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

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.

I thought "least appealing song" was kind of designed with the assumption that no one was actually going to listen to all this shit, and it's based more on what you hear in your head when you read the tracklist. For me that ranges from "sure, this makes sense even if I don't need to hear it" (STP, Blind Melon) to "this makes sense but sounds super annoying" (Cracker, whom I like sometimes, Hootie) to "ugh why" (4NB, Crow, Big Head Todd). But for the "ugh why" ones it's mostly a function of the songs they're doing, except Big Head Todd who I just assume are going to fuck up a nice song.

I never need to hear "What's Up" again but it never occurs to me as a notably terrible song.

A big memory for me of this album (aside from my local Rock station really priming the pump for its release--I think it even got a Album Network premiere) was seeing this EPK documentary thing about it that apparently is nowhere to be found online now. My local NBC station used to show random stuff after SNL, and one week this special popped up. It went over pretty much every artist, going over why they picked the song they did, behind the scenes recording session footage, memories of Zep etc. The strangest thing was I'm pretty sure this airing was at least a year or two after the album came out; somebody at the station must have found the tape on a shelf somewhere, saw that it fit an hour with commercials, and said "Oh, what the hell..."

Oh wait, that "Out On The Tiles" clip upthread is from that special!

Did Duran Duran decide to make the covers album that forever derailed their
commercial prospects in North America as a result of this project, or was this a horrifying
glimpse into what was already in the pipeline?

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?.''

― tales of a scorched-earth nothing (Doctor Casino)

sure, if it was just a runaway victory for linda perry - if all of the sheryl crow votes went to her, for instance - you could say it's just about her. but there is crow, and even though it's perhaps not statistically significant i am still a little flabbergasted that two voters genuinely decided that the amos/plant "down by the seaside" is the worst thing on the record. (almost want to do a "best song on encomium" poll to counterbalance - it's been twenty years since i listened to the whole thing but "down by the seaside" would take it in a walk for me.)

in some ways polls like this are perfectly designed to bring out people's latent preconceptions and prejudices, because god do _you_ want to listen to the entirety of _encomium_ again just so you can make an informed decision on the worst song on it? bringing up the breeders and bikini kill is kind of a red herring to this, because the issue isn't how excellent bands get treated critically. it's that in general, men seem to have been born with a license to suck, and women will get a lot more flack for doing something awful than a man does. and since any sort of creative work involves the significant risk that what you are doing will turn out to be unutterably awful, this is a pretty big problem.

Did Duran Duran decide to make the covers album that forever derailed their
commercial prospects in North America as a result of this project, or was this a horrifying
glimpse into what was already in the pipeline?

― beamish13

"Thank You" was already on the With Honors soundtrack, released in spring '94. My impression is they recorded the covers at the same time as The Wedding Album ("Femme Fatale is on it, recall) in '92.

wtf with the 4 non blondes revisionism in evidence here, they are terrible, what's going on is terrible, this cover is terrible.

I like Sheryl Crow and adore Tori Amos.

the amos thing is, if anything, more instructive to me because the way it gets justified is "just don't be awful like linda perry and people won't hate you". which, obviously, isn't fucking true.

I just think it's hilarious that Plant decided to sing on his own tribute

robert wyatt did the same! and his song was also great!

...yeah probably the best song on the cd:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRYHNPkGesQ

I should check out the rest of this. The Rollins Band cover is p much ruined by Rollins trying to sing

Was going to post exactly the same thing--looked at the results, was surprised that Rollins got zero ("Does he sing?"), gave it a listen. Twelve bulls in a china shop; he's so unsuited to something requiring subtlety, mystery, swing, and a million other things Led Zeppelin had going for them.

(Which doesn't mean the zero's not reasonable--I'm sure there are other horrors on there.)

All of these pale in the face of knowledge that a couple of years ago Train inexplicably covered Zep II in its entirety:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lA8MykYXoq0

i like rollins' cover of franklin's tower, but on the other hand nobody in the dead could sing!

yeah see... like if 4 non blondes had not been on here, but Train had formed a little earlier and made it in, i feel pretty confident they would have taken this in a walk. i just learned they STARTED AS A LED ZEPPELIN COVER BAND so my god did we dodge a bullet there. i think most on ILM would agree they are a worse band than 4 Non Blondes and they kept...making...songs. but there are tons of mainstream 90s dude bands of this period that ime do NOT get a free pass or license to suck on ILM. Live, The Offspring, Collective Soul, Counting Crows, 311, Silverchair, Bush. all of those have folks here repping for this or that song, but all of them had more than one hit song. and yet generally they do not have cred on this board afaik. even considerably better bands like Smashing Pumpkins have more detractors here than fans. if Soul Coughing, a band i like a lot, were on here i am confident they would have attracted whole new voters to come out and slam them. i think people who hate soul coughing and the pumpkins hate them in a lot of the same ways/reasons people hate 4 Non Blondes - inescapably attention-grabbing and unconventional vocalist front and center, with painstakingly enunciated lyrics that come off as pretentious bullshit if you feel superior to the particular brand of 90s-ness being peddled.

