Led Zeppelin and Philosophy

Then there’s the issue of the seemingly contradictory stylistic sources Led Zeppelin drew from. The early albums are marked by a tension between the band’s debt to traditional, earthy “roots” music—above all the blues and other African-American styles, but also British folk music—on the one hand, and their interest in avant-garde sound techniques on the other. There’s also the tension, evident throughout their entire output, between their “native” musical heritage (British folk) and their “adopted” musical heritage (American blues and rock’n’roll), and between their grounding in Anglo-American traditions and their interest in Eastern (specifically Arab and Indian) musical traditions. Of their two most pervasive extra-musical influences, one, J.R.R. Tolkien (1892–1973), was a bookish philologist and orthodox Catholic author best known for his fantasy cycle Lord of the Rings; the other, Aleister Crowley (1875–1947), was a flamboyant occultist who believed that his controversial Book of the Law had engendered a new religion, Thelema.

How does one explain this level of apparently contradictory tendencies in the band’s music? This question is especially pertinent because Led Zeppelin’s place in rock music history is, while unquestionably seminal, also difficult to categorize. They were far more than just a blues revival band: nonetheless, throughout their entire career, they recorded songs that were not only stylistically indebted to the blues, but which repeated well-established blues tropes (consider, for instance, their frequent celebrations of carnal pleasure from a masculine perspective, “Whole Lotta Love” and “Black Dog” providing just two well-known examples). They were unquestionably an enormous influence on the musical style that came to be known as “heavy metal”: for instance, it’s hard to overstate the impact of “Dazed and Confused,” with its evocation of madness, and “Immigrant Song” with its swords-and-sorcery imagery and storyline, on the future of the genre. Yet considering how much of their material is acoustically based, calling them a proto-metal band is, at best, problematic. Moreover, despite Jimmy Page’s ambiguous feelings about progressive rock,¹²⁸ a small but crucial part of their output (“Stairway to Heaven,” “The Song Remains the Same,” “Kashmir,” “In the Light,” “Achilles’ Last Stand,” “Carouselambra”) fit comfortably within the commonly acknowledged stylistic boundaries of that genre. It’s here, incidentally, that the band comes closest to expressing a more or less clearly defined philosophical stance.

It’s not easy to reconcile the many songs (usually blues-based) that celebrate carnal pleasure, life on the move (“Babe I’m Gonna Leave You,” “Ramble On”), relationship issues, and other “nonphilosophical” topics with the much smaller body of more ambitious (and inevitably less blues-influenced) songs that address “philosophical” and/or “spiritual” concerns. This particular dichotomy separates Led Zeppelin from contemporaries and near contemporaries such as Pink Floyd, Yes, and Rush, who express a more or less coherent philosophical perspective (and, for that matter, a more or less consistent stylistic approach) in song after song on album after album. Is there a philosophical perspective that would explain how the same band responsible for the breathless carnality of “The Lemon Song” and “Heartbreaker” also achieved the universally acknowledged spirituality of “Stairway to Heaven”?

According to Hegel, while nature simply repeats in cycles, human history demonstrates “a real capacity for change, and that for the better—an impulse of perfectibility” (p. 54). History’s progress towards freedom involves “dialectical” transformation through inner conflict, resulting from the fact that “Spirit . . . carries within it its own negation” (p. 57):

Progress appears as an advancing from the imperfect to the more perfect ; but the former . . . involves the very opposite of itself—the socalled perfect—as a germ or impulse. (p. 17)

Spirit is transformed the moment it becomes conscious of this contradiction or negation within itself, as its current identity dissolves and it passes on to a new, higher stage in its development. Thus history is a progression in which each successive movement emerges as an ever-more fully realized solution to the contradictions inherent in the preceding movement: “The dialectical nature of the Idea [is] that it assumes successive forms which it successively transcends; and by this very process of transcending its earlier stages, gains . . . a richer and more concrete shape” (p. 63).

The three-part process of the Hegelian dialectic is often referred to as thesis-antithesis-synthesis; using this terminology, the French Revolution was the “thesis” that inaugurated this process, the Reign of Terror its “antithesis,” and the emergence of the constitutional state the resulting “synthesis.” The danger of the thesis-antithesis-synthesis terminology is that it creates the impression that Hegel viewed the historical process as one of unity-from-duality where two countervailing forces collide, and, through the collision, produce a synthesis. To the contrary, though, Hegel stressed that every culture and historical movement contains an inherent contradiction: when that contradiction emerges, the original culture or movement simultaneously dissolves and transforms into a higherlevel expression of the contradiction. In other words, Hegel’s system is monist, stressing that the underlying unity of a thing is more real than its apparent duality: “Spirit is immortal; with it there is no past, no future, but an essential now. This necessarily implies that the present form of Spirit comprehends within it all earlier steps” (p. 79).¹³⁰

Hegel’s influences included “mystic” or “hermetic” writers such as Jakob Böhme (1575–1624) as well as Eastern religious and philosophical thought, just beginning to reach Europe in translation during his lifetime. Given Led Zeppelin’s debt to Eastern thought and Western hermeticism (the latter mainly through Crowley), both of which contain a very strong monist element, exploring the dichotomies that characterize their music in the context of Hegel’s ideas seems especially appropriate.

An analysis of music on the lines of Hegelian dialectic could take place on several levels. One could make a sweeping analysis of a band’s entire output, or, indeed, of an entire style: one could assert, for instance, that the fundamental tension at work in the progressive rock of the 1970s is that of European classical musical forms and techniques being grafted on to an African-American, blues-based musical foundation. In a crude and not very nuanced way, this is true: however, it tells us little about what such a fusion might have meant, or what its cultural significance might have been. I prefer to examine specific songs, teasing out their apparently contradictory elements, paying special attention to how a song’s structure reflects its tensions, considering how (or if) these elements are reconciled, and pondering what, on a cultural level, such reconciliation (or lack thereof) portends. Like Hegel himself, Led Zeppelin and other bands that came of age during the late 1960s and early 1970s were aware of many tensions and contradictions in their society, and viewed music as a forum for exploring these tensions. They were, to cite “The Battle of Evermore,” involved in the eternal Hegelian struggle to “bring the balance back.”

