An Inspiration Is What You Are to Me

Plato (427–347 B.C.E.) wrote a short dialogue called Ion which has had a huge influence on thinking about artistic creativity.¹⁵ Ion was what the Greeks called a ‘rhapsode’—a performing artist who recited or sang poetry to appreciative audiences. Ion didn’t perform poetry he’d written himself; he specialized in reciting the poetry of Homer. In this he was like Zeppelin or any other band covering material written by other people.

At the beginning of the dialogue when he and Socrates meet, Ion has just come from a competition for rhapsodes where he has won first prize. Ion was successful and renowned in his day, just as Led Zeppelin was in theirs, and like the members of Led Zeppelin, Ion could sound a bit full of himself. Perhaps understandably, Ion comes across as rather vain when Socrates—a selfdescribed “gadfly”—inquires about his profession. Socrates habitually infuriated Athenian citizens by asking them pointed questions and showing them to be ignorant or confused about those very things which they thought they knew best. Without being too obvious about it, Socrates does the same thing with Ion. (Perhaps, like Led Zeppelin, Ion would have done well to swear off giving interviews!)

Under Socrates’s questioning, Ion is led to make a number of highly questionable claims about his skills and the nature of his art. For example, he claims to have lots to say about Homer, to understand Homer’s mind, and even to know something about each of the many topics that Homer touches upon in his verse. Yet with further questioning, Ion comes to admit that when he speaks about Homer, what he says isn’t based on knowledge or expertise at all. If Ion really was knowledgeable or skilled then he could speak intelligently about any poet, not just Homer, since other poets address the same themes as Homer. If Ion were knowledgeable about Homer’s subject matter he would be equally knowledgeable about the other poets too, at least when they speak on the same topics. But Ion isn’t really interested in any other poets; much less does he have anything to say about them. Nor does he really know much about the different subjects Homer discusses, such as chariot driving, leading armies into battle, medicine or divination. So Ion is like someone who sings in a Zeppelin cover band and claims to know all about their songs, but who can’t explain what a “bustle in a hedgerow” is.

Yet there’s no denying that Ion is good at what he does. After all, he won first prize in the competition. But then, what makes him a master of his profession if it isn’t technical skill or some kind of knowledge? Socrates’s answer is that Ion is the recipient of divine gifts. Just as poets like Homer are divinely inspired and even “possessed” by the gods when they compose poetry, so too are rhapsodes like Ion divinely inspired then they recite that poetry well. Neither poets nor rhapsodes are quite in their right minds when they write or recite poetry, and they don’t have teachable skills that might be passed on to others. Consequently, on Socrates’s view neither poets nor rhapsodes create the works and performances we attribute to them. Rather, they’re mere conduits for the gods who take away their intellects and speak through them.

At the end of the dialogue Ion is left both confused and flattered. Perhaps his vanity prevents him from appreciating Socrates’s irony. After all, Socrates’s claim that poets and rhapsodes are divinely inspired is a backhanded compliment, at best. While being associated with the gods sounds like something good, it also implies that poets and rhapsodes themselves have very little to offer. They aren’t knowledgeable or skillful in any important way and don’t really deserve credit for what they do.

Ion was the first but not the only one to miss Socrates’s irony in this instance. The British poet Percy Bysshe Shelley was a huge fan of the dialogue and even translated it into English, smoothing out the Socratic irony in a number of key passages. Shelley’s translation of the Ion, published in 1840, influenced the romantic conceptions of art and poetry as the products of unconscious and mysterious inspiration. These same romantic conceptions have had an influence on some Led Zeppelin fans. Those who believe that Zeppelin’s associations with the occult are in some way a cause of their power and originality are carrying on this tradition of creativity as otherworldly inspiration.

