Stairway to Heaven by Led Zeppelin: Meaning
It is also important to point out the development of postmodernism, an umbrella term for the general sense that there is no universal “truth” in the world and that we should instead explore and understand various local, cultural, and more relative values. Walser goes further to say that heavy metal, like the horror genre in film, developed to “restore the sense of security undermined by these disruptions.” What that means is that when George Ramero was filming Night of the Living Dead and Black Sabbath were playing “Iron Man,” they were attempting to find new, undeniable truths—the absoluteness of evil in flesh-eating zombies, the power of aggression in crunching guitars.
.. In Susan Fast’s book on Led Zeppelin, In the Houses of the Holy, she cites fans as saying things like, “I enjoy the sense of magick [sic] in the music”; “A lot of their lyrics portray far off, mystical lands, castles, oceans, etc. The band’s image was known as being mystical and somewhat secretive”; and “They are consummately modern with cores of ancient and original spirits.”
.. There is—in “Stairway to Heaven,” Led Zeppelin, horror, and metal—a longing to go back to a time when the evil spirits in the forest grounded our beliefs in good and evil.
.. While musicologists and critics have often said that the song gradually adds in instruments as it builds to this solo, it’s more true to say that the classical music elements—the recorder, the acoustic guitar—arereplaced by more modern instruments in a sort of movement through time, a summoning of truths and myths through the contemporary. It is a way to bring these past ideals into the now, and Page is the lone guitar hero who can do that.