“Dazed and Confused” opens with a descending two-bar bass riff in E minor, played by John Paul Jones with a muffled, almost “dead” tone at a ponderously slow tempo. This riff is quite similar to the chromatically descending ground bass figures of the European baroque, which inevitably had connotations of sorrow and lament, as this one has.¹³¹ A few seconds into the song, Jimmy Page begins to play bursts of reverberating guitar notes, and soon thereafter Robert Plant enters with the first verse. The lyrics develop a common blues trope: the man under the spell of a woman who has bewitched him and he wants to leave, but can’t. One is struck by the power of Plant’s voice, which is very up-front in the mix, by the irregularity of his phrasing (he consistently begins his verses before the beginning of the riff),¹³² and by the spastic, irregular rhythms of his vocal delivery—all consistent with the emotional affect of desperation and confusion.

It’s only after the first verse (at 0:35) that the rest of the band kick in full-throttle: Jones and Page with a massive statement of the riff in three different octaves (bass, “grungy” guitar an octave above the bass, “wailing” guitar two octaves above the bass), John Bonham with the song’s first full-on drum groove. Plant soon enters with his second verse (the highest guitar part drops out at this point), then at 1:10, for the first time in the song, the riff momentarily drops out, replaced by a short, explosive rising guitar figure which I’ll hereafter call the “counter-riff.” At 1:20, the original riff re-enters, continuing when Plant commences his third verse at 1:35. A reappearance of the counter-riff at 1:54 transitions us into the middle, B section of the song’s A B A format.

The “cushion” that supports the first half of this shadowy section (from 2:02 through 3:23) is a five-note figure (four sixteenths and an eighth) ceaselessly traded back and forth between Jones’ bass and Bonham’s drums. At first, the exchange between Jones and Bonham is foregrounded, but it is soon overshadowed by Page’s and Plant’s hazier, more irregular call-and-response: Page plays two- or three-note figures on his guitar with a violin bow, crafting halos of richly vibrating sonorities, to which Plant responds with “ahhs” and “ohhs.” From 2:42 the guitar sonorities start to pulsate—eventually the guitar’s melodic outlines become so indistinct that Plant can no longer respond to them—and at 2:57 Jones starts to vary the melodic content (although never the rhythmic pattern) of his bass part. A slowly descending guitar glissando gradually overwhelms the pulsating guitar sonorities, eventually even obscuring the sense of beat.

The second half of this section is launched by Bonham at 3:24 with four smartly-struck hi-hat accents; the band suddenly lurch into double time, and, over Jones’ driving two-beat bass pattern, Page weaves a frantic guitar solo that seems to struggle to break through the gloom—the madness, if you will—of the preceding section. It almost appears for a moment he will succeed—at 4:42 he suddenly introduces a fanfare-like lick, played three times in all, that appears to move the music towards E major. However, before the transition to major can be consummated, the counter-riff reappears (4:57), followed quickly by the original riff. After Page’s desperate solo, the return of the leaden opening riff brings a palpable sense of failing to escape, of sliding down into defeat.

The final A section compresses all the key elements of the song. Plant enters with his fourth and final verse (5:20); we hear the counter-riff at 5:38, and the five-note figure that opened the B section (now without the wordless vocals) at 5:46. The return of this figure suggests that perhaps another “breakout” will be attempted, and indeed, at 5:55, the five-note figure is transformed into a series of pounding D major chords, accompanied by Plant’s frenzied “oohs” and “ahhs.” But the pounding chords cannot escape the tug of gravity, as it were, and are pulled down (at 6:12) into the E tonic, which reverberates for the final ten seconds.

“Whole Lotta Love” also opens with a memorable riff. Initially occupying two bars in 4/4 time, the riff rolls along at an unhurried pace of 90 and 92 beats per minute, belying the intense sense of energy generated by its rhythmic syncopation: when Plant enters with his first verse, the band compresses the riff from two bars to one, which seems to generate even more energy. In his biography of the band, Stephen Davis asserts that during the Vietnam War “American soldiers and marines bolted eight-track stereos onto their tanks and armored personnel carriers and rode into battle playing the song at top volume.”¹³³ Whether or not that is true, the story highlights the riff’s martial nature.

The first part of the song (the A section of the A B A structure) features two verses and choruses; the riff is omnipresent throughout the section. While the music’s original, the words are a rearrangement of the lyrics from Willie Dixon’s “You Need Love,” which Plant apparently encountered through a 1962 single, released by Chess Records, featuring Muddy Waters; Plant excises some lyrics and switches the order of others.¹³⁴ As with “Dazed and Confused,” the lyrics address an anonymous female, but with a different purpose: here Plant is the experienced man offering his services to a (presumably) less experienced woman, making his goal quite clear: “gonna give you every inch of my love.”

“Whole Lotta Love” has often been used as Display #1 by those wishing to convict “cock rock” of sexism: as Charles Shaar Murray puts it, “The woman . . . is here reduced to a mere receptacle; an entirely passive presence whose sole function is to receive the Great Zeppelin”¹³⁵. As with the vocal of “Dazed and Confused,” one is struck by the power of Plant’s delivery during the verses, his expressive use of vocal distortion, and the intensity of feeling conveyed by his breaking up of rhythms as he extends syllables. His vocals during the chorus (“Wanna whole lot of love”), while equally powerful, are curiously inexpressive and machine-like (no vocal distortion and precise, square rhythms), and perfectly complement Page’s descending guitar glissandos, which suggest a train or another large vehicle passing at a high rate of speed and fading into the distance. A convincing argument could certainly be made that this chorus expresses “love” (sex) as a merely mechanical activity.

Like “Dazed and Confused,” “Whole Lotta Love” contains a lengthy instrumental middle section that serves as Feminine foil to the intensely Masculine outer sections. As with the middle section of “Dazed,” this one is built on a rhythmic cushion supplied by the rhythm section—in this case, Bonham alone, who plays a pattern of straight sixteenth-notes on the hi-hat, which he opens and closes every eighth note. After a few seconds he begins to accompany this pattern with a remarkable “tune” played on the bells of his cymbals; the notes of this “tune” tend to fall on upbeats, undermining the sense of meter and veiling the location of the downbeat. The cymbal “tune” consists mostly of longer note values at first, but he gradually starts to play eighth notes, until finally he is playing a repetitive 3/4 pattern on the cymbals against the unchanging 4/4 pattern of the hi-hat. While Bonham is justly considered rock’s premier power drummer, this passage, seldom commented on, shows what a subtle and sophisticated drummer he could be, as he weaves a fluidly polyrhythmic backdrop for the sound collage that slowly takes shape on top. First (1:30) we hear a soft conga (or possibly bongo) counter-rhythm, then a didgeridoo-like sound that resembles a swirling wind storm (1:45); gradually we begin to hear Plant in the background, first muttering (1:56), then panting (“ahh ahh ahh,” and so on) while the swirling “wind” (which replicates a circular motion as it moves from left speaker to right and back) grows louder. As Plant’s muttering grows more intense, Bonham momentarily gives up his cymbal tune in favor of a snare pattern that answers Plant’s ecstatic groans. At about 2:23 we hear a sound that’s something like a creaky door, which morphs into a reverberating whistle; then, as the circular “wind” pattern again grows more intense, we hear Plant’s ejaculation of “Luhv” (2:43) and his more drawn out “Luh uh uh uh ove” (2:52).

