Led Zeppelin is Rediculous.

"Thank You" is far out. And it really shows how groovy Plant was when writing. It was actually the first song Page gave the writing job to Plant, and it showed the rest of the band that he can freakin' write.

This is the difference between Bands, and Artists. I'm so glad I can appreciate this stuff.

"If the sun refused to shine, I would still be loving you.
When mountains crumble to the sea, there will still be you and me.

Kind woman, I give you my all, Kind woman, nothing more.

Little drops of rain whisper of the pain, tears of loves lost in the days gone by.
My love is strong, with you there is no wrong,
Together we shall go until we die. My, my, my.
An inspiration is what you are to me, inspiration, look... see.

And so today, my world it smiles, your hand in mine, we walk the miles,
Thanks to you it will be done, for you to me are the only one.
Happiness, no more be sad, happiness....I'm glad.
If the sun refused to shine, I would still be loving you.
When mountains crumble to the sea, there will still be you and me."


-MA


This is me and my wife's song, beautiful song indeed. I like Zep so much that I kinda feel bad for people who don't get it. I don't feel that way about any other band.
 
I don't mind Zep, it's just the jerkwad radio stations play the SAME 3 SONGS OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN!

You're tuned to one station, and it plays Black Dog. Ok, you've heard it 5 times this week. You turn to another station and guess what? They are playing Black Dog. Ahhhhh!!!!

I'd about give my left testicle to hear "Moby Dick" once in a while.

It is possible to overplay any music, even a great band.

I cringe in embarrassment every time I'm in a coffee shop and they play Led Zeppelin or The Beatles. These bands are played over and over and over and over and over again - it's like Christmas music, except played all year long. For these and a few other reasons, I dislike the Beatles intensely and Led Zeppelin is on its way. Very good bands, very good music, and very very overrated.
 
It is possible to overplay any music, even a great band.

I cringe in embarrassment every time I'm in a coffee shop and they play Led Zeppelin or The Beatles. These bands are played over and over and over and over and over again - it's like Christmas music, except played all year long. Very good bands, very good music, and very very overrated.

I agree. I love both bands but I can't imagine how good they would need to be to live up to the hype and attention. It's amazing the gap between the attention given to them and all those other great performers of that period - The Stones, The Who, Jimi, Janis, Cream, Traffic, Pink Floyd, Purple, Fleetwood Mac, Joe Cocker, The Doors, Bowie, Uncle Frank, BB King, King Crimson, The Supremes, Santana, Focus, Aretha, Gong, James Brown, Chicago (pre blow wave), Roxy, Supertramp etc etc.

Surely at least some of the great numbers by all the other outstanding artists would be worth playing instead of the 20000th spin of Stairway or Black Dog or Yesterday ...
 
For these and a few other reasons, I dislike the Beatles intensely and Led Zeppelin is on its way. Very good bands, very good music, and very very overrated.

Interestingly, back in the 70's they weren't overplayed at all, at least not like the bubble gum pop bands (if I hear Angie one more time in my life I will puke). I do remember Stairway being played a few times on some "album rock" radio stations, but most generally shied from it because it is SO VERY LONG and totally opposite what the teenie pop idol's span of attention could handle. It seems that LZ got more single song radio play in the 1980's after Bonham died, than any other time I can remember. Now I can hardly listen to Black Dog, Rock and Roll, and Kashmir anymore.

Overrated? These guys were not like the Stones, Bowie, Fleetwood Mac, Eagles, and other pop bands that did little more than write the proverbial catchy 3 minute, 3 chord, run of the mill cookie cutter songs that were designed for feeding the masses. Zep had an Avant-Gardedness about them that very few groups of the era displayed at all. The violin bow, the reverse echos, the calming acoustic intros leading to electrical explosions that led back to acoustical outros were just something nobody else was really doing back then. The melting of deep Delta Blues, old English and American Folk, Country Western steel guitar and banjo (Tangerine has always been one of my favorites), with Middle Eastern sounds - no, I don't think they should ever be classified as overrated, not in the least. I think they were an artistic masterpiece and may even be underrated or maybe under-appreciated for their artistic contribution - kind of like Zappa, Emerson, Lake, and Palmer or King Crimson. Still, I cannot listen to a few of their songs today because they have played the grooves out of them on classic rock radio stations.
 
