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 former national correspondent for The Atlantic. He is the author of The Beautiful Struggle, Between the World and Me, We Were Eight Years in Power, and The Water Dancer.