{"id":805347,"date":"2020-03-17T10:54:37","date_gmt":"2020-03-17T16:54:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rollingstone.com\/?p=966955"},"modified":"2020-03-17T10:54:37","modified_gmt":"2020-03-17T16:54:37","slug":"stephen-malkmus-posts-intriguing-yet-wrong-ranking-of-songs-on-led-zeppelin-iv","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/music-news\/stephen-malkmus-posts-intriguing-yet-wrong-ranking-of-songs-on-led-zeppelin-iv\/","title":{"rendered":"Stephen Malkmus Posts Intriguing \u2014 Yet Wrong \u2014 Ranking of Songs on \u2018Led Zeppelin IV\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"
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All across the country, Americans are staying home in an effort to slow the progress of the COVID-19<\/a> pandemic \u2014 and looking for ways to fill those endless inside hours. For Stephen Malkmus<\/a>, the once-and-future Pavement frontman, one way to get through these scary and unfamiliar times is to turn to an old favorite: Led Zeppelin<\/a>\u2019s fourth album.<\/p>\n

\u201cI revisited Zep 4 last night ( w\/headphones in bed ),\u201d Malkmus tweeted on Tuesday morning. What followed was a provocative, unexpected and totally wrong ranking of the songs on that 1971 classic.<\/p>\n

\n

I revisited Zep 4 last night ( w\/headphones in bed ) now I rank songs\u2026<\/p>\n

Misty mountain Hop
black dog
Stairway
Evermore
4 stixx
Levee
California
Rock n roll<\/p>\n

\u2014 Stephen malkmus (@dronecoma) March 17, 2020<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Let\u2019s start at the beginning. \u201cMisty Mountain Hop\u201d at Number One is a bold choice. It\u2019s one of the catchiest Zep tunes, with a sweet, chunky groove and some fun lyrics about Lord of the Rings<\/em>. Is it the best<\/em> song on this album? Maybe, maybe not, but \u201cMisty Mountain Hop\u201d does, in fact, rule, so we\u2019ll allow it.<\/p>\n

Malkmus\u2019 ranking enters murkier waters after that. \u201cBlack Dog\u201d is not the second-best song on any album, unless you\u2019re the kind of classic rock fan who thinks \u201cI don\u2019t know, but I\u2019ve been told\/A big-legged woman ain\u2019t got no soul\u201d is some sort of profound observation on life. Sick riff, but as a song, it\u2019s just not top three material.<\/p>\n

Next, at spots Number Three and Four, Malkmus goes for the one-two punch of \u201cStairway to Heaven\u201d and \u201cThe Battle of Evermore.\u201d Now, if he really wanted to shake things up, he could have put \u201cEvermore\u201d above \u201cStairway.\u201d That would have been a challenging opinion worth entertaining. It can be hard to truly enjoy \u201cStairway\u201d after decades of overplaying, and the gently spooky mandolin whispers of \u201cEvermore\u201d are always refreshing by contrast. Still, there\u2019s little to quibble with in this part of the ranking. Let\u2019s move on\u2026<\/p>\n

\u2026to the most deeply perplexing choice of all. \u201cFour Sticks\u201d over \u201cWhen the Levee Breaks\u201d? A trickily-time-signatured bauble over one of the heaviest, dankest songs ever written? Sure, it\u2019s cool that John Bonham played \u201cFour Sticks\u201d with double the normal amount of drumsticks. But as my esteemed colleague Hank Shteamer, himself a deep student of the drummerly arts<\/a>, noted after seeing this ranking: \u201cYeah, I dig \u2018Four Sticks,\u2019 but let\u2019s not get carried away.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ranking \u201cWhen the Levee Breaks\u201d in the bottom three is sheer madness. So is putting \u201cGoing to California\u201d at Number Nine. Malkmus just released an excellent album of psychedelic folk tunes called Traditional Techniques<\/em><\/a>; how could he disrespect the most bittersweet folk trip in the Zep catalog like that?<\/p>\n

\u201cRock and Roll\u201d is fine. Putting it at Number 10, also fine.<\/p>\n

Look, opinions are like onions (there are a lot of them out there and they sometimes make you cry), de gustibus non disputandum est<\/em>, we get it. Stephen Malkmus has made many a great album himself, and he is entitled to his thoughts on the relative merits of the songs on Led Zeppelin IV<\/em>. But as long as we\u2019re all stuck indoors, you\u2019re damn right we\u2019re going to be thinking about this for the rest of the day.<\/p>\n

\n

Popular on Rolling Stone <\/h3>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

via:: Rolling Stone<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

All across the country, Americans are staying home in an effort to slow the progress of the COVID-19 pandemic \u2014 and looking for ways to fill those endless inside hours. For Stephen Malkmus, the once-and-future Pavement frontman, one way to get through these scary and unfamiliar times is to turn to an old favorite: Led Zeppelin\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[98],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-805347","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-music-news"},"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-07-19 02:22:26","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSMT The Mountain","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/805347","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=805347"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/805347\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=805347"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=805347"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=805347"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}