Led Zeppelin's Led Zeppelin IV (3 page)

This is what Marshall McLuhan meant when he said the medium is the message: The formal characteristics of music recordings change our experience of them. There are many ways that the digital regime has refashioned our lives with music, but the one I want to emphasize here is how our relationship to recordings has become increasingly
incorporeal
. Once your music is “data,” then its material case, if it even came with one, is basically dead wood. “Without the physical body of the disc to rub up against,” writes Dibbell, “a post-Napster consumer erotics comes to rest on the body of information itself.”
⁴
This information fetishism, known to every MP3 hoarder, is the inevitable outcome of
the shift from analog to digital recording, mixing, and mastering. Sure, CDs are nifty to fondle, but with the coming of the great god
iPod
, the CD reveals itself as nothing more than a cheesy plastic pit stop on the road toward the invisible datafile. Our collections are growing literally spineless, vaporizing into virtual libraries, sleek MP3 players, and those ugly black books of CD-Rs. And as we turn to streaming services like Rhapsody, the notion that music is
stuff
at all is melting away.

There is a curious fitness in this disappearance, at least as far as music goes. For nearly all of its ancient human life, music was, in its sensory presence, an essentially incorporeal affair. The San Francisco poet Robert Duncan captured this diaphanous quality when he described the composition of music as “A / volition. / To seize from the air its forms.”
⁵
We made music with our bodies, of course, and needed to be in the presence of bodies, whether lute or larynx, to hear it. But music remained, especially to ears unaware that air is a fluid, an essentially ethereal phenomenon. Its apparently bodiless flow, so like our own consciousness, explains why, of all arts, music was (and is) the one most consistently allied with
spirit
, whether that spirit is expressed in the lore of Orpheus, or the rhythms of the saints, or the subtle mantras that the
Sharada–Tilaka–Tantra
claims lie behind creation. Music’s incorporeal immediacy also helps explain why it retains a spiritual and
transcendental power in the midst of so many people’s otherwise secular, even nihilistic lives.

Records changed the spiritual dynamics of music by subjecting the flux of sound waves to material inscription. Music, once heard only in the moment of its performance, carved a rippling groove that could later reproduce the traces of performance. Music became a kind of
writing
, a mysterious phono-
graph
that was only returned to the realm of air through an industrial contraption. Symbolically, the phonograph record staged a peculiar double movement: of drawing living spirit
into
matter, and then, upon playback, the even more uncanny act of reproducing that spirit—or something like that spirit—
from
matter. This process lent the phonograph a spectral dimension. As David Toop notes: “Frozen in time within the grooves, a voice, an instrument, a sound, becomes the living dead and is worshipped in the way that a loved one, deceased, may be adored for years by the bereaved.”
⁶
It is not surprising that Edison, who tried to contact spirits through radio waves, considered the phonograph his favorite invention: Ghosts grew in the grooves.

Initially Edison wasn’t interested in capturing music or spirits, but in making money from business dictation. Soon phonograph manufacturers realized that they could sell more machines if they offered ordinary consumers recordings of performers they loved. The Berliner
Gramophone Company introduced the rotating disk player in 1896, and by the turn of the century, a new industry was emerging. Audio recordings become
commodities
, material objects packaged, advertised, distributed, and sold in the marketplace. These recordings provided consumers with scratchy inscriptions of their delights and passions, their memories and longings, and the intimacy of these grooves lent records a peculiar power. Walter Benjamin famously argued that mechanical reproduction disenchanted objects of art, but records actually
gained
aura. For the musicologist Albin Zak III, this “transferal of aura” lies in the way that records “capture physical presence and action”—very Zeppelin-friendly terms for the way that recordings become “infused with energy imparted from the interaction of human personalities, embodied now in the form of an artifact with powers of its own.”
⁷

