Stairway to Truth

This Halloween I saw many people I hadn’t seen in a long time, met people I never knew existed, and I got to listen to Stairway to Heaven, by Led Zeppelin, on my way home after a long night. It is kind of Ironic that I would be listening to this song while I’m being driven home at 6 a.m. after a Halloween party. Halloween is supposed to be the day they celebrate the dead, and for some it is the day of the devils. I listened to the lyrics of the song and it made me think, what do they think?

The song actually talks about some important moral issues, “Yes, there are two paths you can go by, but in the long run there's still time to change the road you're on.” For some reason this line was all that I could think about while on my way home. It really made me think about, and analyze, the lifestyle that I am leading and where it is leading me. It is life put into a sentence. Through out life there are many possibilities and outcomes for a person’s life, I don’t think people realize it or maybe they don’t care, but every action that we take in our lives ultimately affects the outcome and quality of our lives. I guess it can be seen as a maze, we don’t really know where the exit is but we are trying to get there the best way we know how to, but we really don’t know what were doing. The two paths can be seen as doing the socially correct thing or listening to your inner gremlin and doing what makes your happy, even though it may make others around us unhappy. Why is it wrong to live a free life? Free from being a slave of society, free from following the daily herd.

“And if you listen very hard, the truth will come to you at last when all are one and one is all, to be a rock and not to roll.” YES, society wants us all to be uniformed and smart like rocks. Society wants us to take the role of a rock and just listen, never questioning, never stepping out of line. The don’t want us to “roll” they don’t want us to move out of the line they have drawn for us because we might start a dominoes effect on the rest of society, we might awaken our fellow rocks.

About a year ago I was browsing through YouTube when I came across the Stairway to Heaven backwards-subliminal message version a.k.a. backward masking. The clip suggests that the part of the song that says “If there's a bustle in your hedgerow, don't be alarmed now, it's just a spring clean for the May queen” really means “ There was a little path, would make me sad, whose power is Satan. He’ll give those with him six, six, six. There was a little tool shed where he made us suffer, sad Satan.” What really gets to me is that this song is supposed to be about thinking about your life and how you are living it but in reverse it really actually sounds like the opposite. I’m not saying that I believe that there really is a subliminal message in the song but one of their original lyrics states, “'Cause you know sometimes words have two meanings.” When people put emphasis into words in a particular way, well its usually that they're going with the implicit meaning rather than the explicit one. People are only listening to what they want to listen. However, if the original song did include intentional backward masking then they totally just made a reference to it.

The song begins and ends with “There's a lady who's sure all that glitters is gold and she's buying a stairway to heaven.” To me this means that there is those who cant distinguish between real issues affecting their lives from unimportant media. People fill their lives with objects and the objects end up filling them. They are empty on the inside, buying their happiness, not quite living their own happiness but other peoples happiness because they think what makes them happy is what they are taught happiness is and everyone is supposed to have the same happiness.