The Song Remains the Same, But Not Always

Expressive content is personal, individual, specific, unique. It cannot be borrowed. If it is not spontaneous it is not sincere, hence not, in the long run, convincing. But intellectual content is all borrowed.

Led Zeppelin has been many things to many people. However, if there’s one thing that their dedicated fans know about the collective interplay of Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones, and John Bonham, it’s that they played rock, not pop.

Rock music is often distinguished from mere “pop” music by saying that rock requires sincere self-expression (and pop doesn’t). Media studies professor Keir Keightley says that “genres and performers that are thought to merit the name ‘rock’ must be seen as serious, significant, and legitimate in some way.”²⁴ Musicologist Simon Frith agrees that when musicians avoid “self-exposure,” so authenticity “is not an issue,” the result is pop, not rock.²⁵ Rock musicians are supposed to be personally invested in their music, which generally requires composing, arranging, and performing original music. In contrast, pop stars can simply enter the studio at the end of the hit-making process and plop their vocal track on top of whatever the “hot” producer has assembled for them.

Pop stars don’t have to “mean” it, but rock musicians do, which is why Eric Clapton took the high road and quit the Yardbirds when he was expected to contribute guitar to a pop song, “For Your Love,” written by an outsider and brought to the group as a potential hit single. This higher standard for rock music looks back to Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry and then, in the next generation, to the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Most of the music performed by the Beatles was by Lennon and McCartney. Most of the music performed by the Rolling Stones is by Jagger and Richards.

So the prevailing standard of rock integrity says that original songwriting is necessary for sincere self-expression. On the model of the Beatles and the Stones, the quality of a band’s original material is the true test of any rock band. So it is not enough that Zeppelin had a near-telepathic musical interplay. To be a great rock band, the originality of their sound (the musical juggernaut that died with Bonham) must serve as the vehicle for original songs (which, if best when played by the founders, might be learned and performed by anyone). Following this logic, the essential Zeppelin emerges when Plant verbalizes his Viking and Lord of the Rings fantasies over Page’s riffs. I admit that what I’ve just presented oversimplifies things by ignoring the fact that Jones originated a number of their classic riffs. However, it’s the sort of narrative that many fans construct in order to justify Led Zeppelin’s status in the rock Pantheon. (“Pantheon,” if you’re wondering, is basically the Roman Valhalla.)

The interesting point is that the band’s critics rely on the same basic logic of self-contained creativity when they criticize Zeppelin. Their critics like to point out how much of their music derives from uncredited yet identifiable blues and rock sources.²⁶ But does this really matter? It’s not as if the Beatles and the Stones composed everything they performed. In fact, part of the fun of Zeppelin concerts was the diversity of obscure “cover” songs that appeared in the middle of their epic performances of “Whole Lotta Love.” Yet I think that I speak for most fans when I say I wasn’t holding my breath in anticipation of a whole album devoted exclusively to their favorite 1950s rock’n’roll. No matter how well performed, the result would have been a letdown. “Boogie With Stu” is great fun on Physical Graffiti, but Led Zeppelin’s achievement is partly based on their having created their own music, so much theirs that they could play it in a way that no one else ever could.

So how much of the music performed by Led Zeppelin was composed by its members? Was it their best music? How self-contained was the band? Zeppelin’s stature as a rock band seems to hinge on our answers to these questions.

However, philosophy is nothing if not an activity of questioning what everyone takes for granted, and my goal in this chapter is to question what it means to say that some of the music played by Led Zeppelin is theirs, and some is not. More to the point, I want to ask why it matters.

The Authorship Issue

Let’s begin with the obvious point that a song involves the interplay of two components, words and music. Consequently, changing either component can change the identity of the song that’s performed. But how much change is enough to make this happen? At one extreme we find Nelson Goodman’s proposal that the alteration of a single note changes the identity of the music.²⁷ But this proposal ignores the reality of music as a performing art. It gives musicians no latitude for interpretation in performance—for launching into “Let’s Have a Party” in the middle of “Whole Lotta Love”—and it implies that Led Zeppelin never performed any song more than once!

So how much can change in performance while retaining identity? And how much do you have to change someone else’s music in order to claim that it’s yours?

