Read Online Led Zeppelin's Led Zeppelin IV by Erik Davis - Free Book Online
Authors: Erik Davis
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traditional sacred dance, say, in Haitian
vodun
: What blend of cultural narratives, beat science, and psychodynamics boots up the gods? How much harder then to talk about entrancing rock music within the broken frameworks of secular modernity. Christian fundamentalists not only accept the reality of musical hypnotism, but suggest that it is an
automatic
function of a specific technology or technique, whether subliminal messages or volume or the “Druid beats” condemned by Jack Chick in one of his famous comic-book tracts. And yet this paranoia points to something we all desire on the road to transport: the release of control, or rather, the submission to a choicelessness that can seem both delicious and slightly ominous. Even fundamentalists crave their rapture, their journey to the middle of the air.
The notion that some magic sonic weapon lies behind Led Zeppelin’s evident power is not just an affront to the complexity of music; it’s an affront to magic. The magician is more than a trickster; as the historian of religion Mircae Eliade wrote, the magician is, by definition,“a stage-producer.” The magus does not just dangle a golden pendulum before your eyes; he shapes a theater around that pendulum, a stage large and suggestive enough to
draw you in
. Jimmy Page knew that all of the Marshall stacks and effects pedals in the world wouldn’t do diddly if Led Zeppelin did not craft drama and atmosphere out of the aggressive and horny energies they raised. Which brings us back, in a rambling sort of way, to
mise-en-scène.
IT’S TO A CASTLE I WILL TAKE YOU
As he ate through his allotted span of time, Aleister Crowley produced a number of definitions of magic, most of which emphasized the will. Crowley meant many things by will, things both phallic and mystic, but the basic picture accords with the conventional notion of the magician as an
operator
, an active manipulator of supernatural agents or sneaky techniques of perception. Crowley also provides a more passive and receptive picture of the magical art in the “Notes for an Astral Atlas” that appends his
Magick in Theory and Practice
. “Magick,” he writes, “enables us to receive sensible impressions of worlds other than the ‘physical’ universe.” 40 In this view, magic does not so much intensify the will as open up imaginative experience, triggering incorporeal sensations and images that have lives of their own. Ifyou replace “magick” with “music” in Crowley’s statement, you will see where we are headed.
Music enables us to receive sensible impressions of worlds other than the “physical” universe.
Even when we are dancing deep in the groove, music is always prepared to disembody us, to set the spirit wandering through worlds conjured with no more material than vibrating waves of energy.
Led Zeppelin records embody this virtual power in the definitive sense that they
take place somewhere
, that they draw you into another world, over the hills and far away. Space is a primary metaphor for understanding and experiencing the band’s music. As Ann Powers notes, “This is why people hated them: they took up so much space. And it’s why people loved them: that space could swallow you up, take you in.” 41 Lots of head music in the late 1960s and 1970s had such aspirations; the rhetoric of transport accorded with the drug culture as well as the discovery that the multi-track studio was a great place to build pocket worlds. But while many self-consciously psychedelic bands suggested the intense distortions and phantasmagoria of the drug rush, Zeppelin’s
mise-en-scène
was more like Crowley’s idea of an astral atlas: an almost storybook panorama of images and characters. They polished rock into a scrying stone: you could
see
the blazing dunes of “Kashmir,” the driving snow of “No Quarter,” and the Viking hordes whenthe thunderous “Immigrant Song” riff kicked in. “The goal was synesthesia,” Page has said. “Creating
vodun
: What blend of cultural narratives, beat science, and psychodynamics boots up the gods? How much harder then to talk about entrancing rock music within the broken frameworks of secular modernity. Christian fundamentalists not only accept the reality of musical hypnotism, but suggest that it is an
automatic
function of a specific technology or technique, whether subliminal messages or volume or the “Druid beats” condemned by Jack Chick in one of his famous comic-book tracts. And yet this paranoia points to something we all desire on the road to transport: the release of control, or rather, the submission to a choicelessness that can seem both delicious and slightly ominous. Even fundamentalists crave their rapture, their journey to the middle of the air.
The notion that some magic sonic weapon lies behind Led Zeppelin’s evident power is not just an affront to the complexity of music; it’s an affront to magic. The magician is more than a trickster; as the historian of religion Mircae Eliade wrote, the magician is, by definition,“a stage-producer.” The magus does not just dangle a golden pendulum before your eyes; he shapes a theater around that pendulum, a stage large and suggestive enough to
draw you in
. Jimmy Page knew that all of the Marshall stacks and effects pedals in the world wouldn’t do diddly if Led Zeppelin did not craft drama and atmosphere out of the aggressive and horny energies they raised. Which brings us back, in a rambling sort of way, to
mise-en-scène.
IT’S TO A CASTLE I WILL TAKE YOU
As he ate through his allotted span of time, Aleister Crowley produced a number of definitions of magic, most of which emphasized the will. Crowley meant many things by will, things both phallic and mystic, but the basic picture accords with the conventional notion of the magician as an
operator
, an active manipulator of supernatural agents or sneaky techniques of perception. Crowley also provides a more passive and receptive picture of the magical art in the “Notes for an Astral Atlas” that appends his
Magick in Theory and Practice
. “Magick,” he writes, “enables us to receive sensible impressions of worlds other than the ‘physical’ universe.” 40 In this view, magic does not so much intensify the will as open up imaginative experience, triggering incorporeal sensations and images that have lives of their own. Ifyou replace “magick” with “music” in Crowley’s statement, you will see where we are headed.
Music enables us to receive sensible impressions of worlds other than the “physical” universe.
Even when we are dancing deep in the groove, music is always prepared to disembody us, to set the spirit wandering through worlds conjured with no more material than vibrating waves of energy.
Led Zeppelin records embody this virtual power in the definitive sense that they
take place somewhere
, that they draw you into another world, over the hills and far away. Space is a primary metaphor for understanding and experiencing the band’s music. As Ann Powers notes, “This is why people hated them: they took up so much space. And it’s why people loved them: that space could swallow you up, take you in.” 41 Lots of head music in the late 1960s and 1970s had such aspirations; the rhetoric of transport accorded with the drug culture as well as the discovery that the multi-track studio was a great place to build pocket worlds. But while many self-consciously psychedelic bands suggested the intense distortions and phantasmagoria of the drug rush, Zeppelin’s
mise-en-scène
was more like Crowley’s idea of an astral atlas: an almost storybook panorama of images and characters. They polished rock into a scrying stone: you could
see
the blazing dunes of “Kashmir,” the driving snow of “No Quarter,” and the Viking hordes whenthe thunderous “Immigrant Song” riff kicked in. “The goal was synesthesia,” Page has said. “Creating
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