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Interestingly, back in the 70's they weren't overplayed at all, at least not like the bubble gum pop bands (if I hear Angie one more time in my life I will puke). I do remember Stairway being played a few times on some "album rock" radio stations, but most generally shied from it because it is SO VERY LONG and totally opposite what the teenie pop idol's span of attention could handle. It seems that LZ got more single song radio play in the 1980's after Bonham died, than any other time I can remember. Now I can hardly listen to Black Dog, Rock and Roll, and Kashmir anymore.

Overrated? These guys were not like the Stones, Bowie, Fleetwood Mac, Eagles, and other pop bands that did little more than write the proverbial catchy 3 minute, 3 chord, run of the mill cookie cutter songs that were designed for feeding the masses. Zep had an Avant-Gardedness about them that very few groups of the era displayed at all. The violin bow, the reverse echos, the calming acoustic intros leading to electrical explosions that led back to acoustical outros were just something nobody else was really doing back then. The melting of deep Delta Blues, old English and American Folk, Country Western steel guitar and banjo (Tangerine has always been one of my favorites), with Middle Eastern sounds - no, I don't think they should ever be classified as overrated, not in the least. I think they were an artistic masterpiece and may even be underrated or maybe under-appreciated for their artistic contribution - kind of like Zappa, Emerson, Lake, and Palmer or King Crimson. Still, I cannot listen to a few of their songs today because they have played the grooves out of them on classic rock radio stations.

Your comments are right on. The Deep Purple, Zeppelin debate seems to show up here every couple of months, but as you've pointed out, the deciding factor for me was the variety of styles Zeppelin played that DP never attempted.

Also with album sales of near 85 million, they're #3 in album sales--only beaten by the Beatles and Garth Brooks per a google search. In 07 they sold the digital publishing rights to their catalog to Warner for 60 million and they're now enjoying a resurgence that few bands will ever enjoy. They might even be more popular now then they ever were?

Of course as drummers we all know that nobody would have ever heard of them if it wasn't Bonham! 8^)

BTW, no song was overplayed more then Smoke on the Water!
 
The Deep Purple, Zeppelin debate seems to show up here every couple of months, but as you've pointed out, the deciding factor for me was the variety of styles Zeppelin played that DP never attempted.

Well, Deep Purple was a pleasure to the ears when they were firing on all 8 cylinders. That being of course when Gillan, Blackmore, and Paice were all getting along, which unfortunately was not that often. I think Ian might have had a better, more powerful vocal range than Plant, and Blackmore's lead solos probably had more musical complexity to them than Page's. Paice vs Bonham? Well, we might as well argue singles versus triplets to cover that one. But when it all came together, Deep Purple was no Led Zeppelin. They were excellent in their own right and I even like listening to some of their live reunions from the 1990s, but as a band in their heyday, they did not shine as bright and as long, and did not leave the overall artistic element and complete musical diversity that Zep did.
 
Well, Deep Purple was a pleasure to the ears when they were firing on all 8 cylinders. That being of course when Gillan, Blackmore, and Paice were all getting along, which unfortunately was not that often. I think Ian might have had a better, more powerful vocal range than Plant, and Blackmore's lead solos probably had more musical complexity to them than Page's. Paice vs Bonham? Well, we might as well argue singles versus triplets to cover that one. But when it all came together, Deep Purple was no Led Zeppelin. They were excellent in their own right and I even like listening to some of their live reunions from the 1990s, but as a band in their heyday, they did not shine as bright and as long, and did not leave the overall artistic element and complete musical diversity that Zep did.