The practical relevance of these questions is their bearing on the issue of Zep’s “borrowings” or appropriations from existing songs and song arrangements. There’s no doubt that Zeppelin was sometimes slow to acknowledge that some of their music, lyrics, and arrangement ideas were borrowed from other musicians. Sometimes this was mere sloppiness; Page found the song “Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You” as the opening track on a Joan Baez album, In Concert Part 1, where the song was mistakenly credited as “Traditional” (that is, as a song old enough to be in the public domain). However, this was an error. Anne Bredon had only recently composed it when Baez heard it from someone else and adapted it. Baez was ignorant of Bredon’s authorship when In Concert was being prepared for release. Trusting the erroneous claim of “traditional” on Baez’s record, Page assumed that he owed no one any money for using the song. Once Bredon contacted Led Zeppelin, she received her proper credit (and, presumably, payment).

Although the failure to credit Bredon was an honest mistake, it is unlikely that we can be quite so charitable about Page’s persistent failure to acknowledge Jake Holmes’s “I’m Confused,” a song he reworked into “Dazed and Confused” when he was with the Yardbirds. Similarly, Page did not write “Black Mountain Side,” but rather arranged the music of a traditional folk song, “Black Waterside.” The most original thing about “Black Mountain Side” is the decision to use an Indian tabla drum for percussion; the guitar arrangement derives from Bert Jansch’s arrangement of the traditional song. Yet Zeppelin has never acknowledged that it was an arrangement of a public domain piece, much less that Jansch had a hand in the arrangement. And then there are the blues covers. As many fans know, Willie Dixon had to file lawsuits in order to get his songwriting credit and royalties for “You Need Love” and “Bring It on Home,” which are identifiable source material for “Whole Lotta Love” and “Bring It on Home” on Led Zeppelin II. Howlin’ Wolf likewise sued to get royalties for his unacknowledged contribution to “The Lemon Song.”

These cases show that the group was initially dependent on outside sources for some of their songs, and that they were slow to broadcast their dependency. However, these facts do not diminish their other early achievements, which center on musical arranging and playing rather than original songwriting. The arrangement of “Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You” is, for me, that album’s best example of the hard-soft musical dynamic implied by the oxymoron of the group’s name. Delicate passages of voice and acoustic guitar give way to instrumental bombast and intensity.²⁸ Apart from some of the music that Jeff Beck made with Rod Stewart and Ron Wood, there was nothing else like it in popular music—even there, Beck emphasized contrasting dynamics of different songs rather than extreme dynamics within the same song. Although rock critics today tend to associate this soft-loud-soft dynamic with groups like Nirvana and the Pixies, it really harks back to Zeppelin.

If Led Zeppelin’s debut album announced the emergence of an interesting and powerful musical group, rather than a fully self-contained and inventive creative partnership, they subsequently developed their songwriting abilities. On the second album, the four songs “Thank You” through “Ramble On” are unquestionably their own creations. Overall, Led Zeppelin II sets the pattern for the majority of the remaining albums—most of the songs are originals but there is a fair share of homage paid to influences through the inclusion of “covers” and rearrangements of existing music. Houses of the Holy and In Through the Out Door obviously violate this pattern by featuring only original material, but even here there are overt stylistic nods to other musicians in “The Crunge” and “Hot Dog.”

Led Zeppelin’s continuing reliance on existing music is not an artistic weakness. No musician is completely original—a completely original artist, warns Immanuel Kant in his influential discussion of genius, produces unintelligible nonsense.²⁹ True genius, according to Kant, is the ability to inspire a school of imitators. As such, our ability to hear Led Zeppelin in a host of subsequent bands (from Soundgarden to the White Stripes to Whitesnake to Kingdom Come) is evidence enough that Led Zeppelin had at least some measure of genius. After all, no one is reminded of Willie Dixon when listening to Whitesnake. Zeppelin always transformed their borrowings, and through this process of borrowing and reworking, forged a distinctive musical identity.

Their Masterpiece?

Because they’re English, it’s ironic that Led Zeppelin’s recording of “Stairway to Heaven” is recognized as having received more American radio airplay than any other recording, ever. Yet overexposure does not obscure the fact that “Stairway to Heaven” is the quintessential Zeppelin song. Composed by Page and Plant, its balance of the pastoral and the volcanic, of acoustic and electric, of restraint and bombast, make “Stairway” the perfect embodiment of the group’s multiple talents. Yet is “Stairway to Heaven” really any more theirs than one of their cover versions—more theirs than, say, “Boogie With Stu” or “The Girl I Love She Got Long Black Wavy Hair”? Some of their detractors think that its achievement is lessened by the fact that the descending motif of the song’s opening acoustic theme is adapted from a segment of “Taurus,” an instrumental by the rock band Spirit. In Page’s defense, he altered what he borrowed, enriching the chord sequence and resolving the musical line differently than did “Taurus” composer Randy California. Ironically, Led Zeppelin’s history of unacknowledged borrowings suggests that “Stairway to Heaven” would not be quintessential Zeppelin without an element of appropriation. It would hardly reflect their total strengths and weaknesses if it were wholly original.

