A WORD FROM OUR PROFESSOR

Over the coming pages, music academic Milton Mermikides reveals what’s really happening, musically, on Led Zeppelin IV.

Milton: Musical evolution, particularly in the rock and popular music genres, tends to happen not by destroying all previous conventions, nor by simply repeating and ‘perfecting’ existing norms. Rather, there is a balance between the familiar and the new, between the expected and the surprising: an accessible invention.

This ‘Goldilocks zone’ between the boringly conventional and the radically experimental has been dubbed, amusingly, by musicologist Brad Osborn the ‘Spears-Stockhausen continuum’, with Britney Spears and modernist composer Karlheinz Stockhausen representing each end of the spectrum. Revolutionary albums, bands and artists often exhibit just the right blend of familiar influences and original ideas or re-assembling of diverse influences. So it is with Led Zeppelin, who managed to manipulate, develop and subvert familiar rock conventions with a range of unlikely influences of folk, funk, structural and – in particular – rhythmic and metric concepts.

Over the coming pages I analyse the seminal Led Zeppelin IV not in terms of rock journalism, but in terms of how to really understand what is happening musically in each track. Where and what these unconventional and novel twists are amid the expected style, which make this album so influential and enduring half a century after it was made.