Finally, at 3:00 Bonham’s dramatic drum break segues into the shorter second part of the middle section. Page launches into an explosive solo, actually a series of passionate ejaculations between sledgehammer-like iterations of two offbeat guitar-bass chords: like “Dazed and Confused,” Page’s solo introduces a new persona to the song, and seems to signify the hero’s struggle against the constraints of the previous section. Here, however, the return of the opening riff (3:18) after the solo doesn’t feel like sliding into defeat, as it did in “Dazed,” but as triumphant affirmation. The song’s recapitulation proceeds more or less predictably until 4:00, when the band pauses dramatically, and Plant sings a recitative-like solo passage, accompanied only by a couple of isolated background chords; this proves to be the song’s final speed bump, as the opening riff resumes, accompanied by Plant’s continuously intense shrieks, moans, and asides. Plant is in the process of emitting one final shriek while the song is fading out.

I’ve said that “Dazed and Confused” and “Whole Lotta Love” explore four apparent dualities: Primitive/Modern, Physical/ Psychological, African-American/European, and Male/Female. The first three are interrelated. During the twentieth century, a school of criticism developed around African-American music—blues, jazz, R & B—that saw its value in its “soul,” its “closeness to nature,” its “pure feeling,” and its “authenticity.” In short, much of the critical writing surrounding American popular music in general, and African-American music in particular, is based on a Romantic primitivism that can be traced back to the eighteenth century and Rousseau’s “noble savage,” if not earlier. According to this ideology, the black bluesman, in particular, is the Noble Savage: in his unselfconscious physicality, he is in touch with a liberating primal energy that the white European has lost touch with, but can recover at least in part through surrendering to the physical power of African-American music.

The danger of saying, in the context of a black-white duality, that black music is “felt” is that white music is, by contrast “thought”: that feeling is a “black” characteristic, but thought a “white” one. Here is where Hegelian synthesis becomes such a valuable conceptual tool (and such a compelling way of viewing the historical process): it rises above mutually-exclusive categories, and allows one to view Primitive/Modern, Physical/Psychological, and African-American/European as poles of a single continuum that are subject to interpenetration and ultimately, transcendence. Hegelian synthesis offers a monist perspective in which apparent dualities are just that: apparent.

How, specifically, does the process of Hegelian synthesis work in the two Zeppelin songs under consideration? In both “Dazed and Confused” and “Whole Lotta Love,” the outer sections are blues-based and powerfully physical; thus, “Physical” and “African-American” are linked.¹³⁶ Clearly, for many white people of Led Zeppelin’s generation, the appeal of blues and other African-American musical styles was their unabashed physicality: by putting them in touch with their own bodies, it met a need they felt their “own” music (music of European or white North American provenance) did not. Furthermore, by juxtaposing the “earthy” blues-based outer sections with the “modernistic” avant-garde sound collages of the middle sections, the band creates an implicit Primitive-Modern dichotomy, thus linking “Primitive” with “Physical” and “African-American.”

If the blues-based sections of these two songs fulfill one strongly felt need (recovery of one’s physicality), then the avant-garde sound collages of these songs fulfill a different need that was at the time equally strongly felt: the opportunity to explore the psychological recesses of inner space. Because they are usually considered a “Seventies band,” it is often forgotten that Led Zeppelin came of age during the psychedelic rock era. The desire to enter the sanctum of “inner space” was almost universal among the cutting-edge rock bands (especially British rock bands) active during 1968–69, and musical entrance into inner space was achieved largely through the new techniques and technology introduced by the European avant-garde during the 1950s.¹³⁷ Therefore, for the musicians who were active in these bands, the categories of “Modern,” “European,” and “Psychological” are linked.

Finally, we must address the Male/Female dichotomy as it is developed in these two songs. In both songs, the outer sections are dominated by powerful rhythms and distorted timbres, while the middle sections are characterized by less assertive rhythms and (usually) less strident timbres; it’s significant that the middle sections of both songs prominently feature Plant’s “feminine” moans and shrieks, but not his actual singing (in the sense of coherent melodic lines). In short, the middle sections of both songs play the role of Feminine foil to the Masculine outer sections. There are three points of interest here. First, “Female” is linked with the categories “Modern,” “European,” and “Psychological.” The last is perhaps less surprising, in the context of Western culture’s long-enduring Mind/Body duality; but it is interesting that “Female” is linked with “Modern,” specifically with modern musical technology (usually perceived to be a male domain), and with the “European,” rather than “African-American,” side of the musical equation. (Given that the black bluesman, the “Noble Savage,” is implicitly viewed as child-like in primitivist ideology, it is perhaps surprising that he, rather than the white musical technocrat, is assigned the “Male” identity).

Second, note that in the middle section of both of these songs, “Female” is constructed not as soft, pliable, and reassuring, but rather as mysterious, frightening, and potentially dangerous. I believe that the reason the guitar solos at the end of both sections have such a desperate energy, a feeling of trying to break through a powerful constraint, is that they are all about recovering a sense of masculine identity after communion with the Feminine Other. In “Dazed and Confused,” this recovery is ultimately unsatisfying, but in “Whole Lotta Love,” we experience the recovery of masculine musical identity (the return of the opening riff after Page’s orgasmic solo) as a moment of triumphant affirmation. Given that adolescent males were among Zeppelin’s largest and most loyal fan demographic during the 1970s, one can easily understand the appeal of this musical gesture to the band’s audience.

