A Dynasty Editorial: Led Zeppelin--the first real purveyors of "world beat" (or How Paul Simon Simon and Peter Gabriel got too much credit)

If you are not a music fan, dislike Led Zeppelin, or are unprepared to hear me potentially blaspheme the name(s) of your favourite musicians, I would suggest that you stop reading now...

I have been spending some time revisiting one of my absolute favourite rock staples, the inimitable power that is Led Zeppelin, and I was re-reading the three essays found in the handsomely illustrated 1990 Led Zeppelin 4-disc boxset booklet (by Cameron Crowe, Kurt Loder, and Robert Palmer respectively). This time around, a passage in Palmer's nearly two decade old essay really struck a chord with me:

One thing this set throws into sharp relief is how much new ground Zeppelin broke, and how little credit they've received for it. The "world beat" phenomenon that has captured the attention of Peter Gabriel, Paul Simon, and other '80's pop stars has accustomed us to hearing music heavily influenced from other world cultures. When Zeppelin started, there was no "world beat" and rock groups borrowings from other cultures were largely window dressing. (Did "Norwegian Wood" really NEED that sitar? Did it have anything to do with the song?)

Zeppelin's interest in world music, sparked by Page's and Jones's early curiosity, really began to pay off artistically when Plant blossomed as a lyricist. His travels through some of the more remote regions of the planet gave him plenty to think and write about, and many of his songs display a healthy (and, at the time, very rare) cultural relativism. Perhaps the apex of this aspect of Zeppelin was "Kashmir", about as perfect a blend of lyric, of music, tradition, and innovation, as one could imagine.

The whole idea of Peter Gabriel and Paul Simon, among others, being seen as these hugely original artists for their incorporation of the music of other cultures into theirs is a farce. No disrespect to either artist, both of whom I own numerous albums by, but if you really examine things more closely, what becomes clear is that the individual members of Led Zeppelin were into so-called "world music" long before Mssrs. Simon and Gabriel. Jimmy Page had gotten a hold of a sitar in advance of George Harrison, Robert Plant began listening to East Indian music in his early to mid-teens, and John-Paul Jones was listening to Arabic music via short-wave radio when he was merely a child, thanks in large part to his musician parents. Page's use of alternate tunings, both existing and created (such as his "CIA tuning", that being "Celtic, Indian, Arabic, which is employed to devastating effect on the instrumental "Black Mountain Side" from Led Zeppelin I), gave songs like "Kashmir", "Dancing Days", "Friends", and "In the Light" their a distinctly foreign flavour within an existing rock and roll framework, a true marriage of Eastern and Western music that made Zeppelin one of the most innovative and truly original bands in rock history. However, other artists tend to get a lion's share of the credit for "world beat", including the Beatles and the Stones, both of whom simply dressed up their traditionally structured tracks with non-traditional instruments, rather than actually fusing the beats and structures of world music with rock and roll (for good examples, check out "Friends" from Led Zeppelin III and "Four Sticks" from the Untitled fourth album).

Led Zeppelin were far more than riff-heavy blues shriekers and their dynamic recordings, full of light and shade, heaviness and acoustic flavours bespeak a unit of players fully in-tune with one another who were not afraid to experiment. Page, Plant, Jones, and Bonham put no limits on what their music was supposed to be, the only limit being their collective imagination. As the surviving band members, and others, have noted, folk, blues, Indian, Arabic, and country music all were integral parts of the Zeppelin sound and really this is what sets them apart from the rest of the hard rock genre. In fact, I would argue that they are not even really a part of the hard rock genre, but rather above it, in a category all their own.

So, 1980's Peter Gabriel and Paul Simon as the originators of "world beat"? Hardly. The Beatles as cutting edge for hanging out with Ravi Shankar and having a sitar feature on "Norwegian Wood"? Pshaw. Have a look at the recorded canon of the Hammer of the Gods if you are looking for the true pioneers.