His Is the Force that Lies Within

The German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) also gave an account of artistic creativity.¹⁶ Kant wrote mostly about poetry and the visual arts, but what he said was applied to music as well. When we examine a work of art—imagine a painting—we understand that it is a painting and not the thing depicted. No one mistakes a painting of a horse for an actual horse, or a black and white graphic of an exploding zeppelin for a real one. But to make a graphic of a zeppelin look like or be acceptable as a zeppelin to an audience, the artist must follow certain rules or conventions. These rules are relative and vary across artistic and cultural traditions.

A painting of a horse from ancient Greece might not look exactly like one from eighteenth-century France, and one artist’s rendering of a zeppelin might not look like another’s. But if both are really good artworks they’ll have at least one thing in common: when we examine them we’ll forget that the artist worked according to artistic conventions. We’ll be so absorbed in the painting that it won’t cross our minds that the artist had to follow certain rules. Something similar happens when we listen to music. Zeppelin fans can distinguish their music from other music in similar styles, but they don’t think about the “rules” of the various popular music styles. All of this raises further questions: where do these rules come from and why do they change from time to time?

Kant’s answer to both questions is: artistic genius. Certain individuals have an inborn talent or natural gift for making art. Although immersed in an artistic tradition and capable of following all the rules of that tradition, these special individuals can make art that seems new and different. They can make art that is original. In effect, they break or ignore the rules of the current artistic scene and create new rules that other artists will follow in the future. Think of Jimmy Page using a bow to play the electric guitar, or how “Stairway to Heaven” lasts much longer than a standard threeminute radio hit. Zeppelin continued to break rules with “Stairway” when they refused either to release the song as a single or to record a shortened version for radio play. Later artists who come after the genius may be technically very proficient; but they will be followers rather than leaders. They lack that spark of genius that would allow them to make new rules themselves.

For Kant, artistic genius is rare and fundamentally mysterious. The genius doesn’t himself understand how he comes up with his new ideas. Nor can he teach anyone else how to be original. We might say that the genius has a more productive imagination than others do, or that his imagination works in a different way. But these are just ways of restating the problem. What does it really mean to say that one person has a “better” or more prolific imagination than another person? What makes the genius different from other talented yet unoriginal artists? We can only wonder.

Lots of People Talking (about Creativity) and Few of Them Know

On the surface, Plato’s and Kant’s accounts of creativity seem different. In the first, the creative artist is inspired by external forces. He or she is merely a medium or conduit through which the muses or the gods communicate, and makes very little contribution to the process. In the second, the creative artist deserves all the credit. He has a mysterious gift that elevates his work above that of other artists, who are competent but must be content to follow rules. These competent but uncreative artists are like musicians in some cover bands. They’re fine as long as they follow the rules and play someone else’s material, but their own stuff just doesn’t cut it.

Yet when we take a closer look, Plato’s and Kant’s accounts actually have a lot in common. First, both are intensely individualistic. It’s not just that Plato and Kant assume that the artists in question will be individuals and not groups. They also write as if these individuals could work in isolation. The great rhapsode is picked out by the gods and inspired by them. That’s all there is to it. The only social context the rhapsode needs is an audience to appreciate his performances. Kant’s genius does need others to help him learn the existing artistic conventions. But his real talent only becomes apparent when he can transcend those conventions, and perhaps also transcend the surrounding social context.

Tradition—and by implication the people who embody those traditions—must be overcome if genius is to shine forth. This is one of the major sources for the stereotype of the great artist as a solitary genius, doomed to be misunderstood by those around him. However, thinking of creative artists in this way leaves us perplexed when it comes to groups such as Led Zeppelin. How could four solitary geniuses work together? Is the group itself some kind of “super-genius”? But if so, then we can’t say anything about the way in which the group members interact with one another or create together.

Second, both accounts of creativity are predominantly mental or psychological. When a rhapsode is inspired, it’s his intellect, not his body, that is taken over by the gods, who then speak through him. Similarly, the originality of Kant’s creative genius is described in mental terms. It is not his physical mastery of technique that makes him a great artist. Many artists have mastered technique but genius is rare. What sets the genius apart is something about his mental faculties—his imagination is different from others’, as is the way it interacts with the rest of his mind. Applying this model, we would have to explain what made Zeppelin creative without talking about Page’s amazing guitar technique or Bonham’s brute physical interaction with his drum kit.

