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Thursday, November 18th, 2021
| Time | Event |
| 9:00a | How Led Zeppelin Stole Their Way to Fame and Fortune
When Bob Dylan released his 2001 album Love and Theft, he lifted the title from a book of the same name by Eric Lott, who studied 19th century American popular music’s musical thefts and contemptuous impersonations. The ambivalence in the title was there, too: musicians of all colors routinely and lovingly stole from each other while developing the jazz and blues traditions that grew into rock and roll. When British invasion bands introduced their version of the blues, it only seemed natural that they would continue the tradition, picking up riffs, licks, and lyrics where they found them, and getting a little slippery about the origins of songs. This was, after all, the music’s history. In truth, most UK blues rockers who picked up other people’s songs changed them completely or credited their authors when it came time to make records. This may not have been tradition but it was ethical business practice. Fans of Led Zeppelin, on the other hand, now listen to their music with asterisks next to many of their hits — footnotes summarizing court cases, misattributions, and downright thefts from which they profited. In many cases, the band would only admit to stealing under duress. At other times, they freely confessed in interviews to taking songs, tweaking them a bit, and giving themselves sole credit for composing and/or arranging. A list of ten “rip offs” in a Rolling Stone piece on Led Zeppelin’s penchant for theft is hardly exhaustive. It does not include “Stairway to Heaven,” for which the band was recently sued for lifting a melody from Spirit’s “Taurus.” (An internet user saved the band’s case by finding that both songs used an earlier melody from the 1600s.)
During those recent court proceedings, the prosecution quoted from a 1993 interview Jimmy Page gave Guitar World:
The blame shifting was “not quite fair to Plant,” the court found, “as Page repeatedly took entire musical compositions without attribution.” He stood accused of doing so, for example, in “The Lemon Song,” lifted from Howlin’ Wolf’s “Killing Floor.” After a lawsuit, the song is now co-credited to Chester Burnett (Howlin’ Wolf’s real name). For his part, Plant readily blamed Page when given the chance. In his book Led Zeppelin IV, Barney Hoskyns quotes the singer’s thoughts on the “Whole Lotta Love” controversy:
Led Zeppelin’s musical thievery does not make them less talented or ingenious as musicians. They took others’ material, some of it wholesale, but no one can claim they didn’t make it their own, melding American blues and British folk into a truly strange brew. The Polyphonic video above on their use of others’ music begins with a quote from “poet and famous anti-semite” T.S. Eliot, expressing a sentiment also attributed to Picasso, Faulkner, and Stravinsky:
As far as copyright goes, Zeppelin didn’t always cross legal lines. But as Jacqui McShee said when Page reworked a composition by her Pentangle bandmate, Bert Jansch, “It’s a very rude thing to do. Pinch somebody else’s thing and credit it to yourself.” Maybe so. Still, nobody ever won any awards for politeness in rock and roll, most especially the band that helped invent the sound of heavy metal. See a scoreboard showing the number of originals, credited covers and uncredited thefts on the band’s first four albums here. Related Content: Zeppelin Took My Blues Away: An Illustrated History of Zeppelin’s “Copyright Indiscretions” When Led Zeppelin Reunited and Crashed and Burned at Live Aid (1985) Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness How Led Zeppelin Stole Their Way to Fame and Fortune is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
| 12:00p | Carl Sagan Warns Congress about Climate Change (1985)
Without climate change, we couldn’t inhabit the Earth as we do today. The greenhouse effect, by which gases in a planet’s atmosphere increase the heat of that planet’s surface, “makes life on Earth possible.” So says Carl Sagan in the video above. He adds that without it, the temperature would be about 30 degrees centigrade cooler: “That’s well below the freezing point of water everywhere on the planet. The oceans would be solid.” A little of the climate change induced by the greenhouse effect, then, is a good thing, but “here we are pouring enormous quantities of CO2 and these other gases into the atmosphere every year, with hardly any concern about its long-term and global consequences.” It’s fair to say that the level of concern has increased since Sagan spoke these words in 1985, when “climate change” wasn’t yet a household term. But even then, his audience was Congress, and his fifteen-minute address, preserved by C-SPAN, remains a succinct and persuasive