Least appealing song on "Encomium: A Tribute to Led Zeppelin"

God the 90s were awful.

Meconium?

Never the Bride sounds like it should be a screamo band fronted by Jennifer Aniston.

Misty Mountain Hop video is hilarious

I'll duck some tomatoes and say that the STP song is good. I actually heard it before the original and my mom bought me Houses of the Holy in 8th grade as a result.

The Blind Melon track is actually pretty great.

yeah the STP version is fine

holy shiiiiiiit this video, thank you neanderthal

it just keeps going, too!

D'Yer Maker is probably LZ's worst song to begin with, that crappy pun on down.

I bear no malice at all towards Sheryl Crow but I doubt she can redeem it

quite enjoying this so far, when the 90s are rescued this is the lead camel thru the needles' eye

ugh i mean needle's

an album with three tracks by women people have heard of (Never The Bride doesn't count), and those three tracks get DOUBLE the votes of everyone else combined

somehow Hootie pains me the worst because I'm convinced 90% of people thought (and likely still think) that was a Hootie original, being as it was a Zep b-side.

I haven't heard this since it came out and I can't really recall anything about it, I vaguely recall the STP & Helmet/Yow covers, vaugely & this came out when I was peak Rollins Band fan and even I couldn't get it together for them.

But to me the weirdest thing about this is...these are 12 very weird selections for a Zeppelin tribute album, like if you asked me to name 12 Zep songs these wouldn't be the first 12 (except for "Good Times Bad Times") I would think of

Oh shit, I just realized I never posted this here: this comp was the first time I heard Hootie and, as noted, theirs was a pretty solid cover and I bought their album sight unseen on that basis. WHOOPS.

Nina Persson cover of "Whole Lotta Love" kicks ass but that was only performed live afaik

This tribute was a huge missed opportunity to get PJ Harvey to cover "The Lemon Song"

Still get worked up about this:

Rollins once told me in an interview that he changed the words to the bridge in "Four Sticks": "I couldn't sing 'When the owls cry in the night.'"

― If Timi Yuro would be still alive, most other singers could shut up, Wednesday, January 7, 2009 2:38 PM (eight years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

WELL THEN MAYBE DON'T SING THE SONG ABOUT OWLS CRYING IN THE NIGHT, THEN, HENRY. FFS.

I had no idea that was what that song was about

Yeah, it's about owls crying because someone stole their sticks (four of them). Duh.

doves cry, owls hoot, rollins otm from a sub-editor's perspective

an album with three tracks by women people have heard of (Never The Bride doesn't count), and those three tracks get DOUBLE the votes of everyone else combined

― a self-reinforcing downward spiral of male-centric indie (katherine), Thursday, March 9, 2017 12:24 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

oh come on. the musical reasons for disliking the Four Non Blondes version of this song (and them as a musical act) are well known over ILX. and the Sheryl Crow cover is just bad - fairly sure most of the people ITT have defended/liked many other songs of hers.

The Tori song only got 2.

and it isn't like the male tracks were lauded with praise. the whole album took a beating.

*well established on this thread and other threads of ILX, more what I meant to say.

would bet if Heart's version of "Battle of Evermore" was on this thing, nobody woulda given it a vote.

Vastly prefer the Amos cover of 'Thank U' to her number on this comp.

Frankly, LZ shouldn't have even done D'yer M'aker

She did it of her own accord

D'yer is p much the worst song on that album

Houses that is

oh come on. the musical reasons for disliking the Four Non Blondes version of this song (and them as a musical act) are well known over ILX. and the Sheryl Crow cover is just bad - fairly sure most of the people ITT have defended/liked many other songs of hers.

The Tori song only got 2.

again, it's not any individual instance so much as the overwhelming, suffocating aggregate effect. (also, I have never understood the dislike for 4 Non Blondes or "What's Up," I like Sheryl Crow a lot, and if someone tries to tell me either artist is worse than fucking Hootie and the Blowfish or Stone Temple Pilots then I fundamentally do not understand that worldview, even though it's foisted upon me daily by the music canon)

I must've been confused since it came out around the same time, but I swore Duran Duran's gloopy cover of "Thank You" was on here too.

"Thank You" (Page/Plant), by Duran Duran 2

again, it's not any individual instance so much as the overwhelming, suffocating aggregate effect. (also, I have never understood the dislike for 4 Non Blondes or "What's Up," I like Sheryl Crow a lot, and if someone tries to tell me either artist is worse than fucking Hootie and the Blowfish or Stone Temple Pilots then I fundamentally do not understand that worldview, even though it's foisted upon me daily by the music canon)

― a self-reinforcing downward spiral of male-centric indie (katherine)

yeah i understand where you're coming from - this is why discussing pervasive gender prejudice is so pernicious because you can't discuss the whole without talking about specifics. personally i think the hootie number should've ranked higher, on par with sheryl crow, because in both cases we're talking about terrible musicians doing terrible versions of terrible led zeppelin songs - and i do think darius rucker is probably worse than sheryl crow.

what's the takeaway from this, though? are straight "pick one" polls like this just fundamentally a bad idea, prevalent only because they're easier to implement than ranked lists? should we all spend more time pondering the relative merits of darius rucker and sheryl crow before talking about songs we hate?