Finally, both Plato and Kant present creativity and originality in art as fundamentally mysterious, not to say inexplicable. According to Kant, the genius himself doesn’t understand the source of his creativity, and Socrates’s reference to the muses or the gods only pushes back the question without answering it, since we have no knowledge of what makes the muses creative. Empirical research into the phenomenon of creativity seems to be a waste of time. Studying how creative artists actually work would apparently leave us none the wiser. If Plato and Kant are correct, there is no point in trying to figure out what made Zeppelin great.

It Really Makes Me Wonder

These two accounts of creativity—Platonic inspiration and Kantian artistic genius—have been hugely influential and still affect the way we talk about art and music today. Both also fit very well the Romantic conception of the artist as a solitary, misunderstood loner. For certain kinds of musicians—especially singer-songwriters like Bob Dylan or Joni Mitchell—these traditional models might have a place. But for thinking about the artistic and musical achievements of rock bands or other kinds of artistic ensembles, they fall flat. In fact, thinking about creativity in terms of these two accounts can seriously obscure what is musically and artistically significant about the work of creative ensembles.

There are at least two other things any decent theory of creativity would have to cover. The first is what some philosophers of mind have called the “extended mind” hypothesis. This is the idea that the mind isn’t all in the brain (or the head). Human cognitive processing sometimes extends into other parts of the individual’s body and even into the environment around him or her. Second, theorists need to take seriously the idea that creativity is a social and not simply individualistic phenomenon. Some creative works are best seen as emerging from the cooperation and conflict of a number of actors, rather than as the work of solitary geniuses.

The Piper’s Calling You to Join Him

The idea of the extended mind was introduced to philosophers in a well-known article by Andy Clark and David Chalmers published in 1998.¹⁷ The authors were impressed by the way the environment and things in it can sometimes support or even direct cognitive processes. Props—including body parts such as fingers as well as external props like notebooks, calculators, and computers—have long served as aids to cognition and memory. A guitarist might find that it’s easier to remember how to play a song on the guitar if he or she actually has a guitar in hand. The fingers may “remember” what the mind forgets. Clark and Chalmers defended what they called the “Parity Principle.” As Clark put it, “If, as we confront some task, a part of the world functions as a process which, were it to go on in the head, we would have no hesitation in accepting as a part of the cognitive process, then that part of the world is (for that time) part of the cognitive process.”¹⁸ In other words we can’t conclude, simply on the basis of spatial location or metabolic structure, that something isn’t part of the mind.

For example, there’s a growing body of experimental work that underlines the importance of physical gestures to thinking and problem solving. Children who were told not to move their hands or gesture while solving math problems did worse on the problems than children who were encouraged to gesture. Researchers disagree as to what role the gestures play, but it seems clear that they have a cognitive function. In other words, the gestures are doing some of the mental work that we previously assumed was confined to the brain. Understanding gestures in this way can help explain why we gesture when talking on the phone although we realize the person we’re speaking with can’t see our gestures, and why even people who have been blind from birth gesture when they are talking to other blind people. It might even illuminate the compulsion to play air guitar when no one is around—especially when no one is around!

The idea that the mind might extend outside the head and even outside the body sounds pretty bizarre; but that isn’t a reason to reject it. A lot of ideas that are now generally accepted as true sounded bizarre when they were introduced. According to the Parity Principle, if I work out a long division problem on paper rather than in my mind, the pen and paper constitute part of my cognitive process and part of my mind. Or think of musical notation as a cognitive prop that helps us to extend our “built-in” biological memory. Before the invention of musical notation, the only way to preserve a musical work was to preserve it in human memory. If everyone who knew a particular tune died the tune would be lost forever. But if the tune is written down it will be accessible as long as there are people who know how to interpret the notation. Imagine a musician (a piper?) who carries with him a book with the notation for all the tunes he can play. Rather than memorize every tune he knows, he can look them up anytime in the book. That way, when we all call the tune, he’s never at a loss. It seems plausible to regard the book as an external memory storage device.

