Every generation of rock and roll doesn’t really have a say on who becomes the next big thing.
As much as people like to guide the next generation in the right direction, it’s their choice whether to ignore them entirely or move on to create something that’s completely different from what they did in the past. And Robert Plant definitely felt when his generation was slipping away.
But Plant’s entire motivation wasn’t always to please those that came before him. He knew that it would be the ultimate honour if one of his musical heroes complimented him on his superior approach to singing, but for the past few years, his bluesy tone was considered taboo in many circles, so it was only natural for him to go against the grain and start shouting at the top of his lungs whenever Jimmy Page had the right guitar riff in front of him.
Right as music started shifting in the 1980s, a lot of the sincerity of Zeppelin had been lost along the way. Many hair bands may have seen the group as gods, but ‘Percy’ knew that there was no point in them trying to channel every piece of their writing while looking like a buffoon in spandex and teased hair. So when the grunge movement happened, it should have been a blessing in disguise, right?
After all, Zeppelin were being treated like gods again, and Page and Plant even managed to get a record of their own in heavy rotation, but as the 2000s dawned, everyone was now knee-deep in nu-metal. The genre had already peaked in many respects with Limp Bizkit, but when Linkin Park began making their mark on the world, everything felt a little bit different.
As much as fans were tired of the rap-rock cliches that were happening around that time, Linkin Park were the first ones to seem genuinely sincere in years. The mix of rock, rap, and electronica music fit like a glove on the charts next to the likes of Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears, but when Plant looked at songs like ‘Crawling’, he could hardly consider it to be the true future of rock and roll.
At the time, Plant did have some kind things to say about people like The Flaming Lips, but Linkin Park would only confuse him over time, saying, “Well, people are going out and trying to invent without aiming straight at the weak insubstantial underbelly of the next rock generation. I mean, Linkin Park, is that really what rock became?” But even if their aim wasn’t towards the blues, the California band still had something going for them that no other group had: sincerity.
You could feel genuine pain behind Chester Bennington’s screams whenever he performed songs like ‘A Place For My Head’ and ‘Faint’, and even if the glitchy electronic sounds feel a little bit odd today, they have aged in the best way that a ‘product of its time’ could possibly age. And since Bennington cited people like Chris Cornell as a major influence, it’s not that hard to draw a straight line back from him to the Soundgarden frontman to Plant.
So while Plant may have had some issues with the younger generation making something different, it was never about continuing on one set tradition. Rules were meant to be broken in rock and roll, and it was up to everyone else to take the raw emotion behind their favourite records and spin it into their own unique entity.
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