Duh, and there it is

i dig hootie's hits and have a lot of fondness for sheryl crow's self-titled album from around this same time. both acts have a lot more cred, with me and i think with ILM, than 4 non blondes. mind you, i don't think sexism is an irrelevant thing to bring up in relation to which acts get cred, which ones get passes for their earnest and embarrassingly 90s alt signifiers and which ones don't, especially when we're talking about cover tunes of a sort of classically "dude" band - - i'm willing to believe that at least some of the negative response to some of the covers stems from a sense of "wrongness" which is consciously or unconsciously gendered.

nonetheless i think there are at least a few other factors here which should be taken into account. #1 this whole album is a mediocre cash-in by the label, so there are no wrong votes. #2, 4 non blondes winning reflects them being a loudly terrible one-hit wonder, long a target of imho legitimate mockery both on ILM and in pop culture generally. #3 "misty mountain hop" was a single, with a long and painfully mugging-heavy video, which surely gives it a boost in people remembering and disliking it. iirc "dancing days" was the only other promo track off of this, and not only is that a slightly more competent rendition, it's a slightly less beloved Zep song in the first place, so less of a sense of "travesty" attached. STP were also a popular band with many songs on the charts so this seemed like just another thing by them, whereas, #4, 4 non blondes were several years out from their lone hit (literally their only release to ever chart, and it was no longer getting airplay in 1995/96) and in fact had broken up a year before this CD came out, so their inclusion feels particularly like a desperate cash-in. #5 depending what you look for in a zeppelin cover this is a pretty lousy one - it doesn't add much to the original song besides vocal ad-libs. ymmv of course!

"#1 this whole album is a mediocre cash-in by the label, so there are no wrong votes."

yeah but you know "herd of independent minds"; whatever the individual motivations were (or what individual voters _thought_ their motivations were), the aggregate is shit, and it's shit in a way post hoc rationalizations don't seem to _really_ address.

I'm not trying to write a hot take here, just pointing out the universal principle that given any assortment of artists of roughly equal quality and stature, with very few exceptions the female artists will be seen as worse and/or more forgettable, and if pressed the answer will be "because they're just bad." (no idea how artists chose and/or assigned songs on this, but presumably that wasn't random either.)

(for some reason this is really prevalent with '90s artists; I suspect it's the analogue to the backlash against feminism in the '90s, where people consciously or subconsciously resent having to care about female artists.)

that's true...i think as an example w/the '90s there was the derisiveness towards Lilith Fair, to the point that i doubt it was covered seriously as an event by the music press at the time. or the critical rehab of a lot of mainstream alt rock of the era but the relative silence that probably still greets a group like Belly who released at least two great albums, as opposed to the one good album a lot of acts managed to release.

there are probably better examples...

three if you count lovesongs for underdogs

RIGHT

maybe it was you repping for it on the Best Coast thread that made me check it out.

I keep reading this thread title as meconium

it is so great, beginning to finish, after the swan song EPs it's her best album imo (counting both belly albums)

katherine, I'm digging your argument generally speaking, and yeah tons of 90s rock acts, that at the time were sort of ghettoized and lumped together as ''they rock... but they're GIRLS!'', are still considerably short of the cred they deserve.

i just don't buy that in the case of this particular CD, the artists are of ''roughly equal quality and stature'' - quality's pretty subjective (i'd rate 4NB low-ish from this bunch but not any lower than blind melon or cracker), but stature-wise they are in the very bottom tier of acts on this CD, no? i mean even just in terms of chart performance, they are clearly out of their league alongside STP and sheryl crow or even hootie. they'd had a spree of singles that the public just did not go for, and here's another one. so yeah, the voters for the judge-a-book-by-its-cover poll went based on that track record and what they think of ''what's up?''

sheryl crow's positioning here gives a lot more credence to yr critique for me personally - perfectly good artist where the judge-book-by-its-cover-lol-poll result seems fishier. but idk. if this weren't a label-specific cash-in and we had indigo girls, breeders, belly, maclachlan, bikini kill and L7 here i really don't think they would soak up the votes like linda perry. people just really hate ''what's up?.''

the issue is this was a "least appealing song" thread, not a thread assessing the overall merits of each artist. and it was a cover song thread at that, and covers can notoriously go south, easily - the issue with the Crow track isn't "lol, girl trying to rock", it's that the production is tinny, the arrangement is fairly generic and bland, and this already started behind the rest of the pack because it isn't exactly a Zep favorite for many diehards (certainly not mine). i don't think her vocals fit the song particularly well either (whereas her voice worked nicely on her cover of "First Cut is the Deepest")...

idk i shd back off of this topic - defending manifest or latent dudebro tendencies on ILM is really not a hill i actually want to go to battle on. i just wanted to defend hating on 4 Non Blondes as a basically legitimate activity in and of itself but i think i've said everything useful i could say to that end.

yeah I realize I am not in the majority on that

I never got ILX's weird "What's Up" hate, song is great

ILX: "buh this 90s novelty song is bad but you know whats good is len's steal my sunshine"

Ew fuck that

I had to hear that garbage all the time in college on our campus vid station.