Happy 50th Anniversary to Led Zeppelin’s fourth studio album Led Zeppelin IV, originally released November 8, 1971.
Growing up, my parents usually played Q104.3, a New York Metro Area classic rock radio station, in the car. The marquee event for any Q104.3 listener was the week before Thanksgiving, when the station would count down the 1,043 best classic rock songs, as voted on by their listeners. They start on Tuesday or Wednesday and end late Sunday night, with an anticlimactic countdown: Even though the list changes yearly, “Stairway to Heaven” from Led Zeppelin IV (1971) has been number one every time.
If you grew up listening to a station like Q104.3, Led Zeppelin IV was basically inescapable. Each of its eight tracks—from the weird folk odyssey of “The Battle of Evermore” to the thundering blues of “When The Levee Breaks”—had the potential to come over my parents’ car speakers at any moment, with my mother immediately and rightfully cranking the volume. These are maybe the songs I’ve known the longest. They are a fact of my life.
Its place as a classic rock cliché does not overturn a simple fact: Led Zeppelin IV kicks serious ass. It’s not cool for IV to be your favorite Led Zeppelin album, but let’s face it: it’s the best. Yes, other Zeppelin albums reach incredible heights, particularly Physical Graffiti (1975), but no record is as tight or complete as IV.
How good is it, exactly? Well, any band would love to have a song like “Misty Mountain Hop” in their repertoire, but it’s maybe the sixth-best song on the album. You’ve also got the folk perfection of “Going to California,” the vivid imagery of the opening to “Stairway to Heaven,” the best of Jimmy Page’s incredible riffs in “Black Dog,” John Bonham’s drumming masterclass on “When the Levee Breaks,” and the insanely fun “Rock and Roll.” Every performance, every note, is perfectly executed. Slap on a weird cover and a strange occult mythology, and you’ve got a winner on your hands.
But as we all know now, Led Zeppelin built their career imitating and copying (sometimes without credit) traditional Black blues. They weren’t the first white rockers to do this—the story goes back to Buddy Holly and Elvis Presley—but Led Zeppelin (1) made enough money for a tricked-out private jet from music written by Black artists and (2) are credited with spectacular, genre-defining innovations that overshadow their debts.
Case in point: On the 2020 edition of the 1,043 greatest classic rocks songs from my beloved hometown radio station, the highest-ranked song by a Black artist is Jimi Hendrix’s version of Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower” at number 35. To find a song performed and written by a Black artist, you’d have to go all the way to number 62: "Purple Haze.” Looking for someone who isn’t Hendrix? Number 101: Chuck Berry, with “Johnny B. Goode.”
The point here isn’t to dunk on my hometown radio station. The point, as musicologist Matthew D. Morrison points out in the article “Race, Blacksound, and the (Re)Making of Musicological Discourse” is that “the aesthetic and performance practices of African Americans have been exploited and embedded in the discourses of popular music and sound, even as they are made hypersonic (or rendered racially inaudible) when marketed to a primarily white audience.” There is no Led Zeppelin—or Rolling Stones, or Beatles—without Black music, even as the Blackness was squeezed out of it by the people performing it and the executives marketing it. As a result, this Thanksgiving, some kid will listen to that radio countdown and learn, like I did, that the history of rock is white.
The real question at stake here is: who do we think of as being responsible for rock music? Black musicians have been its driving force since the beginning, but too frequently our lists and our listening do not reflect this fact (and I am very much part of this). I do not mean to deny Led Zeppelin IV’s status as a stunning and inspiring record—but it is not the beginning of any story.
This is not a purely academic question; it has repercussions for the rock music scene more broadly. Black fans of one of my favorite groups, Phish (who have covered Led Zeppelin and play funk, blues, and reggae) have called out how the presumption that rock shows are white spaces can have negative effects on nonwhite fans. Bartees Strange, who I saw play for a mostly white crowd in Boston a few weeks ago at the unfortunately-titled House of Blues, has commented on how the whiteness of indie and punk rock shut out talents and ideas from other cultures. Black people are being shut out of a space that would not exist without Black people. This is an enduring problem.
In some places, progress is being made. Rolling Stone put out a new Top 500 songs ranking with an eye toward a more inclusive list. This is good, and helps readers see the story of rock & roll in a more vivid way. More progress would require a more inclusive understanding of rock among rank-and-file fans, the ones who make scenes and shows inclusive or exclusive, and who vote on lists like the one I listened to growing up.
But where does all of this leave Led Zeppelin IV? Can we listen to it?
Of course. The world is a better place because we have “Black Dog,” “Stairway to Heaven,” and “Four Sticks.” Those thundering drums from “When the Levee Breaks,” obviously the most blues-based song on this particular album, have been sampled by everyone from Dr. Dre to Beyoncé to Björk. It is part of this larger musical story now, and that’s a good thing, but there is so much more to the story. When we think about Led Zeppelin IV, then, we should think about this incredibly good album not as the product of four (white) geniuses—but as an inventive extension of a musical history that still isn’t being given its just due.
LISTEN: