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Unknown Soldier · 02-16-2013, 12:36 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by j.w.

That's the thing, though. They didn't write it. Memphis Minnie wrote it, & they appropriated her life experience as their own, which is disingenuous at best, theft at worst.

David Welky wrote a phenomenally comprehensive book called the Thousand-Year Flood a couple of years back on the '37 flood & it gives a ton of context to songs like Minnie's When the Levee Breaks or Johnny Cash's Five Feet High & Rising. To me, it's that sort of context that makes the songs so powerful. You can't divorce the delta blues from things like slavery or faith or the Mississippi River, or else you're stripping the soul out of the music. Which is exactly what Zeppelin was doing, I think. Certainly, a song that's written in the midst of struggle is more worthwhile than a song written about imagining what struggle is like, or about appropriating someone else's struggle.

There's a footnote in Steve Hyden's The Winners' History of Rock & Roll where he quotes Robert Plant as saying, "When we ripped [Willie Dixon's You Need Love] off, I said to Jimmy, 'Hey, that's our song.' And he said, 'Shut up and keep walking.'" He didn't cop to this until after Willie sued for writing credit on Whole Lotta Love. And I've just gotten to the point where this thread of aloofness has become consistent through all of their early records.

And this kind of stuff is why critics panned Zeppelin. It's kind of faux-blues. And if you think about it, some of these songs were just 20 or 30 years old at the time, some even less. It's like if someone came out now & released a record of Nick Drake songs or Velvet Underground songs & tried to pass them off as their own. Except it's more offensive because you're crossing racial lines at a time when racial tension was still high. Shuggie Otis or Dennis Wilson... any critically acclaimed record from the 70's that a band could pass off to the mainstream as their own songs.

There's a lot to love about Led Zeppelin, which is why my favorite Zeppelin song happens to be one of the songs I'm also most offended by, but this stuff is becoming common knowledge... anyone who calls themselves a music fan is almost required to at least acknowledge the critical reception of Led Zeppelin (or lack thereof).

Every blues rock band at the time, were doing what Zeppelin were doing and that was lifting material by older traditional blues acts, some of these bands acknowledged what they were doing and others didn't. People just point the finger at Zeppelin because they were the biggest band of their day. The fact of the matter is, that whatever Zeppelin may have lifted their version often shared little with the original. Of course Page and Plant were poseurs, rock at that time was just about image and sex appeal as it was about the music.