ishakhemkablog

In both Lou Reed’s and Led Zeppelin’s lyrics, ideas surrounding boundaries, fantasy and location are pondered, however, where Zeppelin’s Robert Plant portrays the desire to idealise the world around us through Orientalist exoticisation and myth ,Reed grounds lyrics and literature in the stark, gritty reality of urban life revealing the futility of the ‘American Dream’.

In Led Zeppelin’s song ‘Kashmir’(1975) the speaker describes the sensual allure of an extensive, sandy Eastern terrain only to reveal that this romantic depiction purely exists to nurture and house the speaker’s scattered mental state. The speaker presents an almost Martian land where his “eyes fill(ed) with sand” and the “sun beat down upon my face with stars to fill my dream” using synaesthetic, sensory language -heat, grit, light- to feed into the listener’s preconceptions of an Eastern fantasy land. However, apart from this sparse, elemental imagery of sun, sand and dust, this terrain is completely devoid of anything substantial, practical or even named. Instead, the land’s purpose is entirely centred around the speaker’s desires and feeds into the literary critic Edward Said’s idea of “imaginative geography”: where a space exists to reflect the western traveller’s inner life rather than to represent a real place with its own culture and history. This idea that the location is at the western speaker’s mercy is compounded by the metaphor ‘all that I see turns to Brown’ where ‘turns’ suggests that the transformation isn’t due to the landscape but the speaker’s own impositions, collapsing an entire terrain to a single, undifferentiated colour. “All” of the land being flattened into the colour Brown suggests that the sensory impression is what is valued most in the lyrics, it isn’t the land itself that matters but the way it impacts the speaker. ‘Kashmir’ functions as a fantasy land for Plant’s speaker where he has complete autonomy over the land and elements surrounding him whilst also functioning as an escape from the reality of the world abounding him and his position in it.

Similarly, in Led Zeppelin’s song “Achilles Last Stand”(1976)  the speaker’s desires and perception override the land’s reality. Arguably, the lyrics of this song present an even more extreme divide between reality and pretend than ‘Kashmir’. Instead of naming any real destination that the band visited on their 1973 Moroccan Road trip(that the song was supposedly inspired by),  “Achilles Last Stand” puts mythology and classicism at the centre of its meaning. In a similar way to ‘Kashmir’, the speaker in the song talks about travelling to a distant land with similarly ambiguous and ambitious description, “into the sun, the south, the north”  and presents overt idealisation of this place. The romantic desire to “sail away to Sandy lands and other days’ is similar to Kashmir in the way that the location and journeying as a whole serves as an escape to the speaker. The temporal link to the place bringing him “to other days” goes even further in presenting the power of the terrain or rather the speaker’s use of the terrain. This fantasy occurring in not only a difference place but transporting him to a different time suggests that his fantasy is completely untethered from reality and the present.

In ‘Achilles Last Stand’ the speaker offers a reason for the purposeful disengagement from the world around him (that occurs in both songs) as he argues that the idealised elsewhere is explicitly built on the rejection of real world commitment and obligation. The metaphor “the shackles of commitment fell in pieces on the ground”  depicts the constraints of modern day life, therefore suggesting that dreaming of a disconnected, fictional world is the response to this. In fact, mythology in this song doesn’t just rescue the speaker from the forced perils of his life but has added allure in the way it elevates and rewards him. The power and permanence that reality could never bring is conveyed through the line “if one bell should ring in celebration for a king” which elevates the speaker to an almost monarchic status. This works in conjunction with the line ‘Oh Albion remains, sleeping now to rise again” which uses the old, poetic name for Britain (Albion) but embeds within it the legend of Arthur as the “once and future king”-the story that Arthur didn’t actually die but sleeps in Avalon until Britain needs him again. Through this image, the speaker’s fantasy is uplifted to something eternal,almost divine and self renewing. In the same way that Albion, like  Arthur is never truly gone but just pauses, this fantasy land for the speaker is overtly not a physical place but a state he can return to. This escalates even further into an image of Atlas, whose “mighty arms… hold the heavens from the earth”- a cosmic, transcendent authority that mundane life could never depict or grant. Whereas at the beginning of the song the speaker exclaims “Oh, the songs to sing when we at last return again’- suggesting that the speaker plans to venture back home- the speaker’s fixation on mythology at the end of the song depicts the futility of his return to reality and hints there may not be one at all.

In contrast to Robert Plant and Jimmy Page’s depiction of real places being usurped by their mythological significance- using location as a place of fantasy, escape, control- Lou Reed does the reverse by taking widely known stories and projecting them onto a specific, unglamorous city. In Reed’s song “Romeo had Juliette’ (1989) he takes Shakespeare’s lovers and warring families and places them in contemporary New York City. He exposes the flaws of the American Dream through his shift from something idealised and beautiful to the stark reality beneath it. The song opens with a description of Columbus: “Caught between the twisted stars, the plotted lines, the faulty map that brought Columbus to New York” depicting a real historic event which is almost myth/story like in the way it defines American history. However, Reed presents how this heroic, imperial narrative of the location is flawed, “Faulty” and dark in its reality. Whereas Zeppelin’s depictions of these faraway lands are quite vague and limited to the speaker’s interpretation of them (sensory, instrumental), Reed goes into deep descriptive detail of sartorial, religious, defining imagery such as “a leather vest”, a “diamond crucifix”. Where Zeppelin’s speaker remains anonymous, Reed’s lovers are given full, ethnically specific names- Romeo Rodriguez and Juliette bell- rooting Shakespeare’s Feud in real social categories, made explicit in ‘Little Joey Diaz”’s line “those Italians need a lesson to be taught”. Therefore, through racial challenge and description Reed presents the conflicted, multidimensional nature of New York.

The other imagery in the song similarly denies the listener of any comfort or escape through almost brashness or harshness: “The crack dealers were dreaming of an Uzi” and the aside that a “cop died in Harlem… I was dancing when his brains ran out on the street”. Reed also invokes “betwixt between the East and West” language which alludes to Victor Turner’s term for liminality. The refrain’s shift from “wanted” to “had” brings an almost closure to the song, unlike Zeppelin’s endless deferral. The fleeting ending of the song where “something flickered for a minute, then it vanished and was gone” is compounded by the grotesque deflation of the American dream where the speaker proclaims “I’ll take Manhattan in a garbage bag”. Antiquity’s worth is ultimately devalued at the end of the song where the trash bag has “Latin writ on it that says its hard to give a …. These days”, suggesting that these past ideals and archetypes don’t serve a proper purpose in the current American context. The final simile of “Manhattan sinking like a rock into the filthy Hudson, what a shock, they wrote a book about it, said it was just like Ancient Rome” reframes American exceptionalism as the empire’s decline.

Ultimately, both songwriters use myth to discuss the same anxiety about locations and borders but arrive at opposite outcomes.  Whilst in Led Zeppelin’s lyrics, mythology is something elevating, generative which depicts kings, ideals, utopias, values such as permanence this is done due to the fact that reality cannot compete, Reed’s use of mythology projects Shakespeare’s tragedy onto the violent, gritty New York, he denies his lovers any mythic escape. Where Zeppelin’s Albion sleeps only to be revived again, Reed’s America simply sinks.