Three poems about Led - Two

Dazed and Confused: imagine a fat man heavily plodding down stairs.... ba-bom, bom, bom, bom (breathe), ba-bom, bom, bom, bom. This is how the song starts, with this ominous descending bass line, and then the guitar comes in; following the same bass line but with more angst. Against this basic centre of the song comes the bashing rush of guitar chords and matched drums smashing it all up.

It's the long middle section that makes the song a rock masterpiece. I believe the middle section of this song is Led's finest moment. They play so well together. The bass doing it's quiet modulated riff, the bowed guitar mimicked by the singer's voice and the drummer keeping a steady beat, sometimes doing a call and response to the bass on the toms.

And then... oh lord, and then the drummer hits the hi-hat three times: t, t, t, and suddenly the madness expands out - the bass uncoiling in rapid swirls underneath the flailing cymbals, the guitar lifting out above, while the drums begin to gather so much fury they seem to be coming apart.

And the critics at Rolling Stone loved the debut album:

Here, as almost everywhere else on the album, it is Page's guitar that provides most of the excitement. "Babe I'm Gonna Leave You" alternates between prissy Robert Plant's howled vocals fronting an acoustic guitar and driving choruses of the band running down a four-chord progression while John Bonham smashes his cymbals on every beat. The song is very dull in places (especially on the vocal passages), very redundant, and certainly not worth the six-and-a-half minutes the Zeppelin gives it.

In this album review Dazed and Confused is not even mentioned.

What is good writing about music? I think it involves listening to the music not to the other stuff. When I was in Japan I was cut off from critics and had to form my own opinions. At that time Radiohead released Kid A. having not read any of the hype about this album I just bought it and listened to it. I thought: man this is good.

Shortly afterwards I went back to New Zealand for a holiday and was told that Kid A was "the worst kind of art rock pretentiousness" (which is a pretty pretentious thing to say). Many reviews panned it and derided Thom Yorke and I wondered: how much do you really hear something properly and how much are you loaded against something by what other people say and surfaces? It was actually a defining moment for me in listening to music.

Even though Britney Spears is garbage Toxic is a decent pop song.

If you actually listen to it.