Most of this is a Led Zeppelin gig dominated by longwinded soloing from Jimmy Page. If that's your bag, dive in, I guess you'll love it for the music at least. For me, it was a reminder of how I felt about this kind of thing as a kid in the '70s: I hated it, and my feelings, it turns out, well, remain the same, ha ha: this much electric guitar Sturm und Drang feels as tedious and dreary to me as being caught in an actual storm. There is no feeling or meaning in it, only showing off - another reminder of why punk felt so necessary to so many of us. Yet still, call me naive, I came to this with certain hopes, I suppose of some kind of transcendent experience. I mean, these guys were masters of their craft, no?
This morning I read the following in a book of Joan Didion essays: 'Make a place available to your eyes and in many ways it is no longer available to your imagination.' This is like that, except here the greater immediacy of the moving image undermines the aura of photos already 'available to our eyes.' In its full gestalt, Zeppelin's legendary majesty turns into an actual if not literal lead balloon: four regular guys playing music full of pomposity, inflected with sword and sorcery as silly as it's ever been. No surprise that when it comes to turning this into onscreen images, you end up with the banality of the fantasy sequences here: Plant slaying castle guards to rescue a fashion model maiden, Page seeking wisdom from an elder who turns out to be...himself. More and more as I watched, I had the feeling that Zep ended up a 180-degree betrayal of what rock 'n' roll began as: relatable humans carving out the space to get down and dirty, not high and mighty, with their joys, griefs and rages, roughly as per Dave Hickey's great essay, 'The Delicacy of Rock 'n' Roll.' That's what punk tried to snatch back from '70s high mannerism, whether heavy rock or prog. But even Zeppelin knew how to do that at the start with 'Communication Breakdown.'
Still I could forgive and maybe even enjoy the Wagnerian epic note if it wasn't all so tawdry. Look how it plays out in Zep's attitude to sex. That focus might seem truer to rock 'n' roll's roots than all the elves, knights and Valhalla stuff, but here too we get not the vulnerable frustration and economic efficiency of 'Satisfaction,' 'What do I get?' or 'Summertime Blues,' but a superego virility myth no reality can live up to. Seen on film, the artful fraying on the bulging crotch of Plant's too tight jeans looks like the phoney, obvious Freudian manipulation it is, and the man himself, handsome specimen though he is, turns out to be a lumpy, mortal, non-omnipotent human like the rest of us.
The whole experience is like being able to go back in time and find out just how much we scam ourselves when we give in to nostalgia.
This morning I read the following in a book of Joan Didion essays: 'Make a place available to your eyes and in many ways it is no longer available to your imagination.' This is like that, except here the greater immediacy of the moving image undermines the aura of photos already 'available to our eyes.' In its full gestalt, Zeppelin's legendary majesty turns into an actual if not literal lead balloon: four regular guys playing music full of pomposity, inflected with sword and sorcery as silly as it's ever been. No surprise that when it comes to turning this into onscreen images, you end up with the banality of the fantasy sequences here: Plant slaying castle guards to rescue a fashion model maiden, Page seeking wisdom from an elder who turns out to be...himself. More and more as I watched, I had the feeling that Zep ended up a 180-degree betrayal of what rock 'n' roll began as: relatable humans carving out the space to get down and dirty, not high and mighty, with their joys, griefs and rages, roughly as per Dave Hickey's great essay, 'The Delicacy of Rock 'n' Roll.' That's what punk tried to snatch back from '70s high mannerism, whether heavy rock or prog. But even Zeppelin knew how to do that at the start with 'Communication Breakdown.'
Still I could forgive and maybe even enjoy the Wagnerian epic note if it wasn't all so tawdry. Look how it plays out in Zep's attitude to sex. That focus might seem truer to rock 'n' roll's roots than all the elves, knights and Valhalla stuff, but here too we get not the vulnerable frustration and economic efficiency of 'Satisfaction,' 'What do I get?' or 'Summertime Blues,' but a superego virility myth no reality can live up to. Seen on film, the artful fraying on the bulging crotch of Plant's too tight jeans looks like the phoney, obvious Freudian manipulation it is, and the man himself, handsome specimen though he is, turns out to be a lumpy, mortal, non-omnipotent human like the rest of us.
The whole experience is like being able to go back in time and find out just how much we scam ourselves when we give in to nostalgia.
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