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All That Glitters Is Gold

2020-09-15 · letter vlog · John · 3:46 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Pop culture · mode: Personal essay · tags: community lore

John reflects on the lyric 'all that glitters is gold' from Stairway to Heaven and Smash Mouth's All Star: though the proverb says otherwise, he cares less about what the band meant than about how the lyric names magical moments when you can feel a memory forming, and says loved songs hold the warmth of past memory and future hope.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — The lyric in Stairway to Heaven and All Star; 'all that glitters is not gold' from Shakespeare, Chaucer and Aesop; fame as an example

  • ★★ John notes the lyric 'all that glitters is gold' appears in Led Zeppelin's 1971 Stairway to Heaven and reappears years later in Smash Mouth's All Star. — 00:00:00
  • ★ John says he has been thinking a lot about the lyric 'all that glitters is gold' for roughly the last 21 weeks. (playful, hedged) — 00:00:00
  • ★★ John calls the lyric strange because it is manifestly untrue: much that glitters is not gold, including glitter. — 00:00:00
  • ★★ John says the observation is old: in The Merchant of Venice Shakespeare writes 'All that glisters is not gold' and adds 'Often you have heard that told', so it was already a cliché. — 00:00:00
  • ★★ John says Chaucer wrote a version two centuries before Shakespeare, and Aesop made a similar observation 2,600 years ago. — 00:00:29
  • ★★ John says 'all that glitters is not gold' reminds us we can't always trust our senses: superficial truth often misleads, and what seems wonderful at a distance often isn't. — 00:00:29
  • ★★ John's example: when younger he thought being famous was the most glitteringly magnificent thing, but seeing it up close he found it more complicated. — 00:00:29 · celebrity

00:00:58 — Not an expert lyric analyst: art is to be lived with, not figured out; the Stairway to Heaven lyric as a naive belief

  • ★★ John admits he is not an expert at analyzing lyrics: where others find a Mountain Goats song is about a Maoist rebellion, he thinks every Mountain Goats song is about him. (playful) — 00:00:58

  • ★★★ John says poems and songs don't exist primarily as riddles to be solved: art exists not to be figured out but to be lived with. — 00:01:27

    “art exists primarily not to be figured out, but to be lived with”

  • ★★ John reads the Stairway to Heaven lyric as a naive belief that if you collect enough glittering gold you can buy a stairway to heaven. — 00:01:27

00:01:56 — Smash Mouth repurposes the lyric for rock-star life; the original follow-up line, 'wave bye-bye to your soul'

  • ★★ John says when Smash Mouth repurposed the lyric 28 years later, it seems to be just about rock-star life: you get the show on, you get paid. — 00:01:56
  • ★★ John says the original line after it, 'wave bye-bye to your soul', makes it richer: you get rich but lose your soul, so the Smash Mouth character can't rock-star into heaven. — 00:01:56

00:02:26 — What the lyric makes John feel: magical moments, memories being formed, songs holding past memory and future hope; sign-off

  • ★★ John says he doesn't really care what Smash Mouth had in mind; what matters to him is what the lyric makes him feel when people sing it. (playful) — 00:02:26
  • ★★★ John says some moments feel genuinely magical: an adventure, an amazing conversation with people you love, or watching your brother play music backstage to a crowd singing along. — 00:02:26 · Hank Green

  • ★★★ John says in these moments when we feel infinite (Stephen Chbosky's word) you can almost feel a memory being formed, and all that glitters really does feel like gold. — 00:02:55

    “it's almost like you can feel a memory being presently formed”

  • ★★★ John says what he loves most about music is that the songs he loves, even stupid ones, hold the warmth of past memory and of future hope. — 00:02:55

    “contain both the warmth of past memory and the warmth of future hope”

  • ★★ After the sign-off John says the video contains a clue leading in a roundabout way to a secret livestream, notes there was also a clue last week (week of 7 September 2020), and says coming weeks will often but not always have clues. — 00:03:26

In the description and comments

  • ★★ The description says the video contains a clue leading eventually to a secret livestream, and invites viewers to solve it with others at Tuataria or the nerdfighters subreddit. — video description · Reddit
  • ★ The description thanks Rosianna Halse Rojas for the observation about feeling memories being presently formed; a channel comment says it came from her note on his script. — video description · Rosianna Halse Rojas
  • ★★ In a channel comment John says he is now closer to 'authorial intent doesn't matter very much' than 'not at all', though for Smash Mouth it may not matter at all. — creator comment

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: All Star · Stairway to Heaven

Also: People: Aesop · Geoffrey Chaucer · Stephen Chbosky · William Shakespeare

Works: The Merchant of Venice

Groups: Led Zeppelin · Smash Mouth · The Mountain Goats

Concepts: authorial intent · celebrity

Only in the description or credits: Reddit · Rosianna Halse Rojas · Tuataria

Also centred on All Star: hey now · YOU'RE AN ALL STAR! · Didn't Make Sense Not to Live for Fun · I ain't she was with well and I so and it's and but so and I'll and

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