cleverness in somehow mixing all these dangerous musical chemicals together, the bimodal, polyrhythmic clash is with us from beginning to end. The inner dissonance of the subject is never at home or at ease with the setting that might bring him spiritual peace, and he knows it.
The climax of Kashmir‘s vocal part comes just halfway through the song (I’ll say more about that in a future post). It’s the second-highest note in the song, the longest-held note in the song, and tails off into a breathtaking melisma that’s as agonizing for the listener as it must be for the singer. It’s a moment of inflection that was reserved for the very end of Stairway to Heaven:
Stairway to Heaven and Kashmir have completely different messages of spiritual discovery, and leave us in completely different spiritual states. Stairway ends with a closed cadence from a solo voice. Kashmir reaches no such tidy ending; it fades out with music and voice even more ablaze than when the song started.
So whom would each of these two remarkable musical works mean more to? Can you profile the kind of music-lover you are that you’d find one musical kind of story more compelling than the other? Is it possible to map the spirit of a song to ‘profile’ of the person who loves it?
I’ve tee’d up these giant pieces of music as a faultline among listeners of ‘The Greatestestestest Band Evarrr.’ Am I myself in one camp or the other? Do I think one of these songs is vastly superior to the other?
I do. But you couldn’t waterboard it out of me.