Don't ge me wrong, I'm a big DP fan. I just appreciate that Zeppelin was always pushing the boundries of music and styles and it always worked for me. DP on the other hand stuck pretty much to the hard rock formula so you can only guess at what they could have, or might have done if they had experimented more.
 
Strangelove, you're a hard man - lol

Sure, Fleetwood Mac and The Stones didn't have a class of Led Zep (I see David Bowie in a similar league, though), but the difference wasn't night and day.

I'm nore sure Zep had the class of Uncle Frank or King Crimson either, although I wouldn't say the latter (in their various incarnations) are better bands, just more sophisticated.

At some point with most listeners, gut feeling overrides extra musical sophistication. At what point that kicks in is an individual thing. If you're talking about influence, then sure, Zep are way up there.
 
I'm actually getting really quite sick of the backward-looking 'Rock' lobby at the moment.

Now that I've alienated everybody in this thread, I will explain.

I like Led Zeppelin. I used to like them a lot more, but I'm actually with DMC on this one on so many levels. This focus on bands that have been gone thirty or forty years to the forsaking of all others (to use matrimonial terminology) really irritates me. That and bands (like Wolfmother) who just re-hash this kind of music. It happened, it's over, please move on with your lives.

The truth is, it stagnates everything. Whenever I listen to Classical Music (and I listen to a lot more than the majority of the people on here as part of my degree) I can usually place it within a certain compositional timeframe and see a progression directly from Bach, through to Mozart, Beethoven, Stravinsky, Schoenberg et al. I don't know if it's just me, but the speed of musical change in the previous century should have made it easier to pinpoint to even more specific dates. I can do it with jazz - I can listen to a lot of the music and pinpoint a rough era as to when the music was written - pre-'Brew' Davis is definitely pre -'Brew' Davis and Brian Blade is definitely much more modern, because I can see a linear progression. However, when I listen to a lot of guitar-based music, I just don't hear that. I can certainly hear it for the first decade or two of rock, for argument's sake '55-'75 but really beyond that, I struggle to hear what has musically changed in a lot of mainstream material.

This focus on a very specific time frame (roughly '68-'78) means that younger generations are growing up with an attitude of just wanting to play that music. I'm sick of pentatonic scales, I'm sick of two-minute guitar solos, I'm sick of drummers hitting their crash every 'one' and I'm sick of vocalists who think that they can use the word 'wooohhhmmaaannn' in a song without a hint of irony.

There are plenty of bands out there that don't do this. I could name dozens, but it seems to so many young people today that this period is all that counts. I know, I've been there and out the other side and I was even critical of drum machines for a long time - until I started looking elsewhere. I've discovered so much musical diversity in the last two decades it is ridiculous, but so little of it uses the 'standard band' format. Bowie is a prime example - there's a guy who realised what he was doing was going to be passe in the next two years and changed it all just because he could. What did we get? Two (arguably three) fantastic albums - that mercifully haven't been copied - and mind-blowing collaborations with a small group of musicians that have seriously radicalised and influenced a wide range of musicians in the years since. Why then, do I keep hearing the same three chords on the radio? Why do I listen to a mainstream pop track and think it's from the 90s but it turns out to be the 'newest' chart release?

Because people don't listen to enough music. Vygotsky (a psychologist) postulated a theory known as 'Zones of Proximal Development' whereby in order to develop, one has to stretch slightly beyond their 'comfort zone' and seek new empirical experiences. I don't think enough people do that. Without that I would have never have started the degree I am doing, I would never have discovered some really fantastic music (let's just start with Schoenberg and Penderecki) and I would have never have discovered quite what a computer could do, and that actually deeply disturbs me, yet every time I log in, I keep seeing the same names mentioned, the same concepts mentioned and there is very little new in any of it.

Why not take the primitive rhythms of Stravinsky's 'Rite of Spring' and try something new, rather than lauding over Bonham, Paice et al (who I do think are great drummers) and really pushing some boundaries?
 