Notice, too, that in “Whole Lotta Love,” while orgasm is sung about from a masculine perspective in the outer sections, it’s musically evoked from a feminine perspective in the middle section, with Bonham’s soft, subtle rhythmic cushion and the circular motion of the sound collage evoking not only the Feminine, but the womb. Therefore, Charles Shaar Murray is incorrect in alleging that “Whole Lotta Love” reduces the woman to passive receptacle. Like too many popular music critics, Murray fails to take the music itself into account: Plant’s metaphoric partner during the middle section is the sound collage. This point was made explicit in the band’s live performances of the song, where, in a call-and-response with Plant, Jimmy Page recreated the studio recording’s sound collage via his Theremin. While Zeppelin certainly didn’t subvert all the expected constructions of masculinity and femininity in these two songs, their constructions of Male/Female are quite nuanced and, in some ways at least (especially in linking femininity with technology), do represent a genuine interpenetration and synthesis.¹³⁸

The strength of Led Zeppelin’s musical vision during 1968–69 is that they bring apparently dualistic categories into a mutually enriching dialogue. In “Dazed and Confused,” the middle section is used to explore the feelings of confusion and madness that the protagonist laments (in a more overtly physical, dramatic way) in the outer section. In “Whole Lotta Love,” the middle section evokes the sexual experience referenced in the outer sections not just as a physical, but also a psychological experience. In short, during 1968-69 Zeppelin were feeling their way towards a music that transcended the perceived limitations of both their African-American blues and European avant-garde sources: a music that combined physicality with the possibility of psychological depth (through the exploration of inner space), that made the power of the past and of the future available in the present, that experimented with new constructions of “masculine” and (particularly) “feminine,” and that brought together “black” and “white” approaches to music-making in a single discourse.

This new music came to be known as heavy metal, although few metal bands achieved Zeppelin’s nuance and subtlety. And the formation of this new musical style was in turn emblematic of, and driven by, tensions—concerning changing racial and gender identities, new modes of consciousness, growing anxieties about the relationship of the present to the past—that operated at the deepest levels of society. That is to say, the Hegelian synthesis at work in the band’s music reflects a Hegelian synthesis at work within contemporaneous society.

Although neither “Dazed and Confused” or “Whole Lotta Love” is “philosophical,” at their deepest structural levels, both songs reveal a philosophical base that is essentially monist. Apparent dichotomies like “Primitive” and “Modern,” “African-American” and “European,” “Physical” and “Psychological,” and even “Male” and “Female” are merely spectrums along a continuum of experiences and identities. This monist perspective becomes even more evident in the band’s later music.

Zeppelin’s fourth, untitled album is usually referred to either as “IV,” “Zoso” (for the quasi-runic inscription from its liner sleeve), or “The Runes Album.” Demonstrating considerable advances in production (especially in finally capturing the full power of John Bonham’s drum sound), in arranging sophistication (here Page perfects his multi-layered guitar arrangements, or “guitar army”), and in its magisterial drawing together of the band’s primary stylistic sources, it was quickly recognized as the band’s finest album yet. Indeed, a sizable contingent of critics and fans continue to rate it the band’s greatest album of all. It contains “Stairway to Heaven,” arguably the band’s greatest achievement, and unarguably one of rock’s greatest songs. The band seemed to realize the importance of “Stairway” almost immediately: it became the first Led Zeppelin song for which the lyrics were included in the album, and the art-work for both the outer cover of the album and the inner gatefold are clearly intended to tie in thematically with the song. It’s the first song in which Led Zeppelin more or less explicitly reveal a coherent philosophical perspective: but to unravel this perspective, we must coordinate our readings of cover art, lyrics, and music.

First, let’s consider the artwork. The front of the album features a photo of an old peasant carrying sticks on his back; the photo is in a rough frame set against old wallpaper. The back of the album features a slum tenement in a grimy urban landscape that suggests the industrial Midlands; the fact a bit of the peeling wallpaper from the front bleeds over into the back suggests that perhaps the photo is to be found in one of the tenements. When you open the album, the inner gatefold shows a night-time scene from the top of a very steep hill, with a sleepy English village far below in the distance. On top of the mountain stands a formidable bearded old man in robe and hood, holding a lantern; far below, strenuously clambering up the side of the mountain, is a young, earnest pilgrim seeking wisdom, which looks a bit like Jimmy Page during the period that he grew a beard.¹⁴⁰ There’s not really any need to debate the intended meaning of this artwork, as Page himself has expounded on it:

The old man carrying the wood is in harmony with nature. He takes from nature and he gives back to the land. It’s a natural cycle . . . His old cottage gets pulled down and they put him in these urban slums . . . The Hermit is holding out the light of truth and enlightenment to a young man at the foot of a hill. If you know the tarot cards, you’ll know what the Hermit means.”¹⁴¹

In the tarot, the Hermit has two complementary meanings: he symbolizes both contemplative withdrawal in search of wisdom, and the guardian and transmitter of such wisdom once gained. In short, the artwork introduces several dualities that will be musically developed in “Stairway”—rural-urban, past-present, traditionmodernity—and the ideal of both natural renewal (represented by the peasant), and of spiritual renewal and transformation (represented by the Hermit figure).

Robert Plant has stated that the lyrics of “Stairway to Heaven” were influenced by Magic Arts in Celtic Britain, by Scottish antiquarian and occultist Lewis Spence (Hammer of the Gods, p. 132). Another source is J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. In “Stairway” what Plant borrows from Tolkien is imagery, and more specifically, perhaps, the very Celtic image of the “lost straight road” and the idea of the spiritual quest involving a journey through the forest.¹⁴² Keep in mind that while the lyrics certainly are about a spiritual quest, one should avoid giving any specific image too rigid of an interpretation: a variety of readings are possible, and what follows is just one. There are two main characters: the Lady, who Stephen Davis describes as a synthesis of “Spenser’s Faerie Queen, Robert Graves’s White Goddess, and every other Celtic heroine—the Lady of the Lake, Morgan La Fay, Diana of the Fields Greene, Rhiannon the Nightmare,” and the Piper (there is also a fleeting, ambiguous reference to the May Queen). We immediately learn that the Lady believes “all that glitters is gold.” This is a direct inversion of a passage in Tolkien’s Fellowship of the Ring where, during the Council of Elrond, Bilbo Baggins defends Aragorn (at that point in time a rather ragged figure) by saying, “All that is gold does not glitter.” Bilbo understands that a thing’s worth is not always apparent on the surface: the Lady, on the other hand, advocates shallow, grasping materialism—she wants to buy a stairway to heaven. She appears to be a “dark” anima figure, symbolizing destructive illusion.

