“Hysterical”: The genre Robert Plant said ruined rock singing
The most important thing that any artist can do is evolve their sound. No one wants to spend their time listening to their favourite artists and watching them grow tired in one genre, and some of the most engaging artists of all time are normally the ones that go through different periods throughout the course of their career. And while none of us had the pleasure of seeing what a version of Led Zeppelin would have sounded like going into the 1980s, Robert Plant knew that he was never going to be the same singer he was when he started.
But before Zeppelin was tragically ended when John Bonham passed away, Plant was already working on switching up his style a little bit more. Presence had been one of their more grandiose guitar records, but In Through the Out Door was when all the keyboards were brought in behind the scenes, which made for a record that sounded much lighter than anything they had done before.
As the rest of the band started to move on, though, Plant knew that he couldn’t get dragged back into the same Zeppelin persona forever. He had been considered a ‘Golden God’ back in the day, but the idea of playing the role of that frontman up into his 50s would have been silly, so everything from Now and Zen to Raising Sand with Allison Krauss was a way for him to pivot styles a little bit more.
He was never going to leave Zeppelin behind, but it would be in a far more muted sense later in his career. There were occasional moments when he would get together with Jimmy Page for a record or perform tracks like ‘Gallows Pole’ and ‘The Battle of Evermore’ with Krauss, but it turned out that the world didn’t have to wait much longer for some of the Zeppelin clones to start popping up in the heavy metal world.
Despite Plant never being that big a fan of the genre, every heavy metal singer that came after him was doomed to follow in his footsteps. There was no doubt that his voice sounded powerful on Zeppelin’s debut record, and when looking at everyone from Judas Priest to Iron Maiden to every single hair metal act that came out of LA, their goal was to match what Plant was doing naturally, to the point where they almost sounded like they were on helium half the time.
“The whole deal about hard rock singing became heavy metal, and the whole deal of masculinity was you’re not really a hard rock singer unless you can hit those notes. I think that whole concept is hysterical.”
Robert Plant
Imitation might be the sincerest form of flattery, but Plant was happy not to grow up to be that kind of singer for the rest of his days, saying, “I don’t want to be heard as a guy who sings notes that will only attract dogs and strange wild animals. The whole deal about hard rock singing became heavy metal, and the whole deal of masculinity was you’re not really a hard rock singer unless you can hit those notes. I think that whole concept is hysterical and quite obsolete now.”
While Plant may be correct that genres like hair metal have fallen by the wayside with the advent of genres like grunge, that didn’t mean hard rock singing didn’t have room to change as well. In fact, some of the detriments of modern-day rock music has been people going too far the other way, usually trading in those piercing high notes for a thick, brooding baritone that’s meant to only attract alpha males that worship people like Ivan Moody, Scott Stapp and Chad Kroeger as their Holy Trinity of rock singers.
So despite Plant having a problem with the high-register approach to singing, it’s far from the main issue regarding what hard rock vocals should be about. Some folks might try to overdo it to this day, but since the lower register singers have their own problems, the key to great rock singing is a balance of the two sides rather than dominating one end of the vocal spectrum.
