Why we still love Led Zep

They epitomise everything today’s rock ‘n’ roll lacks

When I was in high school, I hated Led Zeppelin. I was a punk. To me, those long-haired beasts in Zeppelin, with their extended guitar solos and songs about fairy-goddess devil women, were very old hat.

In college, I took up women’s studies—and hated Led Zeppelin even more. Zep was a particular bugaboo for feminists, put off not only by the strutting machismo of songs like Whole Lotta Love, but also by the infamous offstage “antics” that could be labelled groupie abuse.

In the 1980s, the wheel of pop was, as always, turning. The arena-goers who never had stopped loving the band soon found new company in the indie musicians of the Pacific Northwest. Soundgarden created a new hard rock that somehow reconciled punk’s no-frills virtuousness with metal’s florid virtuosity. In the meantime, metal itself was going underground; with Metallica leading the transformation.

At 24, I was already feeling jaded (ah, youth!) and in need of something to rejigger my musical libido. My roommate Anne and I became hooked on a local band called the Ophelias. We followed the Ophelias’ trail to the Zep albums that were so easy to find in the used-record bins. We were going back—to a time we never actually had wanted to be a part of and that actually existed only in fantasy worlds like the one Zep’s music created.

We hardly wanted a return to the sexism embodied by lyrics like Soul of a woman was created below. But it still felt great to bellow it out, to take it on, to see what it felt like just for a minute to act like these objectionable expressions were OK. Because, frankly, that feeling was a luxury that, as young women fighting for our own voices, we were never allowed. I still love Led Zeppelin.

Fast-forward to the present day. The three surviving members of Zep are reuniting for the first time in many years. They’ve recorded a new song and rumours are circulating about a possible US tour. Once again, Zep has come in all its excessive glory to save us from appropriateness.

What’s inappropriate about Zep now, and what we long to hear, is the band’s sound. Its greatest outings, from Stairway to Heaven to the group’s epic live jams, oppose the professionalism, studio-altered perfectionism and clean digestibility of today’s mainstream rock.

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And nothing could be less like Led Zeppelin than what the Top 40 now calls rock. Even top-notch commercial rock bands favour snappy, tight rhythms and melodies and that compressed production style that makes songs shoot out of a car radio like silver bullets.

A Led Zeppelin song could captivate and bore within the space of a few minutes. A big part of their genius was that they thought it was OK to do both. So welcome back, Led Zeppelin. Enjoy the thunder, the lushness, the boring parts. They don’t make ’em like this band any more. And we, with our 21st-century ears, probably wouldn’t want them to.

-Ann Powers (LAT-WP)