Given their cavalier attitude toward musical appropriation, Led Zeppelin’s response when they first found themselves on the receiving end of musical appropriation is fascinating. In 1978, an obscure band from San Francisco, Little Roger and the Goosebumps, borrowed from “Stairway to Heaven” and created “Gilligan’s Island (Stairway).” Released as a 45-rpm single on Splash Records, it was one of a string of parody records created by the team of Roger Clark and Dick Bright. They worked together in a comedy-musical act with a regular gig in San Francisco. In some circumstances they were known as Dick Bright and His Sounds of Delight Orchestra. Other times, they were billed as Dick Bright and the Hi-Balls. To make matters more confusing, their earlier 1976 tribute disc to the Kinks, Kinks Sides, attributed one song to the Sounds of Delight Orchestra but two others to the Goosebumps.

“Gilligan’s Island (Stairway)” gained immediate national airplay. It falls squarely into the tradition of rock’n’roll novelty songs. Clark and Bright edited the music of “Stairway to Heaven” into a manageable three and a half minutes—something that Zeppelin had refused to do, so that the original song’s radio success was independent of its status as a Led Zeppelin single.³⁰ Over the highly recognizable music, a voice enters in a fairly good imitation of Robert Plant. (The vocal was contributed by John Means, a San Francisco comedian whose stage name is Dr. Gonzo.) However, instead of the familiar words, “There’s a lady who’s sure all that glitters is gold,” he shatters our expectations by singing something else: “Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale.” While this line may be unfamiliar to many people today, it opens the theme song of a popular 1960s situation comedy, Gilligan’s Island. In the 1970s, the show’s ninety-eight episodes were frequently seen through their continuing syndication. It’s quite possible that more people knew the TV program theme song, written by George Wyle and Sherwood Shwartz, than knew “Stairway to Heaven.” Roger Clark cleverly combined the melody sung by Robert Plant with the words of the first three verses of the TV theme, proceeding with their seamless marriage until words and music arrive at their dramatic climax. But now “And she’s buying a stairway [dramatic pause] to heaven” is replaced by “And they’re here on Gilligan’s [dramatic pause] island,” and the pretentious Led Zeppelin anthem deflates into triviality, the mystical into the ridiculous.

Today, most fans would call this a mash-up.³¹ If you’ve never heard this recording, it’s probably because Led Zeppelin threatened a copyright infringement lawsuit against Splash Records unless they stopped distributing it. Lacking the money to fight Zeppelin in court, the Goosebumps complied and killed it. (There was not, as is often reported, an actual lawsuit.)

The Gilligan-Stairway hybrid is interesting for two different reasons. First, it seems to make hypocrites of the members of Led Zeppelin, who would not permit others to engage in the same musical appropriation that defined their early career. However, that’s not itself a philosophical issue. What’s philosophically interesting is the way “Gilligan’s Island (Stairway)” illustrates a situation discussed by Eduard Hanslick, a nineteenth-century music critic who wrote an influential book on the value of music.

Hanslick’s Thought Experiment

Hanslick offers the following thought experiment:

Take any dramatically effective melody. Form a mental image of it, separated from any association with verbal texts. In an operatic melody, for example, one which had very effectively expressed anger, you will find no other intrinsically psychical expression than that of a rapid, impulsive motion. The same melody might just as effectively render words expressing the exact opposite, namely passionate love. . . . Has the reader never heard the fugato from the overture to The Magic Flute performed as a vocal quartet of quarrelsome . . . shopkeepers? Mozart’s music, with not a single note altered, suits the lowcomedy words almost alarmingly well, and we must laugh at the comedy just as heartily as we enjoy the seriousness of the music in the opera house. (Eduard Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful, Hackett, 1986, pp. 17–18)

Take some serious music, such as a melody from Mozart’s opera, The Magic Flute, or take an angry song from an opera. For centuries, musicians have had fun by setting new words to familiar music, so that the new words conflict with audience understanding of what was previously expressed by the familiar music. Through this juxtaposition, serious music can create humorous songs and angry music can be used to express any passionate feeling, including love. Surprisingly, the music works equally well either way! Hanslick’s best example is G.F. Handel’s recycling of his own music. Handel wrote a set of songs for Italian lyrics focused on lust and desire, then used the same music many years later when he did a rush job writing his religious masterpiece, Messiah. Music originally written to express criticism of a lover became, “unchanged in key and melody,” Handel’s music to convey the joyous excitement that accompanies the Messiah’s birth in “For Unto Us a Child Is Born” (p. 19). Messiah, of course, consists of musical settings of Bible verses; the highly emotional refrain of “For Unto Us a Child Is Born” is a setting of Isaiah 9:6.