What does this have to do with creativity (or with Led Zeppelin)? If our idea of creativity is fundamentally mental or psychological and we conceive of the mind as being in the head, then we will pay the most attention to those processes that seem to go on in the head. We will tend to think that musicians’ major creative activities will be thinking up lyrics and music, in the sense of working out tonal and rhythmic patterns and harmonic sequences. We will tend to downplay or even overlook the creative work that does not go on primarily in the head but with the aid of musical instruments. And yet, in an interview with Alan “Fluff” Freeman, Jimmy likened his relationship with his guitar to that of an actor actually becoming one with the role that he plays: when an actor “takes on the part within a play he becomes that person. I mean it’s just a total involvement within it. And that’s just how it is with your instruments. You’re just totally involved with it. It’s just a part of you, an extension of you, and yet sometimes maybe you’re an extension of it. It’s like driving a car. You’re part of the machine.”¹⁹ So, when John Bonham works out a solo on his drum kit, or Jimmy Page plays around with different guitar hooks until he finds the right entry, the work they do on the musical instruments is in each case part of the creative thought process. And these small touches are anything but trivial. They can make the difference between a good track and a great one.

Take, for example, one of my favorite Zeppelin recordings—“Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You,” from their debut album. The song sounds like it might have been around forever, but was actually written by Anne Bredon in the late 1950s. Page knew and liked the Joan Baez version, and he’d played the song as a session musician with Marianne Faithfull. As Baez sings it, accompanied by a lilting acoustic guitar, the song has a definite folk sensibility. The Led Zeppelin version still contains elements of the folk sound, but there is much more going on. Page’s arrangement inserts an instrumental bridge—drums and guitars—between each verse. Each time this is played, it is progressively louder and more intense. Robert Plant’s voice is gentle at the beginning of the song, but grows stronger and more intensely emotional as the song progresses. As he continues, elements of mystery and menace can be heard in his voice. Whereas Baez’s voice remains on a consistent level throughout her performance, Plant goes almost literally from a whisper to a cry. Led Zeppelin doesn’t just cover the song; they transform it into something that is completely new and completely their own.

Led Zeppelin’s version of “Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You” is a creative achievement that would in turn be copied by later groups. It’s virtually part of the hard rock/heavy metal “rulebook” that bands must slow down and perform at least one heartfelt ballad. In more ways than one, “Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You” is the ancestor of Kiss’s “Beth,” Journey’s “Faithfully,” Foreigner’s “I Want to Know What Love Is,” Def Leppard’s “Love,” “November Rain” by Guns ‘n’ Roses, “Still Loving You” by the Scorpions, and “Bed of Roses” by Bon Jovi. The way “Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You” is changed in Zep’s performance is not best understood as something that happened in the head of Page or any of the other members. Led Zeppelin did their major creative work together, whether in rehearsal, in the recording studio, or on stage in live performances.

The extended mind hypothesis can help us to understand the creative work that can come out of their playing together. If we think that creativity is limited to the head, then rehearsal and performance can only be a putting into play of musical ideas that have already been thought out. But anyone who has ever played music with others—whether in a garage band, string quartet, or high school marching band—knows that playing together is not like this. Depending on the type of ensemble and the setting, rehearsals and playing together are more or less controlled processes of trying things out, listening, adjusting, and then trying something else. Musicians do not think and then play; rather, they think with or through their instruments. Their instruments and their bodies are not the means by which they express musical ideas that have already been formed in their heads. Rather the act of playing an instrument has to be understood holistically and as itself a form of creative musical thought in action.

