Which 1970s band has influenced contemporary music the most?
We talk about music as if the things we say are definitive. They’re not. The best guitarist, the most influential band, the most influential decade, nothing in music is black and white. This isn’t a bad thing; the beauty lies in the technicolour; the fact that no question has a definitive answer keeps conflict alive, wounds raw, and emotions vivid. The Beatles, Black Sabbath, Nina Simone, The Cure, Elvis, Hole, and Arctic Monkeys are all a part of the wonderful tapestry of modern music, and depending on who you’re speaking to, each artist is as important as the last.
That being said, despite the lack of a specific decade that contributed the most to music and no set answer for which band from that decade were most influential, it doesn’t mean we can’t speculate. The 1970s is arguably one of the most difficult genres to pair with an influential band; as genres spread out rapidly, they were divided into sub-genres and sub-genres of sub-genres, to the point each strand of music had its own pivotal artist responsible for its formation.
People weren’t just listening to rock music; instead, they were listening to heavy metal, glam rock, psychedelic rock, folk rock, and soft rock. Alongside that, you had the emergence of disco, electronic music, and pop. There is simply too much to keep track of. No one band represented the entire decade’s sound; however, one band can be credited with representing the entire decade’s mindset.
“Light and shade”: that’s how Jimmy Page described the sound that he wanted Led Zeppelin to embody, “Lots of light and shade in the music.” While the 1960s gave rise to popular recording techniques and established the godfathers of multiple genres of music, Jimmy Page was working with these godfathers and embracing the different recording techniques as a session guitarist, expanding his knowledge on how to play various styles of music and how to record it in the most exciting way.
After spending so much time on the frontlines of music, when it came to starting his own band, he was keen on not just sticking to one genre of music but instead decided to embrace lots of different ones. “I wanted Zeppelin to be a marriage,” he said, “Of blues, hard rock and acoustic music topped with heavy choruses – a combination that had never been done before.”
Page was successful in achieving this sound. Working with three of the finest musical minds in the world, John Bonham, John Paul Jones and Robert Plant, he had no trouble merging these genres and establishing a sound that was experimental, exciting and fragile. “I can remember it was hot, and it sounded good – very exciting and very challenging,” said Robert Plant, discussing the first time Led Zeppelin played together, “I could feel that something was happening to myself and to everyone else in the room. It felt like we’d found something that we had to be very careful with because we might lose it.”
This willingness to embrace various genres of music acted as the framework for many other bands. Granted, many tried to copy Zeppelin; however, others saw the merging of genres as the exciting thing rather than the sound itself. The doors were blown off the hinges, and people could play complex chord structures with three-chord guitar effects, put big choruses in soft rock, and play around with different styles and sounds until they found something that suited them.
So much happened to music in the ‘70s that it’s impossible to pick one band that championed all these changing styles. However, Led Zeppelin’s willingness not to be bound by the lines drawn between genres and instead embrace multiple playing techniques captures the mindset of many musicians from that period. It still resonates today, as beyond the world of rock, genres from different parts of the world persistently overlap and give rise to exciting new music as a result.
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