It should now be obvious why I quoted Hanslick. Bright and Clark pulled a Handel! Where Handel took a Bible text and set it to music that should have been incompatible with it, Bright and Clark took the trivial words of a TV theme song and set them to one of the most epic, serious, and uplifting pieces of music of the rock era. Like the Mozart melody adapted into an exchange among four quarrelsome shopkeepers, the result is hilarious. However, the important point is that the words fit the music, and the music fits the words. Just as ordinary listeners will find nothing amiss in Handel’s “For Unto Us a Child Is Born,” anyone who doesn’t already know “Stairway to Heaven” will experience no immediate disconnect between music and words in “Gilligan’s Island (Stairway).” The music sounds as if it’s been carefully crafted to provide just the right support for the words. The music is peaceful as the ship sets sail, and then becomes stormy and turbulent as “the weather started getting rough.” (The sound of thunder is added to heighten the effect.) Where Led Zeppelin invest their full fury into the music leading to the line “To be a rock and not to roll,” Dick Bright reaches the same point with the beaching of the ship, with the lyric, “On this uncharted desert isle.”

Hanslick invites us to consider why such cases surprise and amuse us. After all, it’s not as if Plant sat beside Page as they cowrote “Stairway.” Plant contributed the words after the music was written, which, for its part, was constructed from separate bits of music that were not originally intended to work together—a lesson already demonstrated by the presence of Spirit’s “Taurus” in “Stairway.” That, in fact, is the first of Hanslick’s two points in asking us to think about such examples. Put aside your amusement over the prank or your outrage that your musical heroes have been skewered. Hanslick asks us to use our “capacity for abstraction”—in other words, to philosophize (p. 16). If different words can work equally well with a single piece of music, then the music’s emotional power is determined by its interaction with each set of words. We might suppose that a song’s expressive power is primarily due to some intrinsic property of the music, but that is false. If we find that different emotions are expressed when different words are set to the same melody, then each song’s expressive power is due to that interaction. However, if the interaction of the two elements (words and music) creates an expressive effect that is absent from either on its own, then the music alone does not have any particular expressive power at all! By itself, the music is neither angry nor happy, neither spiritual nor carnal.

Hanslick is calling attention to a mistake that philosophers recognize as the fallacies of division and composition. Fallacies are common reasoning errors, and the errors of division and composition are the common mistakes of thinking that what’s true of a part is true of whatever it’s a part of (composition), and that whatever is true of an object is true of each of its parts (division). Examples quickly demonstrate why these assumptions are foolish. After all, “D’yer Mak’er” is reggae and it’s on Houses of the Holy, but that doesn’t mean that Houses of the Holy is a reggae album! Going from whole to part, I can enjoy Houses of the Holy without loving every song (“The Crunge” doesn’t do all that much for me). So when we explain the emotional power of a song—that is, the combined whole of music and words—by pointing to what happens in the musical component, we should be on guard for the fallacy of division. If the song feels emotionally changed when we change the lyrics, then it’s illogical to suppose that one part, the music, is the emotional engine driving things. Our examples of different lyrics for the same music suggest that the words, not the music, are the determining factor in our understanding of its expressive features. Not that they are the only factor, for that conclusion would itself be a fallacy of composition. But our examples suggest that the lyrics are the most important contributing factor in arriving at a determinate identification of what’s expressed.

Hanslick uses a metaphor of visual representation in order to clarify his point about the interaction of words and music. “In vocal music,” he proposes, “the music adds colour to the black-and-white design of the poem.” The music adds to the words, and thus good music “could transform a mediocre poem into a fervent manifestation of feeling.” We can confirm Hanslick’s insight by examining the lyrics that got Zeppelin into trouble with Willie Dixon and other blues musicians. On paper, as a poem, there isn’t much emotional drama in Dixon’s words for “You Need Love.” Better yet, consider Bukka White’s words for “Shake ’Em on Down” (one source for Zeppelin’s “Hats Off to (Roy) Harper”). As sung by Plant, accompanied by Page’s slashing slide guitar, the same words are frenzied, bitter, and vengeful. Here we see the point of Hanslick’s analogy between music and drawing. A drawn outline gives us the idea of the thing it represents, but it takes the addition of color to bring it to life for us. The phrase “shake ’em on down” is a bare outline of what’s happening—it’s a threat aimed at others—but we need supporting music to fill it out, to move us with the anger of that threat.