So Anytime Somebody Needs You, Don’t Let Them Down

Led Zeppelin is a group, not a single individual. In some situations though it can be useful to talk about Led Zeppelin as a super-individual made up of its four members. This was particularly convenient, for example, when Led Zeppelin was sued by other musicians for plagiarism. Yet in other cases to talk about Led Zeppelin as a single individual is to risk obscurity. This is especially true if we want to try to understand the band’s creative achievement—what made them stand out from other bands at the time and what contributes to their on-going popularity. I think that the band’s creative output is best understood as an example of smallgroup collaborative emergence.²⁰ The concept of emergence allows us to recognize the social aspects of creativity and that Led Zeppelin was made up of four talented individual musicians who nonetheless achieved something extraordinary when they worked together.

Emergence is an important concept for a number of different fields, from biology to psychology to computer science. Emergence is anti-mechanistic; when you combine a number of different elements sometimes something new and unexpected arises. Emergent effects are always different from the various elements from which they arise, and somewhat unexpected. Emergent effects are not initially predictable from the knowledge of their components. A classic example is the wetness of water: hydrogen and oxygen are the causes, wetness the emergent effect. The wetness of water emerges from the mixture of hydrogen and oxygen.

A property of a system is emergent if it is not possessed by any single component of the system. Being alive is an emergent property of cells. To use a Led Zeppelin example, being awesome is a property of the solo on Stairway to Heaven, but not (necessarily) a property of any individual note. Nor could the awesome quality of the solo be predicted just from knowing that Page first bends the G string at the seventh fret, then plucks the high E string at the fifth fret (in other words, hits an “A”), and so forth. The emotional impact of the solo emerges from its components without being reducible to them, considered in isolation from their place in the whole.

An emergent system is one that displays new behavior or novel properties that could not have been predicted from a complete description of the individual components of the system. One of the key ideas here is that understanding the base level does not necessarily mean that you will understand the higher levels. Understanding which notes Page plays on the guitar does not allow us to predict what the music will sound like. Emergence can occur at many levels of organization, from the molecular level to the interpersonal or social level to the geopolitical level. Collaborative emergent phenomena are those that result from the collective activity of social groups where there is no one formally directing the group and no structured plan is followed. Examples include everyday conversation, brainstorming sessions, discussion seminars, improv theatre and musical improvisations.

R. Keith Sawyer, a psychologist who studies creativity, stresses that although collaborative emergence results from the interactions of individuals, these phenomena cannot be understood by simply analyzing the members of the group individually. Sawyer gives the example of improvisational theatre performances in which actors create dialogue on stage without a script. As he says, “the performance that results is truly a collaborative creation; the performance cannot be understood by trying to reduce it to a study of the psychology of individual actors” (p. 449). Sawyer explains that as each actor improvises a line of dialogue, one possible path for the action is chosen and other potential paths are closed off. As the improvisation continues, there is a changing dramatic emergent—a shared understanding of what has been established and what is going on. The actor’s further speech and actions must be appropriate; that is, they must proceed within the frame established by the emergent drama. But it is worth noting that this shared frame is itself an emerging social product that has been created, bottom-up, by the actions of individual actors.

I hope that the implications for musical creativity (and for Led Zeppelin) will be obvious. In trying to understand Led Zeppelin’s creative achievement we need to look not only at their individual talents and skills but also at how they worked together. The music of many groups is better than what is produced by the solo efforts of their most talented member. On the other hand, a group might have very talented individual members but—for reasons of ego, personality, or temperament—be unable to work together effectively for very long. The Jeff Beck Group and the latter-day Yardbirds are good examples. Led Zeppelin was exceptional in being made up of four supremely talented musicians who were nonetheless able to work well together. (Plant called their union, “a very strange, four-quadrant marriage.”)²¹ To understand the creativity of Led Zeppelin, it is not enough to know that Page was an amazing guitarist and arranger, Bonham was probably the best rock drummer ever, Plant was a superb vocal communicator, and John Paul Jones was a talented multi-instrumentalist. Almost everyone who writes about Zeppelin says something about their “telepathy”—their almost spooky ability to understand and anticipate one another’s musical moves on stage. Jimmy Page, discussing the way the band worked together in performance, told David Fricke that “Robert could come in at any point [with a vocal idea], and by the time he got halfway through the first line, we’d know what he was going for. And we’d be there with him before he finished that line. That’s how on it all was. Of course, we had the benefit of knowing each other so well musically—and also the fact that this band continued on, year after year, tour after tour, album after album. We could take more and more chances with each other onstage.”²²