i'm belaboring all this not because i want to prove that women in rock don't face all the asymmetrical uphill bullshit that's being pointed out. they totally do. but because katherine indicated the equal "stature" of the bands was an important factor here.... and as nitpicky as it probably seems, i think it's weird to suggest that STP and 4 Non Blondes are bands of the same stature. STP have sold forty million records and among their sixteen or so high-charting singles, have at least a dozen songs that are still in regular rotation. hootie were coming off their sixteen times platinum debut (including three huuuuge singles) and hadn't yet sophomore-slumped. 4 non blondes had had one moderate-sized hit two years before, and then four singles that did not make the hot 100, and had already broken up by the time this album was released. if one aspect of the poll is "which of these acts seems the most pitifully out of their league trying to cover zeppelin" then some of that does enter the picture and i don't think ALL of it is gendered.

that doesn't mean that the questions of who gets cred, who gets stature, who's seen as appropriate to sit at the big-kids' rock table, aren't profoundly gendered. they totally are and even as i'm typing the above i'm struggling to write it in a way that doesn't fall into tropes that are typically masculine rockist dudebro tropes. i think this is super interesting and important and i'm glad katherine brought it up as it's giving me some things to think about and challenge in my own assumptions. i just, still, sincerely question whether a single-vote radio button poll, with so many other variables in play, can really be that revealing. or again if it's THAT noteworthy that a notoriously hated one-hit wonder band would take a particular beating on a label cash-in album thread, especially when their song is one of the two singles/videos that people are likely to have actually heard, and the other one of those two (STP) took third place.

the two tori amos votes could be people who don't like tori amos or people who think the idea of robert plant showing up to his own covers record is gross, who knows... but it got less votes than hootie and the same number as duran duran and big head todd. if a plant-free tori - surely the actual best artist here, by some distance - had won this by the margin 4NB did, then i would be a lot more "wtf ILM."

Thing about STP too is 70s-flavored hard rock was a thing they dabbled in a lot. DeLeo loved his slide guitar (which he used much more later on) so I get the pick.

I think this is one of the few Zep songs they wouldn't fuck up because Weiland always seemed more suited to 70s glam than wailing bluesy hard rock, but this isn't a very demanding song vocally...no Plant wailing, few ad libs, straightforward as hell.

Imagine STP doing "Immigrant Song" on the other hand

which would actually be GOOD casting for 4 Non Blondes!

they STARTED AS A LED ZEPPELIN COVER BAND so my god did we dodge a bullet there.

they released an album last year on which they covered the entirety of led zeppelin ii, so potentially we didn't dodge a bullet at
all

now she's back from the atmosphere
with drops of lemon juice in her hair

It's not actually horrible, but it's like paying to hear a tribute band

How soft your fields so green
Can whisper tales of gore
Of how we calmed the tides of war
We are your overlords

Tell me
Did the wind sweep you off your feet
Did you finally get the chance to dance along the light of day
And head back toward the Milky Way

this thread just prompted a "Zeparella" rabbit hole on YouTube - thank u thread

Kinda nice that Plant sings with Tori as Zeppelin was her favourite band as a child and inspired her playing in the conservatory.

IIRC, she asked him to join her, going so far as to let him pick the song. He picked DBTS because it was a track he felt he'd contributed a lot to, writing-wise, that was at the same time reasonably obscure and underexposed (did they ever even do it live?).

There's a Tori interview where she says she was asked to do the song via a phone call; don't think they've performed it live though.

IIRC, she asked him to join her, going so far as to let him pick the song. He picked DBTS because it was a track he felt he'd contributed a lot to, writing-wise, that was at the same time reasonably obscure and underexposed (did they ever even do it live?).

― to fly across the city and find Aerosmith's car (C. Grisso/McCain)

good pick, i think; i think the _encomium_ version of it is probably better than the zep version.

Well, speaking of Linda Perry and covers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_wtzVvstfA

Violent J has really shed some pounds!

wtf with the 4 non blondes revisionism in evidence here, they are terrible, what's going on is terrible, this cover is terrible.

still say the STP cover is p nice if not incendiary