This proposal is curious, given that examples like “Gilligan’s Island (Stairway)” and Handel’s “For Unto Us” show that the music is emotionally neutral. By itself, music does not possess features that can be decisively labeled as bitter or vengeful, sad or hopeful, spiritual or earthbound. So how does music give emotional power to lyrics that are, taken by themselves, simplistic and trite? Hanslick realizes that he owes us a positive theory of how the music enhances the words.

Hanslick’s explanation relies on the insight that each composition of tonal music normally possesses a distinctive form, a tonally moving form. The important point is that we hear successive musical pitches as a display of movement, as when a melody line is heard as moving up or down. Motion, in turn, possesses dynamic qualities (p. 20). A motion can speed up, as when the hard rock section of “Stairway to Heaven” has a faster motion than the opening, acoustic segment. Music can saunter (the opening of “Down by the Seaside”), race along (“Hot Dog”), or stagger (the main riff of “Black Dog”). Among its other dynamic qualities, music can also thicken and thin, and gain force and weaken. In relation to its purely musical dynamics, music “can be called charming, soft, impetuous, powerful, delicate, sprightly” (p. 10). Because emotions are experienced as having parallel dynamic qualities, combining a musical dynamic with a lyric that conveys a particular emotion produces a heightened experience of the lyric’s emotion. In this way, the musical motion “animates” the ideas provided by the words, and a sketchy lyric is experienced in a setting that makes it experientially rich and powerful. In other words, all competent listeners will perceive music’s distinctive characteristics of motion, but these are not apprehended as distinctive emotion unless we receive additional, textual cues about which emotion is being represented.

So Susan Fast is either mistaken or speaking very loosely when, analyzing “Stairway to Heaven,” she unpacks its construction to reveal the musical details that create its distinctive “affective character” (In the Houses of the Holy, p. 63). Analyzing the opening acoustic section, she claims that the music’s plaintive character “is important to the narrative, encoding the weightiness of and uncertainty of spiritual journeys. In other words, this musical construction signifies struggle.”³² But, as Little Roger and the Goosebumps demonstrate, the musical journey need not be a spiritual one. It might be a sightseeing trip from a tourist port! And the perceived uncertainty may just be some dark clouds on the horizon. The supposed “weightiness and uncertainty of spiritual journeys” derives more from Plant’s words than from Page’s descending cadences.

Get over the joke value of juxtaposing Zeppelin’s music and the Gilligan lyrics in “Gilligan’s Island (Stairway)” and you’ll find that, as Hanslick predicts, the story of the Minnow’s voyage now has considerable drama and emotional wallop. Wedded to lyrics about bad weather, the same musical motion that powerfully conveys a spiritual journey is equally good for conveying the physical peril of the Minnow’s crew and passengers.

Authorship through Transformation

Still, Hanslick’s main point is that if music and the words are distinct entities, then composing and songwriting are very different arts. The fundamental art of music is the art of composing instrumental music, in which the composer’s thoughts and ideas “are first and foremost purely musical ideas” (On the Musically Beautiful, p. 10). In other words, the composer is preoccupied with combining musical elements in a way that makes musical sense without guidance from a text. The art of composing songs is a different art. Whenever a singer is singing words, those words provide a direction for audience interpretation, so the audience’s interpretation of the musical element will be different depending on which words are set to that music. In short, Page and Jones were Zeppelin’s principal composers, and Plant was the principal songwriter.

At this point, some readers will worry that I’m just imposing my own views on the band and its music. Discussing the derivation of “Whole Lotta Love” from “You Need Love,” Page says, “I always tried to bring something fresh to anything that I used. I always made sure to come up with some variation. I think in most cases you would never know what the original source could be. Maybe not in every case, but in most cases.” In other words, they transformed any music they borrowed. It was the lyrics that got them into legal trouble: “most of the comparisons rest on the lyrics. And Robert [Plant] was supposed to change the lyrics, and he didn’t always do that, which is what brought on most of our grief. They couldn’t get us on the guitar parts or the music, but they nailed us on the lyrics.”³³