As Plant develops his storyline (which he does more through repeated allusions to a common stock of characters and images than through straight narrative), the setting he conjures draws on several Tolkienesque images. Alternating between first, second, and third person viewpoints, Plant describes a journey on a path or a road (each term referenced once) through a forest (“trees” are mentioned twice, “the forest,” once), where he finds himself looking anxiously to the West (the sacred direction of both Celtic tradition and Lord of the Rings).¹⁴³

We learn that if we will collectively “call the tune,” the Piper “will lead us to reason.” The Piper, then, symbolizes the transmitter of gnosis (much like the hermit figure of the gatefold art), his melody the call to the spiritual quest,¹⁴⁴ and once he enters the narrative, he and the Lady appear to represent conflicting spiritual values: in fact, we learn “there are two paths you can go by.” Soon, our “head is humming” because the Piper is calling us to join him. And although the Lady is told her stairway “lies on the whispering wind” (and therefore is not a commodity to be bought or sold), when we encounter her during the song’s climactic section, she again “wants to show how everything still turns to gold”—that is, everything is reducible to material commodity.¹⁴⁵

Just before this encounter with her, we are on a road where “our shadows [are] taller than our souls.” In Hinduism, “shadow” is often a symbol of Maya—illusion—that which prevents us from seeing the underlying unity of all things. In short, her path (and ours, if we follow it) would appear to be the path of Maya, just as the Piper’s appears to be the “lost straight road” that leads to the land of promise. Finally, we’re told that if we “listen very hard,” the Piper’s tune “will come to you at last.” And when will it come to us? “When all is one and one is all.”

Led Zeppelin went on to pen later epic spiritual quest narratives—among them “Kashmir,” “Achilles’ Last Stand,” and “Carouselambra.” However, only “Stairway” explicitly asserts that gnosis begins with the understanding that all is one and one is all; or, put it slightly differently, that (in the words of John Lennon) “I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.” Thus “Stairway” is the band’s great credo to monism: while their entire output is the expression of a monist worldview, “Stairway” is the first, and one of the few, Zeppelin songs that articulates this worldview explicitly.¹⁴⁶

To comprehend “Stairway to Heaven,” taking into account the lyric’s implicit storyline is not enough: the music builds its own narrative trajectory, developing a set of dichotomies to create a “message” that both supports and transcends that of the words. With “Stairway,” Zeppelin move beyond standard song form, creating the kind of “progressive” or teleological form beloved to contemporary British progressive rock bands like Emerson, Lake and Palmer and Yes. If there is one word that describes the musical dynamic of the song, it’s “growth”—of instrumentation, texture, and tempo, but also in the sense of the gradual revelation of new structural components. Another defining feature of the song is its modal harmony and pentatonic melodic outlines, deeply rooted in traditional British song, which give it a different flavor from the band’s blues-based songs.

“Stairway to Heaven” falls into three main sections, with Jimmy Page’s justly renowned “guitar fanfare” serving as a transitional episode between the second and third. The first section is defined by Page’s cleanly picked, smoothly-flowing acoustic guitar arpeggios, John Paul Jones’s soothing four-part recorder consort, which in concert he realized on Mellotron, and Robert Plant’s relaxed voice, here centered in the lower part of his range. The tempo flows at 76 beats per minute; the tonality is A modal minor, and the melancholy four-bar chord progression that defines the section is built on the guitar’s chromatically descending arpeggio which, as I pointed out earlier, traditionally has connotations of lamentation. The section comprises two and a half repetitions of the sixteen bar verse: the first is instrumental, the second vocal (through “two meanings”), and the final half repetition comprises a four-bar vocal segment (“In a tree . . .”) followed by a four-bar guitar/recorder continuation. The section evokes both the pastoral (through its use of acoustic instruments) and the archaic (through its use of the sound of the pre-modern recorder and Page’s lute-like guitar part).¹⁴⁷

The second and longest section of the song begins at 2:09, when Page’s acoustic guitar suddenly morphs into jangly twelve-string electric guitar, and Jones’s recorder consort to the bell-like Rhodes electric piano. One immediately perceives a sense of greater depth (lower frequencies, greater registral range between low and high notes) and greater timbral intensity (the twelve-string electric has a bigger sound that the acoustic six-string, the Rhodes electric piano has a bigger sound than the recorders). The section begins with the song’s chorus (“Ooh it makes me wonder”), which we have not heard before: this marks the beginning of a structural practice I call “progressive revelation” that marks later Zeppelin epics (“Kashmir,” “In the Light,” “Achilles”), wherein key structural elements are not revealed until the song is well underway. The chorus is distinguished from the verse in several ways: it’s strummed rather than picked, it’s syncopated rather than consisting of even eighth note motion, and consists of just two primary chords, A minor seventh alternating with D major. Because this progression suggests G major just as strongly as A minor (it’s a ii7-V progression in G major), it creates a sense of harmonic uncertainty that is only resolved when the verse reappears in a clearlydefined A minor.

At the beginning of the second section, the tempo begins to “move” a bit more: 84 beats per minute at first, increasing to 88 beats per minute by the second statement of the chorus. When the verse returns (“There’s a feeling I get”), the vocal melody remains the same, but Page changes the underlying guitar harmonization, eliminating the chromatically descending line on the guitar’s lowest strings. The result is that the new harmonization both is simpler (now using four different chords instead of six) and somewhat brighter (it now begins with a C major rather than an A minor chord). The song’s lengthy second section is broken into two unequal parts by the entrance of Bonham on drums and Jones on bass guitar at 4:06: besides creating a more powerful bass presence, this entrance also generates more rhythmic energy, and tends yet again to slightly increase the tempo.

At 5:05, just a few seconds beyond the song’s structural Golden Mean, Page launches into his famous fanfare passage that ushers the song’s climax. Traditionally, fanfares signal particularly solemn and important events: this one is no different. The guitar timbre becomes more distorted, the guitar presence becomes bigger (through the quasi-symphonic layering of guitar lines that dominates the remainder of the song, and, indeed, subsequent Zeppelin epics), the rhythms more jagged and complex. The tempo increases yet again (to 100 beats per minute), and the harmony becomes more dissonant and ambiguous. The two main chords, a D suspended fourth and a C major with an added second, suggest both G major (again, like the chorus) and E minor without confirming either, thereby creating a sense of expectancy.

