I know you probably don’t know yet, and aren’t too keen on finding out (I quote, “Just don’t ask me to explain ‘Stairway to Heaven’”), but just what is the song “Stairway to Heaven” about? My two favorite songs are “Hotel California” and “Stairway to Heaven.” You explained HC very well, but S2H remains a mystery. Help! –Charlie Kininmonth, Sussex, England
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I’ve been putting this off for 30 years. Time to bite the bullet. But first you must understand that rock lyrics, like the quantum mechanical universe, are subject to a sort of Heisenberg uncertainty principle–that is, we can’t truly know the truth but merely glimpse it, as through a glass darkly, etc. (And no, I’m not reprinting the words to “Stairway to Heaven”–anybody who can’t remember them after more than three decades of steady airplay probably can’t read anyway.) With that caveat out of the way, some theories about the song:
(2) It means something really deep. Browsing the Web, I find the following commentary, allegedly extracted from a 1991 Esquire article and attributed to Robert Walser, professor of musicology at UCLA and author of the 1993 book Running With the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music: “Musically, ‘Stairway’ fuses powerful ‘authenticities’–which are really ideologies….We find a set of concepts (that pretty much sum up the central concerns of all philosophy): signs, words, meanings, thoughts, feelings, spirit, reason, wonder, soul, the idea that ‘all are one and one is all.’ We find a set of vaguely but powerfully evocative symbols: gold, the West, the tune, white light, shadows, paths, a road, and the stairway to heaven itself. At the very end, we find some paradoxical self-referentiality: ‘To be a rock and not to roll.’ The words…are resonant, requiring no rigorous study in order to become meaningful. Like the music, they engage with the fantasies and anxieties of our time; they offer contact with social and metaphysical depth in a world of commodities and mass communication. ‘Stairway to Heaven,’ no less than canonized artistic postmodernism, addresses ‘decentered subjects’ who are striving to find credible experiences of depth and community.”
It’s about drugs. Just like every other rock song.