If Plant had written original lyrics for “Hats Off to (Roy) Harper,” no one would ever have said that it derives from Bukka White’s version of “Shake ’Em on Down.” Their shared blues elements are so basic and generic that the specifically musical link to White’s song is non-existent. Similarly, “Boogie With Stu” can be linked to Ritchie Valens’s “Ooh! My Head” only because Plant appropriated Valens’s lyrics. Change the words and no one could say whether any particular 1950s song was the actual inspiration. Most telling, I think, is Dixon’s lawsuit over the appearance of his lyrics for his 1962 song “You Need Love” in “Whole Lotta Love.” Zeppelin settled out of court, acknowledging Dixon as co-writer. However, give a listen to Muddy Waters’s 1962 recording of “You Need Love.” Aside from the swirling organ, it’s a pretty standard Chicago blues performance. Omit the words from “Whole Lotta Love” and, again, no one would ever link the Zeppelin riff and rhythm to the Dixon song. Where Waters struts, Zeppelin churns. (The actual musical connection appears to be a third song, the Small Faces version known as “You Need Loving,” where Steve Marriot’s vocal clearly influences Plant’s delivery of some lines of the Dixon lyric.)

Suppose we ignore what Plant is singing in these appropriations and concentrate on Page, Jones, and Bonham. Focus on the music, not the lyrics. In each case where we can identify borrowed musical materials, Zeppelin’s music diverges from the known source material. In many cases, the musical trio of Page, Bonham, and Jones is playing their own version of what is otherwise a generic blues progression. Remove the words and Zeppelin’s blues music can never be confused with that of Muddy Waters or Sonny Boy Williamson. Their non-blues borrowing are equally distinctive. With two exceptions, they rearranged the material beyond recognition. That leaves only the two serious cases of non-lyric, musical borrowing—the clear similarities between “Stairway” and “Taurus” and between “Black Mountain Side” and Jansch’s “Black Waterside.” Even here, they are musically reworked. Zeppelin’s arrangement of borrowed music is always distinctive.

Because the real problem of “theft” lies in the words that Plant sings, let’s return to Hanslick’s point about what happens when a distinctive musical element is wedded to an existing lyric. Both are transformed. And just as new words alter our interpretation of existing music, changing the music will enhance or diminish the feelings identified by familiar words. Either way, the new entity is never merely a sum of its parts. Led Zeppelin may have objected to Little Roger’s “Gilligan’s Island (Stairway)” (or at least some of them did), but it’s a wonderful example of how their own music works. Much of the time, musical creativity and success have far less to do with a narrow understanding of authentic and sincere emotional expression (spontaneous originality) than with musicians’ abilities to breathe new life into our shared musical past. Whenever Plant borrowed the emotions of others by borrowing the rudiments of songs, their collective genius was to reinvigorate and animate those emotions.

Authentic Rock

Because Plant is clearly borrowing whole lines from other songs, a number of Led Zeppelin’s compositions are not entirely original as songs. Nonetheless, the unique musical interplay of Page, Bonham, and Jones—and, yes, Plant—produced something genuinely new. Songs have both words and music, leading to important interactions between the specifically musical elements and the meanings of the words. Aesthetically original and powerful music may arise in this interaction, which does not require completely original material in the music and words. We should therefore resist the temptation to think that the features that we value in the combined whole are directly contributed by either the words or the music. Conversely, Led Zeppelin’s lack of originality in some of Page’s music and some of Plant’s lyrics does not translate into a lack of originality in the musical interactions to which they contributed.

Three additional conclusions now follow. First, Zeppelin fans who think that originality and creativity are important features of rock music can defend their heroes in good conscience. Despite their borrowings, “Whole Lotta Love” is not “You Need Love,” “Hats Off to (Roy) Harper” is not “Shake ’Em on Down,” and “Stairway to Heaven” is not “Taurus.” Second, we must reject the idea that emotionally powerful music requires a tight connection between sincerity, originality, and personal self-disclosure. Borrowed words and musical ideas can reduce the originality of a part without reducing the emotional wallop of the whole.

I don’t know how sincere Plant is when he sings the borrowed line, “Squeeze me, babe, ’till the juice runs down my leg,” in performance after performance. What I do know is that Led Zeppelin regularly supplied the musical motion to make it worth hearing. Finally, that last point challenges the idea that self-exposure and authenticity make rock different from pop music. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not trying to do away with the distinction between rock and pop. When we look up “rock” in the dictionary, we ought to see a picture of Led Zeppelin. But their place in the rock Pantheon shouldn’t be tied to a one-size-fits-all story that takes too narrow a view of creativity and casts doubt on the legitimacy of musical borrowings.