After Bjork and, maybe, Radiohead, Led Zepplin was the next sector of "white music" I fell in love with. I have this image of myself circa 2002, as the inverse of some white dude bumbling around his black friends exclaiming his love for "this Rakim-guy."
Oh well, sorry I missed out. And I'm mostly sorry because I would have loved to play "The Battle For Evermore" during one of my D&D sections with my brother Malik. Instead, we just played a ton of Public Enemy. Talk about dissonance. And yet it was my love for hip-hop that really took me to Zepplin. Hip-hop instills I love for drums, and so it was easy to love John Bonham driving the percussion on "When The Levees Break" like a great truck through a hail-storm.
What a beautifully, relentless track. This is a double shot.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates is a national correspondent for The Atlantic, where he writes about culture, politics, and social issues. He is the author of The Beautiful Struggle, Between the World and Me, and We Were Eight Years in Power.