Led Zeppelin's Led Zeppelin IV

Description

In this wickedly entertaining and thoroughly informed homage to one of rock music's towering pinnacles, Erik Davis investigates the magic-black or otherwise-that surrounds this album. Carefully peeling the layers from each song, Davis reveals their dark and often mystical roots-and leaves the reader to decide whether [FOUR SYMBOLS] is some form of occult induction or just an inspired, brilliantly played rock album. Excerpt: Stripping Led Zeppelin's famous name off the fourth record was an almost petulant attempt to let their Great Work symbolically stand on its own two feet. But the wordless jacket also lent the album charisma. Fans hunted for hidden meanings, or, in failing to find them, sensed a strange reflection of their own mute refusal to communicate with the outside world. This helped to create one of the supreme paradoxes of rock history: an esoteric megahit, a blockbuster arcanum. Stripped of words and numbers, the album no longer referred to anything but itself: a concrete talisman that drew you into its world, into the frame. All the stopgap titles we throw at the thing are lame: Led Zeppelin IV, [Untitled], Runes, Zoso, Four Symbols. In an almost Lovecraftian sense, the album was nameless, a thing from beyond, charged with manna. And yet this uncanny fetish was about as easy to buy as a jockstrap.

Erik Davis has been writing about music, subcultures, and technoculture for fifteen years. His cult book Techgnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information (1998), was translated in 5 languages and is being republished with a new introduction by Serpents Tail. He is a regular contributor to Wired, and lives in San Francisco.

...Davis, who's a regular contributor to Wired, spins an irresistible narrative about his rediscovery of the classic album while driving through England, tying the songs in with pagan myth and feminine representation. Far from being pretentious, Davis' meditation is charming and readable. * Philadelphia Weekly * The most engaging aspect of this irresistibly readable book is the sheer delight Davis so obviously takes in over reading this stuff. It's as if he went through some hermeneutic wormhole and emerged in a parallel universe where Zep's legendary fourth album is infinitely dense with significance-a textual black hole that sucks all meaning into its dark maw.. -- Mark Dery * Shovelware * ...the literary equivalent of sparking the owl, crafting a sigil, cranking up a back-masked copy of "Stairway to Heaven," and settling in for a deep chat with the collective satanic majesties of visionary rock. -- Richard Gehr * Village Voice * The most ingenious aspect of this book, even if you're not literate in mysticism and the occult, is that Davis intentionally and deliberately over-analyzes the entire album...That's the point. It's almost like reaching over to your bookshelf, pulling out the entire Time-Life Mysteries of the Unknown series and applying them to "Four Sticks"...you can tell that Davis had an absolute blast with this whole project. * Metro NY, August 2005 * The most intellectually inspired and flat-out fun of Continuum's ongoing 33 1/3 series of pocketbook album appreciations, critic Davis's adventurous treatise decodes every magical property embedded within rock's most geeked-on masterpiece. * Blender * ...most likely destined to a fate of cult favorite, Led Zeppelin IV by Erik Davis soars the heights of some very rarefied air indeed. -- Joe Pettit * Ugly Things * Even when Erik Davis published his exegesis on Led Zeppelin's IV in 2005, there seemed to be little left to say about either the band or its best-selling album. Yet the best 33? titles can make you hear familiar albums with fresh ears. Davis has some fun unpacking the rumors of occultic messages hidden in the packaging and in the music (backmasking! mirrored images! Crowley references!), yet he acknowledges the power of the band's particular mythology to cast a strong spell over even the most skeptical listener. The result, he writes, is 'one of the supreme paradoxes of rock history: an esoteric megahit, a blockbuster arcanum. -- Stephen M. Deusner * Pitchfork *