What the four members of Zeppelin achieved together cannot be appreciated or understood simply by analyzing their respective individual contributions. Their music and their unique sound emerged from but cannot be fully explained in terms of each member’s individual actions. To fully understand what set them apart we would need to delve into how, exactly, they worked together. This may be difficult but at least it gives us a place to start. And there’s a big difference between claiming that something is very difficult to explain and claiming that it is fundamentally inexplicable.

For me, one of the recordings that best exemplifies the way that the four members of Led Zeppelin together could make music that was greater than the sum of its parts is their recording of “When the Levee Breaks.” Rock writer Chuck Klosterman’s description of this track is particularly apt: “Drums from God, lyrics from the Depression, guitars that go everywhere, guitars that go nowhere, and the sonic weight of a thousand woolly rhinos falling from Skylab” (Chuck Klosterman IV, p. 92). A great many elements go into making “When the Levee Breaks” a great track. The enigmatic lyrics are both anachronistic and timeless, and Plant sings them with total conviction. Yet I think many would agree that Bonham’s drums are particularly important in making the track the great work that it is. Indeed, he is roundly recognized as having set a new standard for recorded drumming. But while Bonham does the actual drumming, the sound produced is not due only to him. Page and recording engineer Andy Johns came up with idea to put the drum kit in a stairwell and record it through overhead microphones. This, together with the technique of feeding the sound through a guitar echo unit and compressing the hell out of it gives the track its characteristic sound. This decision to try for a certain sound in the drums shaped the overall character of “When the Levee Breaks” because every additional musical decision made by any member of the group had to be appropriate within the frame of the emergent drum groove. The drum groove—together with each additional musical decision—opened up new possibilities but closed off others. Each musical decision helped shape the track.

Bring It On Home to You

What would Plato and Kant have made of Led Zeppelin’s creativity? Plato condemned the popular art of his own day, and it seems unlikely that he would have approved very highly of ours. Kant seemed not to have cared much at all for music. (There are reports that he tried to get the warden of a nearby prison to prevent the inmates from singing hymns—the sound interfered with his concentration!) But more important than the personal artistic taste of either thinker is the fact that their theories of creativity (and the theories of the many thinkers whom they influenced) falter when faced with the example of Led Zeppelin. The account that Plato offers, that artists are inspired by the muses or the gods, in the end amounts to another way of saying that their creativity is a mystery that cannot be explained. Maybe, ultimately, it is; but shouldn’t we at least make an attempt at explanation before we conclude as much? Kant’s account of the creative artist as a solitary genius is maybe even less helpful in making sense of Zeppelin. Yes—the band qualifies for artistic “genius” for the way they broke rules and changed popular music. But they didn’t do so by “overcoming” musical tradition. Rather, they drew on and transformed the British Blues tradition that was their immediate musical context and which was itself inspired by African-American musical traditions. Later work by Zeppelin is even more “multicultural” in drawing on a number of different musical influences. Think of “Kashmir” and “D’Yer Mak’er”, for example. When it comes to the band members themselves, it makes no sense to think of them as four musicians, each reluctantly drawn from a more worthwhile solo project to make music together. While Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Bonham and John Paul Jones were incredibly gifted individuals, it was their interaction as a group—the co-operation, conflict, and competition that arose from that interaction—that allowed each to do what was undeniably their best work.²³