At 5:23, the fanfare passes on into Page’s wonderful solo, regularly cited as one of the greatest in rock’s recorded canon. At this point, the tempo increases yet again (to 102–104 beats per minute) and the tonality dramatically returns to A minor, with the harmonic content being reduced to three implied chords—A minor, G major, F major—as a result of Jones’ hypnotically-repetitive descending A-G-F ground bass pattern. Throughout the song, chord progressions have become progressively simpler: here harmonic movement is reduced to its essence, and the effect is not unlike a river current that becomes stronger and stronger as it’s forced through a narrower and narrower channel. Page’s solo seems to introduce a new character into the musical drama. As with his solo in “Dazed and Confused,” this solo seems to strive against the straightjacket of the bass pattern: however, it is far less frantic, much more lyrical and deliberate in its expression. It is, in effect, the hero’s song, and I think the genius of the solo is that not only does it capture the twin sense of determination and melancholy that characterize the hero’s quest, it invites us to experience vicariously the heroic struggle ourselves: the hero’s song becomes our song, with Page as its medium.

Finally, at 6:09, we arrive at the third and climactic section of the song. Page takes up Jones’ descending ground bass pattern, doubling it in fifths and octaves; the tempo has now increased to between 110 and 112 beats per minute. Plant enters a full octave higher than his opening vocal, singing the hypnotically repetitive two-bar verse with great urgency. His vocal constriction perfectly complements Page’s guitar distortion, especially on the two key words that bring the song to its climax, “all” (“one is all”) and the sustained “roll” (“not to roll”). Then, the song begins to deconstruct. The repetitive ground bass pattern slows to a halt, with Page playing a thickly distorted line that grows perilously slow before pausing expectantly: then, the song returns to its origins in British folksong, with Plant singing the memorable final “And she’s buying a stairway to heaven” (now once again in the low, relaxed part of his range) a cappella.

In his seminal study of heavy metal, Running with the Devil, Robert Walser states that the music of “Stairway to Heaven” “combines contradictory sensibilities without reconciling them, as do Led Zeppelin’s lyrics and cover art.”¹⁴⁸ I strongly disagree, and it is here I think one final appeal to Tolkien will be helpful in understanding the unique appeal and power of the song. As Jared Lobdell notes, “For the Industrial Revolution and the myth of progress that spawned or was spawned by it, there is a counterrevolution and a myth of anti-progress” (pp. 108–09) and Tolkien’s use of this counter-myth is powerful. In expressing anxiety about technology and modernization, the relationship of country to city and of past to present, Tolkien taps into a specifically English ideology that extends back to the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, and was developed by such giants as Blake, Wordsworth, Carlyle, Ruskin, and Arnold. Lobdell notes that one of the underlying assumptions of Lord of the Rings is “If we assume that there resides some kind of genius in a land . . . then we could expect, as languages rise and fall within that land that the peoples who speak them will be not unlike each other. There will always—under whatever guise and in whatever time—be an England” (p. 32). He also points out that “Frodo and Bilbo, though hobbits, are Englishmen” (p. 16). Shippey makes a very similar point: “Tolkien wanted to recreate a timeless and idealized England (or rather Britain) in which the place and the people remained the same regardless of politics” (p. 98).

In other words, Tolkien’s vision of England is a monist’s vision in which past-present dichotomies are only apparent, not real. Hegel agrees, describing the World Spirit as “immortal”: “with it there is no past, no future, but an essential now....the present form of Spirit comprehends within it all earlier steps . . . which looked at in one aspect still exist beside each other, and only . . . from another point of view appear as past” (79). One aspect of Lord of the Rings that many have found appealing is that it posits an imaginary England of the incredibly remote past that is nevertheless organically connected to the (real) England of the present. It reassures us that even foreign (for instance Norman) conquest, the rise of the machines and rampant urbanization of the Industrial Revolution, and two devastating world wars could not destroy the essential Englishness of England; and conversely, that the magic of this incredibly remote past somehow lingers on. In Tolkien’s vision, the past resacralizes the present.

If one understands this, one begins to understand the appeal of “Stairway to Heaven” on a purely musical basis. Robert Walser is mistaken to say that Zeppelin simply juxtapose acoustic and electric, traditional and modern musical discourses in “Stairway,” although they did do that to some extent in earlier songs. (“What is and What Should Never Be” comes to mind). Not only does the music of the opening of the song posit an idealized rural England; its recorder consort and lute-like guitar part conjure an idealized “Old England” by referencing a very specific period of English musical history, the late Tudor–early Jacobean period, the Elizabethan “golden age” that plays such an important part in the English national myth. It seems unlikely that John Paul Jones and Jimmy Page were not at least to some extent aware of this. The song’s transformation into driving hard rock/proto-metal is so gradual, and so musically logical, that the listener experiences no sense of discontinuity: every part of the musical structure emerges smoothly out of what precedes it, just as every new set of timbres feels as if it emerged logically out of what came before. “Rural” seamlessly flows into “urban,” “archaic” smoothly blends into “modern.” “Stairway” definitively realizes Jimmy Page’s vision of “a new kind of ‘heavy music,’ with . . . dynamics, light and shade, chiaroscuro” (Hammer of the Gods, p. 52).

Like Hegel, the members of Led Zeppelin came of age in a time of wrenching cultural transformations: it was inevitable that they would feel anxiety about what appeared to be the increasingly tenuous relationship between the culture of their day and the traditions of the past. As a musical statement, “Stairway to Heaven” almost takes on the force of an aesthetic ideology. British hard rock of the 1970s, which many cultural conservatives of the time saw in anarchic, if not nihilistic, terms, is, in fact, shown to be organically connected to the music of England’s golden age, tied together by modal harmony, pentatonic melodic outline, and similarities in figuration and texture. As with Tolkien, the musical past resacralizes the musical present; and, in Hegelian terms, “Stairway” achieves an almost preternaturally perfect reconciliation of past-present, ruralurban, and tradition-modernity, expressing through the song’s musical style the same monist vision that its lyrics expressed. Ultimately, like Hegel’s philosophy of history, “Stairway to Heaven” presents its dualities as part of an evolving, underlying unity. No wonder Robert Plant introduced “Stairway to Heaven” in The Song Remains the Same with perhaps the most profound words of the entire movie: “I think this is a song of hope.”

