DEFER YOUR ENTHUSIASM (12)

By: Rani Som
May 13, 2025

One in a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, analyzing and celebrating our favorite… late-breaking obsessions, avoided discoveries, and devotions delayed! Series edited by Adam McGovern.

Illustration by the author. Click for larger version.

LED ZEP

As a child of the ’80s, I was heavily into music that I felt was vital and very much of the time: post-punk, third-wave NYC ska, goth. I had very little time for “dinosaur” bands of the ’70s, many of whom made up the context against which punk exploded. Even older kids in my high school seemed oblivious to bands like Pink Floyd, Genesis, and Yes — so while images of men with long hair and bell bottoms were hazily on my visual radar, their music remained a distinct unknown.

Things changed when I went off to college, perhaps in some part owing to being introduced to a variety of drugs, but also meeting kids outside of my high school bubble — hippies, deadheads, headbangers — all of whom seemed exotic in an intriguingly American way to this little Indian-American goth girl. It was at this point that I heard Physical Graffiti by Led Zeppelin for the first time (all four sides!) and had to revise my initial antipathy somewhat. Here was a myriad of musical registers on offer: the unfathomably heavy stomp of “Custard Pie,” the delicate folk textures of “Bron-Yr-Aur,” the expansive, epic scope of “Kashmir.” I thought these Jurassic bands were supposed to be boring! Led Zeppelin IV soon followed. Now of course I had heard “Stairway to Heaven” as a child — who could avoid it — but I’d never really paid much attention to the rest of the band’s output. But here, alongside the urgent, bordering-on-punk velocity of “Rock and Roll” and the electrified blues of “Black Dog” was the song that maybe turned my head: “The Battle of Evermore,” its gentle acoustic tapestry and Middle Earth lyrics, but most poignantly, the exquisite backing vocals of one Sandy Denny, who I grew to love even more than Zep. (The 1994 live version by Page & Plant features Najma Akhtar, an Anglo-Indian chanteuse, singing Denny’s part — a great delight for a child of Indian descent.)

And while Zep’s undeniable stage swagger and bravado emitted distinctly masculine vibes (they didn’t call it Cock Rock for nothing), it was their femme side that ultimately drew me in: Plant’s golden, flowing locks and blouse-like tops, the seriousness with which they were able to immerse themselves in graceful melodies and folklore. For a not-yet-trans-woman, there was something to the confidence in the way Page and Plant prowled the stage, shirts wide open, that spoke to me not of machismo but of a kind of aspirational femme strut, a preening, flirty belief in your own sexiness that I could only dream of. And while the ’70s was by no means idyllic for a lot of people, I miss a time when boys looked like girls and could be just as pretty, dammit. While they did exemplify some of the worst excesses of the time, I still hold out for Zep as proto-femmes — leave a girl to her illusions, please — sisters who will ever wander with me down the hedgerows, beside the Angels of Avalon.

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DEFER YOUR ENTHUSIASM (12)

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