LED ZeppelinIf you take in the entire dimensions of their annihilation Sunburst greatness, a very difficult band is to categorize. They are usually thought of as the gods in metal, and would deny that – although it is my opinion that DNA of classic metal is as much guilty Black Sabbath’s second album, “paranoid”, as it does to Zeppelin. That Said, Led Zeppelin Loomed Like figures on Olympus Over the Entire Cosmos of Metal: The Hard Charging Thunder Chords and Blisting Guitar Solos, The Long-Haired Priapic Strutting, The Vocals That Scream Out Itsnipotence, The Erotica drive.
Still, I also think of Zeppelin as the Beatles of Heavy Metal. There was a yin to their destructive yang – the songs they would do, like “going to California” or “Thank you”, which elicited a vision of life as glowing and romantic and lovely. The place where the hippia still lived in them. And that of course everyone leads to “Stairway to heaven”, which I would not hesitate to call one of the ten biggest songs from the 1900s. It’s one idyllic Song and tragic and divine and sublime wonderful. It contains quantities.
The two sides of Zeppelin are found in a strange harmony. They were hippies who were also ravagers; They were lyrical songs that found their way through Jimmy Pageriffs and Robert facilityS Wails and John Bonham’s Thuds, to a kind of transcendent negligence. I love how Yin and Yang would work together in a single song, so that “over the hills and far away”, for example, starts as a glittering folk-rock ballad, with plant coming in as a medieval minstrel (“Hello lady, you have the love I need …”), and then Sides acoustic strom takes the song up into the clouds, and then suddenly – Stånga! Stånga! – Bonham’s drums crash in it as a tank that blocks through a Sunday picnic. At that moment you are no longer in Kansas. You are in the Rock ‘n’ Roll Himmel-Tat-Feels-As-Food-as-Hel. (With Zeppelin, the stairs walked both roads.)
This weekend, “To be led zeppelin,” The first official documentary about the band opened on 369 IMAX screens, where it earned $ 2.6 million. Next weekend it is set to open on 1,000 screens. It is almost unknown today for a music documentary-and it is also just about unmatched for Sony Pictures Classics, the store distributor who was smart enough to pick up the film, chairman of his recutting (from the too long version played in 2021 at the Venice Film Festival) and drop it. When you see the documentary, which presents the four members of Zeppelin from their earliest years, and covers how they gathered during the second half of 1968, since 1969 spent their first two albums and playing live, often at the music festivals it took place in the wake By Woodstock, you feel the special charge for volcanic intensity they gave off. The cataklysmic force of Led Zeppelin still controls as soundAnd as a totemic rock mythology.
What struck me to drink all this now, as opposed to, for example 50 years ago, when Zep was the soundtrack for my youth (definition of teenage blows, at least for me, in the 70s: play air hockey in a pinball salon with “Black Dog” that bursts through the speakers) is that Zeppelin’s spirit, rather than getting stuck in time, feels bigger and more vibrant than ever. The greatest music, of course, tends to age well; There is no mystery in it. But what meets me when I hear Zeppelin today is how much their music channeled the impulses of the future.
Their songs took many forms, from metal before named Electric Blues to “Lord of the Rings” Pastoral to Mystic Eastern Drone Rock to Beatles-Meets-Primal-Stone-Age-Dums. Jimmy Page, as the documentary explains, would sometimes adapt his guitar as a sitar to create the exotic modalities you heard in tracks like “The Rain Song.” But the crucial Zeppelin, from “Whole Lotta Love” to “Black Dog” to “Immigrant Song” to “Rock and Roll” to “Misty Mountain Hop” to “Kashmir,” was about the breath under the sound, and in many ways that spirit Was the bridge to what we would call punk. The closing credits for “becoming Led Zeppelin” have a track I have never heard before, the band’s burning live -cover version of “C’mon Everybody”, and these are the purest Ramones.
What, exactly, do I mean by punk? The punk revolution in the 70s were many things. And if you, like me, believe that the biggest punk band – what defined the stylish glass that the world went through at that time – was the sex guns, then I think what it means is that punk, in the heart, was an electrifying music that celebrated a Basic hardcore separation from what we like as … empathy. Human feeling. One of my favorite expistol songs was always “no feelings” (“no light-gs … for someone else! “), Because I think it is so neat, catartically honest about the new state that began to settle in youth culture: the unpleasant self -management of everything and rage in a world that began to turn” connection “into a product.
True Punk was over quite quickly (and the collision created music that allowed the children to think of themselves as punk who cared). But I do not think that the underlying affection that punk dropped to disappeared; I think it just grew. I think the punk vision, in more ways than not, describes the world we have today: people full of rage, at each other’s throats, talk and do not listen. No feelings … for someone else. And even though we all know about the pioneers in punk, the literal inventors of it (MC5, Iggy Pop, Who do “My Generation” and Beatles that make “Helter Skelter”), I would claim that on a mass scale it was Led Zeppelin Who came there first. Their songs don’t sound like “punk”, but Zeppelin’s music was looking to ruin the world as much or more than punk ever did.
And because they were such A monumental band, Epic in Reach and Influence, Led Zeppelin marked the moment when a large number of people, for the first time, experienced rock ‘n’ role as a ruthless orgy of the self. It is part of the beauty of Zeppelin, and the beauty of the metal revolution that the band inspired: that it does not pretend to care. You hit your head down to your navel; It’s about you. This nihilism was already out, but never underestimates the power of rock ‘n’ role in redirecting society’s energy. Elvis and Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis did. The Beatles and Dylan and Stones did. And Led Zeppelin made it-so to triple down on the libidinous energy in all counter culture that had come earlier, and also by shining a light, for the first time, on was such a musical wreck of hedonistic junk stimulation could lead. Was it a good place or a dangerous place? It was both. But that’s where we are now. As Robert Plant sang in “Kashmir,” Oooo my baby! Let me take you there.
