In the Houses of the Holy: Led Zeppelin and the Power of Rock Music (review)

In the annals of rock music, the British quartet Led Zeppelin remains both an iconic presence and a crucial dividing point. Ruling over the rock landscape for the initial two-thirds of the 1970s, the band, with its alternately thunderous and gentle musical approach, and its well-documented Dionysian excesses committed while on tour, eventually became one of the favourite targets of the punk-rock movement late in the decade, and soon found itself portrayed by brash upstarts such as The Clash and The Sex Pistols as the ultimate symbol of all that had gone wrong with rock and roll in the years since Elvis first shook his pelvis.

Here in the new millennium, Led Zeppelin, its champions, and its detractors are still going strong: in the short space of time since Susan Fast's In the Houses of the Holy was published, Zeppelin has returned to top the charts with the CD and DVD release of How the West Was Won, which documents searing live performances from 1972; meanwhile, post-Zeppelin 'grunge' rocker Courtney Love has recently released the satirical 'Zeplin Song,' which excoriates a male companion for constantly playing the same Zeppelin hit on his guitar. No doubt none of this attention comes as a surprise to musicologist and music criticism professor Susan Fast, who places herself and her ecstatic (initial and continuing) response to Zeppelin at the centre of her work: 'Listening to the strength and energy of [Led Zeppelin's] "Immigrant Song" was an empowering experience,' Fast writes. 'I had no idea what the lyrics were, but that riff ... its timbre so insistent and confident ... and [singer Robert] Plant's majestic if incomprehensible proclamations, made that song where I wanted to live.'

It is Fast's obvious love and enthusiasm for her subject matter that makes In the Houses of the Holy ultimately cohere, despite her at times unwieldy multidisciplinary critical approach, which combines journalism, musicology (including musical notation), critical theory, and even (in a democratic postmodern gesture) solicited fan responses. Of 'Stairway to Heaven,' the band's quintessential hit (and likely target of the aforementioned Courtney Love satire), Fast notes that the song's movement from its folksy acoustic (rooted in seventeenth-century Tudor music) intro to its crashing electric climax comprises 'a journey ... from the rural/folk/archaic to whatever we might equate with electric instruments - certainly something more contemporary, technological, and ... urban.' The song's enduring appeal to a vast audience is rooted, she contends, in its creation of a living, contemporary mythology 'of connectedness to other people, to history, and to the supernatural world,' thus providing a psychic balm for those 'who feel alienated in their daily lives.'

Especially valuable here is Fast's critique (aided and abetted by the aforementioned fans) of Zeppelin's oftentimes uppity and elitist academic critics, those who seek to define the band's music as mere 'cock rock,' and its female fans as naïve, innocent dupes of this rampaging group of metallic marauders. Employing Bakhtin's theory of the carnivalesque, Fast instead portrays the band's characteristic excesses, both musical and performative, as a challenge to defined cultural boundaries and to societal decorum. Inverting the feminist notion of the harsh 'male gaze' by which women are turned into objects of desire, Fast repositions singer Plant and guitarist Jimmy Page as, 'in one sense ... passive objects of the female gaze, a controlling gaze that is partly responsible for the man acting as he does.' Humorously, the author further contends that, 'however many reasons there may have been for Plant to wear tight pants, it must be acknowledged that one was to attract women ... this is so obvious to my nonacademic women friends that they are incredulous when I tell them that the point still needs to be made in academic writing.'

Indeed, for all of the highfalutin' theorizing, pro or con, that surrounds a band as iconic as Led Zeppelin, perhaps one female fan of the band...