Outstanding post, MFB. As a backward looking old fart I am not 100% with you, but it was still a great post :)

It should be said that my band does noting even remotely like Zep. Nearly all of our material is sourced from the 40 to the 60s :)

Rock has certainly evolved - from post-punk grunge in the 90s to bands like RATM or The Chill Peppers or the four thousand brands of nu-metal ...
 
Outstanding post, MFB. As a backward looking old fart I am not 100% with you, but it was still a great post :)

It should be said that my band does noting even remotely like Zep. Nearly all of our material is sourced from the 40 to the 60s :)

Rock has certainly evolved - from post-punk grunge in the 90s to bands like RATM or The Chill Peppers or the four thousand brands of nu-metal ...

Yes, but that doesn't necessarily mean that there's been an aesthetic shift. Really, when I say I 'don't hear the difference' what I tend not to hear (more than just the notes themselves) is the aesthetic. And to me a lot of it is still loud guitar music with the same attitude as before. I'm not saying that's inherently a bad thing in itself, but I just want to see somebody doing something different.
 
I for one would take all that over the post-punk revival rubbish that is essentially that same aesthetic with all the life and interest sucked out of it. While I agree in principle, I'm prepared to listen to anything if it has sincere and open emotional expression at its heart.
 
I'm actually getting really quite sick of the backward-looking 'Rock' lobby at the moment.

Now that I've alienated everybody in this thread, I will explain.

I like Led Zeppelin. I used to like them a lot more, but I'm actually with DMC on this one on so many levels. This focus on bands that have been gone thirty or forty years to the forsaking of all others (to use matrimonial terminology) really irritates me. That and bands (like Wolfmother) who just re-hash this kind of music. It happened, it's over, please move on with your lives.

The truth is, it stagnates everything. Whenever I listen to Classical Music (and I listen to a lot more than the majority of the people on here as part of my degree) I can usually place it within a certain compositional timeframe and see a progression directly from Bach, through to Mozart, Beethoven, Stravinsky, Schoenberg et al. I don't know if it's just me, but the speed of musical change in the previous century should have made it easier to pinpoint to even more specific dates. I can do it with jazz - I can listen to a lot of the music and pinpoint a rough era as to when the music was written - pre-'Brew' Davis is definitely pre -'Brew' Davis and Brian Blade is definitely much more modern, because I can see a linear progression. However, when I listen to a lot of guitar-based music, I just don't hear that. I can certainly hear it for the first decade or two of rock, for argument's sake '55-'75 but really beyond that, I struggle to hear what has musically changed in a lot of mainstream material.

This focus on a very specific time frame (roughly '68-'78) means that younger generations are growing up with an attitude of just wanting to play that music. I'm sick of pentatonic scales, I'm sick of two-minute guitar solos, I'm sick of drummers hitting their crash every 'one' and I'm sick of vocalists who think that they can use the word 'wooohhhmmaaannn' in a song without a hint of irony.

There are plenty of bands out there that don't do this. I could name dozens, but it seems to so many young people today that this period is all that counts. I know, I've been there and out the other side and I was even critical of drum machines for a long time - until I started looking elsewhere. I've discovered so much musical diversity in the last two decades it is ridiculous, but so little of it uses the 'standard band' format. Bowie is a prime example - there's a guy who realised what he was doing was going to be passe in the next two years and changed it all just because he could. What did we get? Two (arguably three) fantastic albums - that mercifully haven't been copied - and mind-blowing collaborations with a small group of musicians that have seriously radicalised and influenced a wide range of musicians in the years since. Why then, do I keep hearing the same three chords on the radio? Why do I listen to a mainstream pop track and think it's from the 90s but it turns out to be the 'newest' chart release?

