Kurt Cobain’s issue with Led Zeppelin: “A lot of it had to do with sexism”
Nirvana singer Kurt Cobain was a breath of fresh air when his band unexpectedly became one of the biggest acts in the world. As a frontman, he was an antidote to bands like Guns N’ Roses and Aerosmith, who dominated the rock landscape during the previous decade, not just from a traditional musical perspective.
Refreshingly, Cobain was a different breed of singer and came across as himself rather than attempting to become a rock ‘n’ roll stereotype. He refused to revert to cliches and showed it was possible to be adored by the masses without adopting an offensive persona.
While he tackled uncomfortable subjects within his music or during interviews and was unafraid to address topics that his peers would run a mile away from, Cobain fought fearlessly against sexism and misogyny.
In 2024, this stance is thankfully the norm, and even most of those who once displayed misogynistic behaviour in their music would now likely be repulsed by their previous actions.
Astonishingly, by today’s standards, Cobain stood out like a sore thumb due to his progressive attitude when Nirvana emerged amid a pool of misogyny in the rock landscape.
When Nirvana rose to prominence, misogyny and rock was a long-existing marriage that dated back to acts like Led Zeppelin in the 1960s. While Cobain appreciated their work musically, and their records influenced him as a youngster, their troublesome lyrics proved a stumbling block he couldn’t get past.
While they existed in different eras, even if Led Zeppelin were around during the same time as Nirvana, it’s difficult to foresee them taking on the same challenging array of subjects in their work. However, the grunge trio made a particular effort to stand for social justice because they genuinely believed in the importance of the cause rather than for cynical public relations purposes.
An example of Cobain’s forward-thinking approach to music was the track ‘Rape Me’, which was about as heavy-hitting as a song can get lyrically. In light of the #MeToo movement, an open discourse surrounding sexual assault and rape has become prevalent rather than being an unspoken taboo, but that wasn’t the case in 1993.
Detailing the meaning behind the track, Cobain told SPIN: “It’s like she’s saying, ‘Rape me, go ahead, rape me, beat me. You’ll never kill me. I’ll survive this and I’m gonna fucking rape you one of these days and you won’t even know it.'”
The matter also arose on the track ‘Polly’ from Nevermind. In a 1993 interview, Cobain provided an insight into why he felt it was vital to use his platform to speak out against injustice and explained how it stemmed back to his days in high school. He said: “I couldn’t find any friends (at school), male friends that I felt compatible with, I ended up hanging out with the girls a lot. I just always felt that they weren’t treated with respect. Especially because women are totally oppressed.”
From seeing the injustice that women suffer through the prism of his friends, Cobain felt compelled to call out misogyny whenever he witnessed it in action. Therefore, it is no shock that Cobain couldn’t bring himself to ignore the outdated misogynistic messages that were prevalent in Led Zeppelin’s work. Even though he, alongside Dave Grohl, was a fan of the music that Robert Plant, John Bonham, Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones created — some of the lyrics utterly repulsed him.
“Although I listened to Aerosmith and Led Zeppelin, and I really did enjoy some of the melodies they’d written, it took me so many years to realise that a lot of it had to do with sexism,” Cobain remarked to Rolling Stone in 1992. “The way that they just wrote about their dicks and having sex. I was just starting to understand what really was pissing me off so much those last couple years of high school.”
However, as Cobain was exposed to a wider variety of music as he progressed, punk taught him a valuable lesson that made the singer re-appraise artists like Led Zeppelin.
“And then punk rock was exposed and then it all came together,” Cobain continued. “It just fit together like a puzzle. It expressed the way I felt socially and politically. Just everything. You know. It was the anger that I felt. The alienation.”
These remarks were supported by former Nirvana co-manager Danny Goldberg in 2019 when speaking about the icon with Forbes. “First of all, I agreed with him about that. Secondly, I think he was torn: I think he liked the music. He liked Led Zeppelin’s music—and AC/DC,” Goldberg remarked.
Highlighting Cobain’s precise problem with Led Zeppelin, Goldberg added: “But the lyrics were not something that he felt comfortable with, for exactly the reason that you said. And I think I quote him saying something like that in the book, and I wanted to do it because it’s central to who he was as artist.”
As Goldberg rightly noted, these values were central to Cobain’s identity as an artist and a person. Through his relentless honesty, which spread to everything he did, Cobain proved he could be a rock icon without jeopardising his moral compass.
Rock music changed following the birth of Nirvana, and a whole generation was inspired to be progressive due to his actions during the 1990s. Now, if a band exhibits similar sexist lyrics that groups like Led Zeppelin had in their arsenal, they would be called out from the off. Furthermore, even Plant has admitted to reflecting upon many of his lyrics with regret as he matured and moved with the modern world.
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