In addition to these powers, which Zak’s studio informants consistently identify as “magic,” records also became some of the mass media’s most imaginatively charged commodities, perhaps the culture industry’s fetish supreme. We owe the important idea of the “commodity fetish” to Karl Marx, who first introduced the concept in
Das Kapital
using the example of a table. To the extent that the table is made of common, ordinary wood, he said, the thing is just a common, ordinary object. But when the table steps forth as a commodity
in the marketplace, Marx writes, “it is changed into something transcendent.” It gains an extra value beyond its simple usefulness. Marx says that the table “stands on its head” and starts to dance around the room like the shaking tables featured in the spiritualist séances of his day. Marx believed this transcendent glow was an illusion, a displacement of the real source of the thing’s value, which was the social character of human labor. Capitalism “alienates” the relationship between labor and commodity, and the dead things we buy therefore appear strangely animated, almost charged with life-force. To explain how this enchantment occurs, Marx turns to the animistic worldview of so-called primitives, where “the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life.” The commodity thus becomes a
fetish
, a word he drew from the new science of anthropology and its encounter with West African religion and its various talismans, devil-dolls, and warlock gear.

From an animist perspective, on the other hand, one might also say that the table dances because its wood was
already enchanted
. Like all things drawn from nature, the table participates in the creative matrix that shamans and traditional healers believe links human culture and the elements of the earth. The fetish power of commodities then, is not only the displaced buzz of human labor, but the capitalist trace of an ancient mode of relating
to the material world. Whether the source of this relationship is the human mind or the structure of cosmos is ultimately beside the point. What is important is that the glamour and magic of commodities is not simply a spectral effect of technological capitalism, but a transformation—twisted, no doubt, and more than a little Mephistophelean—of an imaginative and even ritual relationship to nature, to the matter/mother of us all.

Vinyl records embody the enchanting power of modern commodities in a particularly potent way. As is now common knowledge, vinyl records represent sound as an analog waveform, whose sinuous groove mimics the vibrating waves of sound that ripple through the thin fluid we breathe. The stylus rides the groove like a tiny rollercoaster, physically reproducing the fluctuations that shape sound from the air. Analog is an
analogy
, then, a graven metaphor. And what analog is
like
is the wave, the undulating continuities that everywhere weave the natural world, from the rolling seas to the rolling hills to the petal of the rose. This inscribed analogy is also a kind of “magic.” After all, analogy—
this
is like
that
—is the basic rhetorical move of spellcraft, which speaks and pictures the hidden correspondences between things, between, for example, planets and plants and the human body.

Every Yin has a Yang, of course, and the flipside of the analog is the digital: a series of ones and zeros that
chop up the flowing snake of sense into discrete bits. With digital, we move from analogy to code: the pits on your CD or the charges on your hard-drive do not “embody” the music the way a groove does. These itty bits have many marvelous properties, not least of which is their ability to translate sound into an abstract and essentially immaterial numerical series that, in contrast to the snap-crackle-pop of analog artifacts, can be reproduced indefinitely with near perfect fidelity. Nonetheless, though digital now rules the roost, people continue to argue for the superiority of analog audio, especially older gear, in a number of domains—from tube amplifiers to electronic synthesis to effects boxes to high-fidelity playback. (Jimmy Page, for the record, prefers AAD to DDD.) As digital continues to improve its simulation of analog, defenders of the old order may come to seem rather quaint, like oldsters who write letters in longhand. Despite the real and evident differences in sound quality, though, I suspect there is a non-technical component to the debate, one not merely of taste but of soul. The warmth and body that some analog proponents describe is, in essence, the industrial trace of an ancient way of going with the flow.

Rock and roll owes its life to the power of the commodity fetish. All recorded music casts its consumer spells, of
course, but rock is the first musical genre that was
born
as a commodity. Albin Zak notes that rock and roll was unlike any previous genre in that it was “first and foremost a recorded music.”
⁸
Its unprecedented commercial success lay less in live performances than in radio and the new and exploding market for 45-rpm singles, which were cheap and accessible enough to make it into the hands of teenagers. Rock and roll became the devil’s music not simply because it transmitted miscegenated beats to white youth, sparking rebel moves and wayward pleasures; rock and roll also made a spiritual pact with the commodity form, with
matter for sale
. For young consumers, the 45 became a personal charm with erotic and energetic powers over body and soul, its lively spin a distant echo of the grind in Elvis’s hips.

