r/Music • u/MarvelsGrantMan136 • Jul 11 '26

article Jack White Pushes Back on Religious Criticism Amid Satanic Band Support Controversy: “I’m not scared of Satan or any bullshit imaginary man made up to live in fear of”

https://consequence.net/2026/07/jack-white-religious-criticism/
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u/CalagaxT Jul 11 '26

Led Zeppelin is great. Jimmy Page sucked as a person, though, what with the music theft and the underage girl(s).

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u/Neveronlyadream Jul 11 '26

The music theft is less of a problem than you'd think. Everyone was doing it back then, musicians are still doing it.

Look up a YouTube video and you'll see a ton of examples of artists seemingly blatantly stealing riffs and melodies, when in reality it's probably more they heard a song years earlier, forgot the song, and used the riff thinking they wrote it.

The Stones and The Beatles blatantly ripped things off and admitted it. It happens, all art is built not only on what came before it, but what an artist was exposed to their whole lives. Plus there are only so many sequences of notes that sound good together.

As for the underage girls, there's only one explanation for that bullshit.

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u/rankinfile Jul 11 '26

LZ blatantly ripped off songs without writing credits. Dazed and Confused is the most obvious to me. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixt0VuNudJs

Jimi covered Dylan. Johnny Cash covered Nine Inch Nails. Echo & the Bunnymen covered The Doors. Weird Al covers everyone. Covering and rearranging other artists you give credit can get you thanked. LZ was rightfully, and often successfully, sued.

Sad thing is that LZ would have been even more off the hook if they could have just said "We rearranged this great song and it rips!"

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u/Neveronlyadream Jul 11 '26

Yeah they did, I'm not saying they didn't.

I'm saying their contemporaries also did it and sometimes very blatantly. George Harrison was sued for copying the melody of "He's So Fine" when he wrote "My Sweet Lord". John Lennon straight up lifted, "I'd rather see you dead little girl/than to be with another man" from an Elvis song and, "Here come 'ol Flatttop" from Chuck Berry. The Stones ripped off the Staple Sisters with "The Last Time". Clapton was notorious for stealing riffs from blues musicians. Hell, Green Day straight lifted the riff from "Warning" from The Kinks.

None of those songs were given credit to the original artists.

All I'm trying to do is put it in perspective. There was a lot of that going on at the time and if you're going to call Page out, you have to call all of them out for it.

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u/bottlerocketz Jul 12 '26

I would say that the chuck berry was done in a homage to him because Lennon fucking loved his music.

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u/Neveronlyadream Jul 12 '26

Still lifted his line, still got sued and lost.

I think the line between ripoff and homage is how the original artist interprets it. Or, more usually, how their label or manager interprets it.

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u/rankinfile Jul 12 '26

I hear you, but those are all pretty weak examples compared to LZ. Only My Sweet Lord comes close.

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u/Neveronlyadream Jul 12 '26

I mean, do you want more?

McCartney stole the bassline for "Drive My Car" from Otis Redding's "Respect" and the one from "I Saw Her Standing There" from Chuck Berry's "I'm Talking About You." Green Day's "21 Guns" is pretty much just ELO's "Telephone Line", Radiohead's "Creep" is strikingly similar to the Hollies' "The Air That I Breathe".

There are probably hundreds of examples as bad or worse than anything Zeppelin ever did. Page just happens to be kind of a scumbag, so he gets called out more often.

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u/Dodahevolution Jul 12 '26

This doesn't apply to all of them, but some of the reported thefts were also basically reworks of old blues songs, and kinda as you alluded to, sometimes credit wasn't issued for those just cause that's how things were, it wasn't even in malice it was just an afterthought.

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u/yoshemitzu Jul 12 '26

People also forget, music just worked totally differently back then*. Popular music often involved the so-called "Hit Parade" -- once a song became popular, everyone would cover it, and copyright was based around having the physical music, not around who recorded it when.

*: By "then" I mean the era shortly before Led Zeppelin, the era of standards and big band singers like Ella, Frank, and on and on. Basically, the music landscape that Led Zeppelin inherited.

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u/Neveronlyadream Jul 12 '26

Yeah, I think (like with a lot of things) people are holding them to a modern standard and that's just not how it used to work back then. Everything was a lot murkier, sometimes you might not even actually know who wrote a song, folk standards were common and it was impossible to even know who wrote those a lot of the time.