Because people don't listen to enough music. Vygotsky (a psychologist) postulated a theory known as 'Zones of Proximal Development' whereby in order to develop, one has to stretch slightly beyond their 'comfort zone' and seek new empirical experiences. I don't think enough people do that. Without that I would have never have started the degree I am doing, I would never have discovered some really fantastic music (let's just start with Schoenberg and Penderecki) and I would have never have discovered quite what a computer could do, and that actually deeply disturbs me, yet every time I log in, I keep seeing the same names mentioned, the same concepts mentioned and there is very little new in any of it.

Why not take the primitive rhythms of Stravinsky's 'Rite of Spring' and try something new, rather than lauding over Bonham, Paice et al (who I do think are great drummers) and really pushing some boundaries?

You've [put up a thoughtful post, but I disagree with you on a number of things.

First and foremost is that age of rock. Of course it's easier to follow the progression of a music that is hundreds of years old--classical, or 100+ years old--jazz.

But even, their are some great reintreptations of classics like "The Hall of the Mountain King," by Apocolypto and Savantage.

But what about the early guitart laden rock, to the electronic music of the 80's, to rebirth of hard rock in the 90's with much less guitar dependence and soloing, to multiple genre's of metal, to the likes of rap and hip hop. Music has changed drastically over the last 40 years--for better or worse is for the individual to decide.

But the idea that "it happened, it's over?" I see that along the lines of cutting out elemenatry school and sending kids straight to high school. It's where you end up anyway. Seems from your post some musical taste foundations irritate you while others don't. I don't see the discussion as being a scholastic as you've implied. Music is music, and some music grabs some, while not others. Seems odd to be irritated by what does grab some. It's also odd to not see the roots of a current top 40 band along the lines of Buckcheery and not see the 70's roots to the music.

Furthermore, a lot of classical music isn't all that scholastic, and a lot of it stands alone in the fact that it didn't come from previous music, and like popular music, a lot of it is just catching a ride on what was popular and rewriting "popular" in another way. A lot like top 40 music is today much the same song over and over. If people were as familiar with classical musuc as they are with current music, this would be obvious.
 
You guys are getting too analytical for me. Music appeals to my right side, not the left. ;-}

My whole point was despite their arena-rockedness, Led Zep is absolutely not in the same league as Black Sabbath, KISS, Guns-N-Roses, or Spinal Tap.
 
Do you think We are lauding over John Bonham, Ian Paice?

The question is: Who will be the next John Bonham, Ian Paice, Bill Ward? At the present time? If there is/are any!
 
You guys are getting too analytical for me. Music appeals to my right side, not the left. ;-}
.



LOL, could not have said it better myself, who takes music and puts that much BS into it? Come on man really, pffftt talk about your over bearing self righteous rubbish.

Give him a break, The kid is 16 and is just discovering the greatest Rock band of all time, he has enough time to learn about all the other crap that makes us all such over opinionated people who think that because they like something the whole world should like it or be called a moron for not getting it.
 
LOL, could not have said it better myself, who takes music and puts that much BS into it? Come on man really, pffftt talk about your over bearing self righteous rubbish.

Just about everybody at this University, so it happens. If you want to talk about what music can do to people (lest you listen to other forms of music beyond your own scope) then it is very much worth talking about and is in now way 'over bearing' nor 'self righteous'. Ever listened to 'Threnody For the Victims of Hiroshima'? Thought not.

ut what about the early guitart laden rock, to the electronic music of the 80's, to rebirth of hard rock in the 90's with much less guitar dependence and soloing, to multiple genre's of metal, to the likes of rap and hip hop. Music has changed drastically over the last 40 years--for better or worse is for the individual to decide.

See, I don't think it has changed. This to me is the 'demographic' nature of the music business - Mozart was guilty of it as we are today (he wrote to commission after all) but that wasn't the sole nature of his output. It has changed in the last few years, but I am one who finds fault with the music industry for actually stagnating so many things. Rap - a great force for political change in the early 1980s (and this analogy holds with many 'new' forms) - was sanitised for the sake of mass-marketing. The same is true of so much of what I hear around me. Why's that? Well, the music industry playing it safe and consumers going along with it.
 
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