Three poems about Led - One

Immigrant Song: This is what rock music is supposed to sound like. A driving riff and a wailing howl. Listen to how the machine of the band drives forward together: how the bass switches to quick, brief upward runs and then back to the hammering main riff; how Bonham's cymbal crashes match the guitar's open shimmering chords, but the kick drum and the toms follow the bass and the main riff tightly. Listen to the end where the guitar drops in its dissonant open chords at unexpected places in the riff, signalling the end.

The lyrical match is perfect. Because it is a driving, relentless song the idea of the Vikings is ideal. It is certainly a song that moves forward, but it is also a dark song, and the Vikings were a dark scourge on the coastal villages of Europe when they came. Unsurprisingly it has been used to inspire college football teams in the USA and US miltary pilots in the Gulf War. It is a battering song, a sudden mob with bats, ugly and lost, a riot on the streets, a truck driver pulled from his cab in LA, a black man being batoned on a freeway.





I remember Kenneth Clarke talking about the Vikings in the first episode of his documentary Civilization. How the prows of those ships thrust up high on the horizon against the slate sky must have struck terror in the hearts of farmers and priests on the land. Those prows are a symbol of the West; with all it's beauty and brutality, bearing down on the vulnerable, filled up with an insatiable greed.

Of course it is a fashion to bash the West, but I've just been reading a lot of books about the Spanish conquistadors in Mexico and Peru. The Aztec and Incan empires were empires based on oppression. They dominated and controlled a patchwork of groups some of which allied themselves with the Spanish when they had the chance. It seems the lesson here is that all cultures that advance use their strength to crush those that have not.

How heartening.

Who is coming for us?