“Kashmir” is, of course, one of their best and best-known songs: Robert Plant has suggested it is Zeppelin’s greatest achievement .¹⁴⁹ It takes as its subject the spiritual quest, which Plant’s lyrics express as a trek through Kashmir in search of hidden knowledge. Unfolding at a stately eighty beats per minute, it is characterized especially by the memorable four-bar opening riff, doubled on Page’s guitar (left channel) and Jones’s Mellotron strings (right channel), with Bonham’s stripped down, powerful drum groove generating enormous polyrhythmic energy as he plays a straightahead 4/4 rock groove against the riff’s 3/4 profile. Although virtually everyone knows that the song is supposed to be “Eastern,” fewer are aware that its musical sources are not Indian, but rather Egyptian; furthermore, despite the lyric’s supposed setting in Kashmir, Plant’s descriptions of the desert-like geography that he passes through on his quest are more representative of North Africa.

The song consists of four slowly alternating musical “blocks.” There are Plant’s vocal verses which are accompanied by the riff mentioned above; a fanfare-like instrumental refrain (0:54); a bridge section built around a short, syncopated Mellotron “string” figure (2:10); and Plant’s “counter-verse” (3:19) accompanied by Jones’ “Arabian orchestra” (which he creates via overdubs of florid Mellotron string lines and sporadic blasts of Mellotron brass). In keeping with the song’s “Eastern” ethos, Page eschews Western displays of ego. Not only is there no guitar solo, there are few independent guitar parts: none, in fact, outside of the counter-verse, where he strums alternating open fifths on G and A deep in the mix underneath Jones’ “orchestra.” The stately tempo, Bonham’s stripped down, powerful drum grooves, the massively-orchestrated Mellotron and guitar parts moving in unison, and the slowly-shifting musical blocks that come and go in a more or less circular progression all contribute to an impersonal, indeed “timeless,” and decidedly monumental musical experience.

“Kashmir” is the last song on the first LP. “In the Light,” the first song of the second LP, has some similarities to “Kashmir”—and important differences as well. Like “Kashmir,” “In the Light” consists of four distinct musical “blocks”: unlike “Kashmir,” these four blocks are presented consecutively, then repeated in the same order, but with variations (so the overall form is A B C D A’ B’ C’ D’). Unlike “Kashmir,” “In the Light” actually does draw from Indian music: specifically, its opening suggests the opening section of a raga. Using an EMS VSC3 synthesizer, Jones first evokes the drone of a harmonium or a very deep sitar; then, in a higher register, he begins to play lead lines suggestive of the sound of the shenai, a double-reed Indian instrument that sounds like a deep, piercing oboe. These lead lines grow increasingly florid, and Jones uses the synthesizer’s joystick to create the pitch bends characteristic to traditional Indian music; however, he renders his raga-like opening “psychedelic” by running the “shenai” lines through an analog delay unit, so that they seem to dematerialize as they blur and blend into each other. The lack of an audible beat and the “melting” of melodic outline create a sense of timelessness and of vast, reverberating space: analogies might include a world without form, the self in the womb, or the depths of the unconscious.

Plant enters at the beginning of the second section (1:43), singing an elemental vocal line (in A-pentatonic minor) four times. Harmonizing with himself in bare intervals, his vocal part suggests an ancient chant: while one might hear it as “Eastern,” one might just as easily hear a similarity to medieval European organum, since its most important feature seems to be its sense of the archaic. Jones accompanies with a simple drone, adding a sitar-like melodic figure that rises from the synthesizer’s deep registers after each of Plant’s vocal stanzas (introducing the musical symbolism of ascent that dominates the remainder of the song). Compared to the song’s “formless” opening section, this section suggests a gradual cohesion: there is now a sense of pulse (although weak and implied rather than explicitly sounded) and of melodic outline (although of a very simple, elemental nature).

It is only at the beginning of the third section (2:45) that Page and Bonham enter: Page with a heavily syncopated, descending two-bar guitar riff that suggests both Middle Eastern and blues sources, Bonham with an accompanying groove that momentarily blurs the location of the downbeat. When Plant enters with the verse (3:00), the band switch to another two-bar riff, this one circular and more Arab than Indian; it’s a bit reminiscent of the Mellotron “string” figure from the bridge of “Kashmir.” Both riffs continue the A-minor tonality of the previous section (the first riff with a blues flatted fifth, the second with alternating raised and lowered sixths); Page’s overdubbed off-beat drone G at the end of every other measure creates a mild but continuous dissonance with both the riffs and Plant’s vocal melody. The heavy beat, faster tempo (effectively double time from the previous section), and greater bass presence (Jones having switched from synthesizer to bass, on which he doubles Page’s line) create a sense of forward motion that the previous sections lacked: one feels that the song has finally achieved a clear sense of beat and melodic profile. The analogy here is time beginning, the world taking on form, the passage from the womb into the world, and from unconsciousness into consciousness.

The first section of “In the Light” is an instrumental prelude, the second a vocal prologue, and the third section the verse. It isn’t until 4:09 that we reach the chorus, the song’s fourth section. Built around Jones’s anthemic Clavinet part, we immediately notice two things: this is the first section that sounds Western rather than Eastern, and it is only now that we pass from minor to major tonality. Musically, the entire song up to this point has been a metaphor for shadow slowly but inexorably giving way to light, and Page further reinforces the motif of emerging into the light with a new two-bar riff (4:25), an A major scale fragment that climbs two octaves: again, the musical metaphor of ascent. However, the section cuts off suddenly; before Plant ever sings, in fact.

From here, the band recapitulates the four sections of the song, in order, the first three in compressed form: we hear brief restatements of the instrumental prelude (4:55), the vocal prologue (5:26), and the verse (5:52). Finally, at 6:36 the chorus returns, and this time Plant enters immediately, explicitly articulating its meaning in a disarmingly vulnerable grain of voice: “in the light . . . everybody needs the light.” This is the moment the entire song has headed towards, and from here on out the band begin to musically develop the chorus: Page layers in reverberating rising fanfare figures, recalling the opening section’s sense of vast space, but now with a far greater sense of drive and forward motion. Indeed, Page’s leads become increasingly florid and ecstatic as the music begins to fade, recalling Jones’s opening synth leads; one feels we have simultaneously come full circle to the opening part, and fulfilled its inherent destiny.

The primary duality explored by Zeppelin in “Kashmir” and “In the Light” is East/West, but the band also engage a number of other dualities subsumable under the East/West polarity: timelessness/time, formlessness/form, unconsciousness/consciousness. These polarities were perceptively and prophetically discussed by Carl Jung (1875–1961) in “The Difference Between Eastern and Western Thinking.”¹⁵⁰ Jung begins by asserting the Western mind is primarily extroverted—that is, directed outwards—while the Eastern mind is essentially introverted and focused within. This tendency is most noticeable in the differences between Western and Eastern religious thought. The Judeo-Christian tradition views salvation as coming from without, from a transcendent God upon whose grace all men and women are wholly dependent; Hinduism, however, stresses the imminent God, the God within. In Hinduism, as Jung puts it, “man is God and he redeems himself” (p. 486).