case for more research into the phenomenon as well as strategies and action to mitigate it. What audience would expect less from Sagan, who just five years earlier had hosted the hit PBS television series Cosmos, based on his book of the same name. Its broadcast made contagious his enthusiasm for scientific inquiry in general and the nature of the planets in particular. Who could forget, for example, his introduction to the “thoroughly nasty place” that is Venus, research into whose atmosphere Sagan had conducted in the early 1960s? Venus is “the nearest planet — a planet of about the same mass, radius, density, as the Earth,” Sagan tells Congress, but it has a “surface temperature about 470 degrees centigrade, 900 Fahrenheit.” The reason? “A massive greenhouse effect in which carbon dioxide plays the major role.” As for our planet, estimates then held that, without changes in the rates of fossil fuel-burning and “infrared-absorbing” gases released into the atmosphere, there will be “a several-centigrade-degree temperature increase” on average “by the middle to the end of the next century.” Given the potential effects of such a rise, “if we don’t do the right thing now, there are very serious problems that our children and grandchildren will have to face.” It’s impossible to know how many listeners these words convinced at the time, though they certainly seem to have stuck with a young senator in the room by the name of Al Gore. Related Content: A Century of Global Warming Visualized in a 35 Second Video Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. Carl Sagan Warns Congress about Climate Change (1985) is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
| 3:00p | Bach on a Möbius Strip: Marcus du Sautoy Visualizes How Bach Used Math to Compose His Music
“A mathematician’s favorite composer? Top of the list probably comes Bach.” Thus speaks a reliable source on the matter: Oxford mathematician Marcus du Sautoy in the Numberphile video above. “Bach uses a lot of mathematical tricks as a way of generating music, so his music is highly complex,” but at its heart is “the use of mathematics as a kind of shortcut to generate extraordinarily complex music.” As a first example du Sautoy takes up the “Musical Offering,” and in particular its “crab canon,” the genius of which has previously been featured here on Open Culture. Written out, Bach’s crab canon “looks like just one line of music.” But “what’s curious is that when you get to the end of the music, there’s the little symbol you usually begin a piece of music with.” This means that Bach wants the player of the piece to “play this forwards and backwards; he’s asking you to start at the end and play it backwards at the same time.” His composition thus becomes a two-voice piece made out of just one line of music going in both directions. It’s the underlying mathematics that make this, when played, more than just a trick but “something beautifully harmonic and complex.” To understand the crab canon or Bach’s other mathematically shaped pieces, it helps to visualize them in unconventional ways such as on a twisting Möbius strip, whose ends connect directly to one another. “You can make a Möbius strip out of any piece of music,” says du Sautoy as he does so in the video. “The stunning thing is that when you then look at this piece of music” — that is the fifth canon from Bach’s Goldberg Variations — “the notes that are on one side are exactly the same notes as if this thing were see-through.” (Naturally, he’s also prepared a see-through Bach Möbius strip for his viewing audience.) In 2017 du Sautoy gave an Oxford Mathematics Public Lecture on “the Sound of Symmetry and the Symmetry of Sound.” In it he discusses symmetry as present in not just the Goldberg Variations but the twelve-tone rows composed in the 20th century by Arnold Schoenberg and even the very sound waves made by musical instruments themselves. Just this year, he collaborated with the Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra to deliver “Music & Maths: Baroque & Beyond,” a presentation that draws mathematical connections between the music, art, architecture, and science going on in the 17th and 18th centuries. Bach has been dead for more than a quarter of a millennium, but the connections embodied in his music still hold revelations for listeners willing to hear them — or see them. Related Content: The Genius of J.S. Bach’s “Crab Canon” Visualized on a Möbius Strip Visualizing Bach: Alexander Chen’s Impossible Harp How a Bach Canon Works. Brilliant The Math Behind Beethoven’s Music Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. Bach on a Möbius Strip: Marcus du Sautoy Visualizes How Bach Used Math to Compose His Music is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
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