“Manufactured”: Why disregarding Led Zeppelin as imitators is redundan according to Kurt Cobain

Passion can be our undoing, sometimes. Is there anything more eye-roll worthy than when someone calls your favourite artist overrated? Or worse, unoriginal? “Popularity doesn’t mean they’re good,” someone might say, priming the stage for countless reasons about why that may or may not be the case. It’s everywhere: there’s probably someone within a 50-foot radius who thinks The Beatles are overhyped. But Led Zeppelin? Perhaps all misconceptions about “originality” actually started there.

In actual fact, maybe it’s the concept of originality in these debates that works out the most eye-roll worthy. It’s fake. Not real. Something people turn to when trying to disregard an entire musical catalogue for reasons they’re not even sure of, other than the fact that it rubs them up the wrong way. Granted, there are countless musicians who imitate too much without leaving much room for their own character and personalities, but that’s a different point.

The point here is that branding someone unoriginal is tossed around like it’s a real marker of superiority. As if many other artists aren’t entirely guilty of doing the same thing. It’s like when Billie Eilish reflected during one of Vanity Fair‘s Same Interview, One Year Apart episodes, watching herself talk about the importance of trying to do something no one else had done before, or write something no one else has heard; it’s impossible, she realised, and you only slow yourself down believing that it’s not.

But when it comes to Led Zeppelin, this is usually the go-to: Keith Richards called them “manufactured” and a poor “white man’s version” of rock ‘n’ roll with a lead vocal that sounds “too acrobatic”. Eric Clapton accused them of stealing Cream’s legacy. Jack Bruce dismissed them as “crap” at the start of a tirade about why he thinks so, while Ginger Baker said John Bonham couldn’t “swing a sack of shit”. Even Bob Dylan seemed to turn his nose up at their general proximity.

The common denominator here seems to come from the same pool, the one where musicians find themselves protective, embittered, even, leaning into their sourness as a means to disregard by any means possible, frustrated with how much Zeppelin seemed to step on their toes, “taking” legacies or earning comparisons where others, quite frankly, felt it was completely offensive. But when you look at the actual criticisms, there isn’t much there, it seems.

There’s no reasons why Led Zeppelin were “crap”, other than perhaps Richards’ suggestion that they didn’t do anything other than regurgitate old “white” rock. Even then, it’s like: what does he mean by that? Isn’t that territory a little complicated, considering how the Stones placed so much focus on reinterpreting American blues? And as for the members of Cream, it looks like they wanted to lash out by any means, only because they felt threatened, not anything to do with the actual music, either.

And if it’s originality they’re after, didn’t they do the same thing? Doesn’t everybody look at what came before and put their own spin on it, in one way or another? The only scathing review that might actually hold some weight was Kurt Cobain’s, when he offered an alternative view about whether Led Zeppelin were an appropriate band to idolise, considering how heavily they often leaned into “sexist” vernacular in their lyrics. He enjoyed their melodies, but he couldn’t sidestep how they “just wrote about their dicks and having sex”.

Perhaps if the other criticisms had been a little more like that, the conversations would be more welcome. But, as it stands, there’s little to go on that made them feel Led Zeppelin were actually worthy of the hot disregard, other than the fact that they operated in the same circles and achieved similar levels of popularity by doing the exact same thing: playing on old tropes to make fresh ones.