The Western habit of outward attention and its “objective” orientation—which, as Jung notes, is responsible both for the West’s scientific and technological achievements and its acquisitiveness—is dependent on a highly-developed sense of ego-consciousness; indeed, for a Westerner, “mind” specifically means the conscious mind. Jung points out that this continuous identification with ego-consciousness is “appalling” from the Eastern point of view, since it amounts to complete identification with Maya (illusion). For the Hindu, ego-consciousness is a rather low level of consciousness; in higher forms of consciousness, the ego disappears altogether. For the Westerner, this “higher consciousness” seems identical to the unconscious: it is difficult for us to imagine a conscious mental state without a subject, that is, an ego, to observe it. For the Westerner, samadhi [the highest level of meditation] is liable to be “nothing but a meaningless dream state” (p. 501).

Jung believed he was living through a time in which East and West were interpenetrating: “While we are overpowering the Orient from without, it may be fastening its hold on us from within” (p. 475). More specifically, Jung believed that even as Western influence was profoundly transforming Eastern political, economic, and (as he noted with regret) military institutions, Eastern thought was profoundly influencing Western spirituality. Indeed, Jung saw this development as both inevitable and desirable:

The two standpoints, however contradictory, each have their psychological justification. Both are one-sided in that they fail to see and take account of those factors which do not fit in with their typical attitude. The one underrates the world of consciousness, the other, the world of the One Mind. The result is that, in their extremism, both lose half of the universe. (p. 501)

Although Jung professed no particular enthusiasm for Hegel, his “Eastern and Western Thinking” presents an unambiguously Hegelian narrative of the convergence of East and West during the first half of the twentieth century; Jung believed the result of this interpenetration would be a new synthesis of Western rationality and Eastern spirituality. Jung specifically criticized the religious movements of the early twentieth century such as Theosophy that believed

Certain Mahatmas, seated somewhere in the Himalayas or Tibet, inspire and direct every mind in the world . . . the East is at the bottom of the spiritual change we are passing through today. Only, this East is not a Tibetan monastery full of Mahatmas, but lies essentially within us. (p. 476)

Both “Kashmir” and “In the Light” grapple with these issues. While “Kashmir” may be the better of the two songs on a purely musical level, it seems open to the criticisms that Jung leveled against the Theosophists. In creating a metaphor of the spiritual quest, Plant creates a story of himself trekking through Kashmir (in the Himalayas) where a “gentle race” (the Mahatmas, perhaps?) guard a secret wisdom, awaiting the coming spiritual transformation “when all will be revealed.” In other words, gnosis is to be found without, in “The East,” where we must journey in order to find it, to receive it from the hands of a beneficent Other. “In the Light,” on the other hand, invites one to look within for one’s answer. And here we will want briefly to consider another of Zeppelin’s influences, Aleister Crowley, since “In the Light” is perhaps the Zeppelin song in which his influence is most obvious.

Because of Crowley’s profligate, libertine ways, his infamous dictum “Do what thou wilt” is often understood to mean “let it all hang out,” and, unfortunately, when his writings went through a vogue of popularity with the hippies during the late 1960s and early 1970s, that is often exactly how they interpreted it. However, Crowley himself said what he really meant was “Let will and action be in harmony,” adding, “Will in the higher sense . . . used by Schopenhauer and Fichte.”¹⁵¹ Schopenhauer describes will as the reality that lies behind the world of illusion and appearances that shape ordinary consciousness; Fichte stresses that a man does not become conscious of his freedom until he launches himself into action. For both, will determines consciousness (or at least the state worthy of that name) rather than the other way around.

Crowley concluded that, as Colin Wilson put it, “man possesses a ‘controlling ego’ which presides over consciousness,” and believed that through the assertion of one’s will, one can access this “controlling ego” and move beyond ordinary consciousness and its illusory appearances into a higher level of consciousness. Thus the importance of magic to Crowley: he saw it as the primary tool for accessing the controlling ego and thus mastering one’s own consciousness. Crowley’s conception of the will seems to bear some resemblance to the Hindu concept of atman—the innermost core of one’s self—and the belief that by becoming fully aware of atman we realize an identity with Brahman, the supreme spirit. Crowley stresses that only when people learn to exercise their will can they fulfill their true destiny. And thus the opening lyric of “In the Light”:

And if you feel that you can’t go on
and your will’s sinkin’ low,
Just believe and you can’t go wrong
in the light you will find the road.

“The light” is within; it is one’s inner will. Once one has activated “the light” by identifying one’s inner will, then one can “find the road” by bringing will and action into harmony. The lyrics of much of the rest of the song are something like an Eastern variant of Paul Simon’s “Bridge Over Troubled Waters,” with Plant telling an unidentified partner that he will help her bear her burdens on this road, as she will help him bear his.

“Kashmir” places wisdom outside; “In the Light” places it inside, which is, in Jung’s view, as it should be. Recalling Jung’s exposition of East/West dualities, we can now make more sense of the musical structure of “In the Light” as well. The song begins on a very inward, “Eastern” level; each subsequent section becomes more extroverted, until finally, when the fourth section (the chorus) is reached, the song becomes fully “Western,” and shadow gives way to full light. Using Jung’s analogy, the song emerges out of the unconscious, and stage by stage becomes more fully conscious until it reaches the full consciousness of the chorus. Of course, one could give this an essentialist reading that sees a progression from undeveloped (Eastern) to fully developed (Western). It’s more likely the band meant to depict wisdom (or to use Crowley’s term, will) being drawn from the depths of the unconscious and, through stages, being brought into full consciousness; and, during the final chorus, as Page’s reverberating fanfare-like leads increasingly come to mirror Jones’s reverberating synthesizer leads of the opening, to show “East” flowing into “West,” “West” back into “East,” in a Hegelian dialectic.

Sing Out Hare Hare: Hegel and the World Spirit

Whole Lotta Love: Balancing Dualities of Gender and Race

Stairway to Heaven: Balancing Past and Present

In the Light: Balancing East and West

Bring the Balance Back: Led Zeppelin and the Hegelian Dialectic