How Led Zeppelin IV

Impacted Music

By Lucy Faulkner

So many things can be said about Led Zeppelins’ impact on music. Every album they made up until their disbandment in 1980 has had so much impact on rock music, but there’s one album in particular that has always been a fan favourite. When Led Zeppelin released their 4th album in 1971, they gave the world so many instant classics that are still being covered and played to this day.

 Led Zeppelin IV was released on November 8th, 1971. Fan reception to Led Zeppelin IV was very positive when it was released. The album was a commercial success, debuting at number two on the Billboard 200 chart and eventually going on to sell over 37 million copies worldwide. Critics also praised the album’s musicianship, songwriting, and production, and it’s since become regarded as a classic rock masterpiece. What I think really adds to this album is the way they integrate multiple genres into one classic album, they use a mixture of hard rock, folk and blues. The best example of their use of the folk genre in this album would be in the song “Going to California”. I think this is because this song is believed to be written with inspiration from folk songstress Joni Mitchell. It is believed that Robert Plant and Jimmy Page were big fans of her work and drew inspiration from her discography, leading them to write “Going to California” during a session at Headley Grange, a former poorhouse in Hampshire that had been converted into a recording studio. starting with Jimmy Page creating the music with a Californian folk sound, with Robert Plant adding lyrics that are reminiscent of the flower power sound of the 60s.

The hard rock is still extremely relevant in this album, as it is with all Led Zep albums. To me, the best example of some classic hard rock from Led Zeppelin in this album would be in the song “Rock and Roll”. With John Bonham’s thundering drums opening the song, then leading to Jimmy Pages and John Paul Jones‘s crazy guitar riffs and choppy bass, all brought together by Robert Plant’s classic rock and roll vocals, it’s easy to hear that they still had that classic hard rock sound even four albums in. I think the song “Rock and Roll” is one that all Led Zeppelin fans would probably agree with when I say it deserves a lot more credibility than it gets, it has that timeless Led Zeppelin sound that never seems to get old, even today. I think that the way Led Zeppelin intertwines different genres along with their own unique sound is something that all artists today can appreciate and feel inspired by, with plenty of rock artists to this day learning from their music and taking what they did and trying it in their own interpretation. For example, a lot of people compare the band Greta Van Fleet to Led Zeppelin because they clearly take a lot of influence from Led zeppelins music, but they put their own spin on it and make it their own, which is something a lot of artists tend to do and I imagine that’s what led zeppelin wanted people to take away from their own music.

How could I talk about Led Zeppelin IV without mentioning the classic rock anthem “Stairway to Heaven”? I think this is easily said to be one of the greatest rock songs of all time, with plenty of pop culture references and covers of the song still being made today. “Stairway to Heaven” has a little bit of everything in it, with it starting out very melancholy with a folkish sound and over the course of 6 minutes they take you back to that Led Zeppelin sound that we are all so familiar with. Led Zeppelin never actually released the song as a single in the United States and still managed to gain incredible popularity. Led Zeppelin recorded “Stairway to Heaven” in headley grange, with Jimmy Page improvising the infamous guitar solo in just one take. The lyrics were written by Robert Plant after he was inspired by a dream he had in which he climbed a stairway to a mystical world. Despite the song’s enormous popularity, Led Zeppelin was also faced with a lot of legal challenges and controversies. for example in the 1980s, many Christian and evangelical groups claimed that the song had satanic messages when it was played backwards. They also were sued by the band ‘Spirit‘ in 2010. Spirit claimed that Zeppelin had copied the opening riff for their song “Taurus” for the opening of “Stairway to Heaven”. Led Zeppelin was of course found not guilty of copyright infringement, ultimately leaving the classic song untouched.

Although I think led zeppelin IV is the band’s most influential album, I think the band themselves are still just as influential. All of the music they made stood the test of time and they are still as relevant in the music world today as they were in the early 70s because they really stuck to what they knew, and the band knew exactly what their fans would want to hear.

By Lucy Faulkner