The following is an excerpt from Chuck Klosterman (he of Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs fame)’s latest, Killing Yourself to Live. I finished the book at 30,000 feet, somewhere over Oklahoma. It was excellent. This passage in particular piqued my interest (read, I believe, over Death Valley, appropriately enough), as it proffers his theory that Led Zep are the most uniformly popular rock band of all time due to the way their music is experienced by males born after 1958. Being a chick (though certainly, a Zeppelin fan), I can’t entirely relate. So, read. Discuss. Comment…
Whenever I find myself in an argument about the greatest
rock bands of all time, I always place Zeppelin third, behind the Beatles and
the Stones. This sentiment is incredibly common; if we polled everyone in North America who likes rock music, those three bands would
almost certainly be the consensus selections (and in that order). But Zeppelin
is far and away the most popular rock band of all time, and they’re popular in
a way the Beatles and Stones cannot possibly compete with; this is because
every straight man born after the year 1958 has at least one transitory period
in his life when he believes Led Zeppelin is the only good band that ever
existed. And there is no other rock group that generates that experience.
A few years ago, I was an on-air guest for a morning radio
show in Akron. I
was on the air with the librarian from the Akron public library…walking out of
the studio, the librarian noticed the show’s 19-year-old producer; the producer
had a blond mullet, his blank eyes
were beyond bloodshot, and he was wearing ripped jeans and a black Swan Song T-shirt with all the runes from
the Zoso album. The librarian turned to me and said, “You know, I went to high
school with that guy.” This librarian was 42. But he was right. He did go to
high school with that guy. Right now, there are boys in fourth grade who do not
even realize that they will become “that guy” as soon as they finish reading
The Hobbit in eighth grade. There are people having unprotected sex at this
very moment, and the fetus spawned from that union will become “that guy” in
two decades. Led Zeppelin is the most legitimately timeless musical entity of
the past half century; they are they only group in the history of rock ‘n roll
that every male rock fan seems to experience in exactly the same way.
You are probably wondering why that happens; I’m not sure,
either. I’ve put a lot of thought into this subject (certainly more than any
human should), but it never becomes totally clear; it only seems more and more
true. For a time, I thought it was Robert Plant’s overt misogyny fused with
Jimmy Page’s obsession with the occult, since that combination allows
adolescent males to reconcile the alienation of unhinged teenage sexuality with
their own inescapable geekiness. However, this theory strikes me as “probably
stupid.” It would be easy to argue that Zeppelin simply out-rocks all other
bands, but that’s not really true; AC/DC completely out-rocks Led Zeppelin, and
AC/DC is mostly ridiculous. Whatever quality makes Led Zep so eternally
archetypal must be “intangible,” but even that arrangement seems weak; here in
Big Sky Country, I’m listening to “Heartbreaker” at rib-crushing volume, and
everything that’s perfect about Led Zeppelin seems completely palpable…Everything
is real. And what makes that everything – maybe – is this: Led Zeppelin sounds
like who they are, but they also sound like who they are not. They sound like
an English blues band. They sound like a warm-blooded brachiosaur. They sound
like Hannibal’s assault across the Alps. They sound sexy and sexist and sexless. They sound
dark but stoned; they sound smart but dumb; they seem older than you, but just
barely. Let Zeppelin sounds like the way a cool guy acts. Or, more
specifically, Led Zeppelin sounds like a certain kind of cool guy; they sound
like the kind of cool guy every man vaguely thinks he has the potential to be,
if just a few things about the world were somehow different. And the experience
this creates is unique to Led Zeppelin because its manifestation is entirely
sonic: There is a point in your life when you hear songs like “The Ocean” and “Out
on the Tiles” and “Kashmir,” and you suddenly
find yourself feeling like these songs are actively making you into the person
you want to be. It does not matter if you’ve heard those songs 100 times and
felt nothing in the past, and it does not matter if you don’t normally like
rock ‘n roll and just happened to overhear it in somebody else’s dorm room. We all
still meet at the same vortex: For whatever the reason, there is a point in the
male maturation process when the music of Led Zeppelin sounds like the perfect
actualization of the perfectly cool you. You will hear the intro to “When the
Levee Breaks,” and it will feel like your brain is stuffed inside the kick
drum. You will hear the opening howl of “Immigrant Song,” and you will imagine
standing on the bow of a Viking ship and screaming about Valhalla.
But when these things happen, you don’t think about Physical Graffiti or Houses
of the Holy in those abstract, metaphysical terms; you simply think, “Wow, I just
realized something: This shit is perfect. In fact, this record is vastly
superior to all other forms of music on the entire planet, so this is all I will
ever listen to, all the time.” And you do this for six days or six weeks or six
years. This is your Zeppelin Phase, and it has as much to do with your own
personal psychology as it does with the way John Paul Jones played the organ “Trampled
Under Foot.” It has to do with sociobiology, and with Aleister Crowley, and
possibly with mastodons. And you will grow out of it, probably. But this is why
Led Zeppelin is the most beloved rock band of all time, even though most people
(including myself) think the Beatles and the Rolling Stones are better. Those
two bands are appreciated in myriad ways and for myriad reasons, and the
criteria for doing so changes with every generation. But Led Zeppelin is only
loved one way, and that will never evolve. They are the one thing all young men
share, and we shall share it forever. Led Zeppelin is unkillable, even if John
Bonham was not.
Leave Your Comments