As the rock and roll of the 1950s metamorphosed into the rock of the 1960s, records deepened their hold on the listening psyche. By the end of the decade, technical developments like hi-fi, stereo, multi-track recording, and photographic covers came to mirror the emerging counterculture’s multimedia exploration of drugs, sexuality, and spiritual exotica. Records became amulets of expanded consciousness, but a consciousness that was nonetheless profoundly embodied. The scruffy primitivism and whole-food ethnophilia of the counterculture represents a conscious embrace of natural life,
a spiritual materialism mirrored in the rituals of rock. Rock is
rock
, after all, an element of earth. Rock is—or at least has the potential to be—base, low, grungy, heavy, hard. Can you dig it? Rock is as low as the vibrations go—the philosopher’s stone without the philosophy.

And rock’s fetish supreme was the Album, which was as much a concept as a storage device. The Album transformed a collection of singles into a singular work, a holistic entity that was more than the sum of its parts, even as it diversified those parts through the innovations of the multi-track studio. The Album also represented rock’s deepening incarnation into matter, because it was only with the Album that the album jacket filled itself out as an aesthetic object all its own. Think of Peter Blake’s cover collage for
Sgt. Pepper’s
, arguably the first fully realized Album, or the Stones’ 3D portrait on
Their Satanic Majesties Request
. Strange and beautiful album sleeves appear across genres and eras of music, of course, but album art achieved its peak of sculptural self-consciousness with the late 1960s and early 1970s rock LP—not coincidentally, the moment of rock’s greatest self-regard. By 1972, a young P. J. O’Rourke was already bitching about the trend in
Crawdaddy
, mocking the spectacle of zippers, trapezoids, and “an endlessly unfolding nearly full-scale Dave Mason with a record … the color of marbleized vomit.”
⁹

Led Zeppelin, with their unrivaled command over the pop mythos of rock music, began the decade with one of these cornball gimmicks. The front cover of
Led Zeppelin III
, which appeared in November 1970, was stuffed with a rotating paper wheel the size of the actual vinyl. When turned, the wheel revealed a swirling candy-cane morass of butterflies and band photos that passed through die-cut holes in the sleeve. The original idea had something to do with rotating seasonal planting guides popular with gardeners, but the designer, Zacron, followed his own muse. Page thought it sucked. But the guitarist managed to leave his mark nonetheless, causing the phrase “Do What Thou Wilt” to appear on the run-off-grooves of the original pressings of the album. “Do What Thou Wilt” is the first chunk of “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law,” the faintly ominous cornerstone of Aleister Crowley’s magick Law of Thelema.
¹⁰
Some copies of
III
are also marked with the inscription “So Mote Be It,” a ritual cry of approbation common to Freemasonry and modern Wicca. Both phrases, in their different ways, affirm the magical will and its power to craft reality with ritual utterance.

With its garish package and run-off spell,
Led Zeppelin III
marked the degree to which Zeppelin was, from the beginning, an
Album
band. Throughout the course of their career, Zeppelin released no singles in the UK
and only a few elsewhere. Not only did this force fans to purchase LPs as if they were 45s, but it gave the group a stage large enough to accommodate their sonic dramaturgy. You worked your way through their songs like you were opening the little foldout doorways on some raunchy Arthurian Advent calendar. The Album also allowed Zeppelin to thicken the fetishistic quality of the outer sleeve. Unhappy with the rushed cover for
Led Zeppelin III
, the band demanded total control over their next album jacket. Jimmy Page and Robert Plant came up with the design, as well as the radical idea of leaving both jacket and spine unmarked with the name of the band, an album title, or even a catalog number. Atlantic Records balked at what the company reasonably saw as commercial suicide, but Page held his ground, threatening to further hold up the album’s already delayed release by withholding the master tapes. In other words, he did what he wilt (or wouldt, or whatever). Atlantic caved, and the album appeared as a textless slab in November 1971. In its various media forms, the record would go on to become one of only a handful of recordings certified Diamond, selling well over twenty million copies.