Feb 3

Feb 3 Kashmir by Led Zeppelin

Grunge meets Exotic. West meets East?

This is my all time favourite Led Zeppelin track and it just so happened to be my friend’s too, although I didn’t know that when I chose it for them (see my About page for why that’s relevant: https://www.jenxlovesmusic.com/about ). It has all the elements you want in a great rock song - heavy guitars and rhythm and some good old grunge - yet it also manages to sound alluringly wild and exotic.

How do they do that?

So what is happening in the music to create its exotic and dramatic effect? I’m going to talk about rhythm and tonality. The rhythm is unusually complex for a piece of popular/rock music and there’s no building up to the complexity either; it’s like that from the opening bars. We have two overlapping time signatures - the drums play standard 4 beats in a bar (stamp clap stamp clap) with the strongest beat being the first of each group of four. Over the top of that, the strings are playing a rhythm with 3 beats in a bar (strong weak weak). This means that the drums and the strings are playing their strong beats at different times and only unite once every 12 beats. The resulting sound is disjointed and edgy, uncomfortable and menacing, as our ears and inner rhythm are not quite sure which strong beat to follow.

Combined with that, the strings are playing an ascending five note pattern which rises half a tone (semitone) at a time - imagine on a keyboard playing every white and black note in turn. This is known as a chromatic scale and can be used to create tension and, as we will hear later in the piece, a sound world that is associated with music from the east.

The chromaticism is reversed when the brass instruments join in with the guitars, so that the tune is made up of a falling scale and even though it is very different to the opening bars, it still feels connected. We feel more firmly in a four beat time signature here, even though the brass rhythm is heavily syncopated (off beat). It feels much more Western.

The piece is in a minor key and delves into a tonality that is distinctively ‘Eastern’. What do I mean by that? Well, at the top of a minor scale you get some very uneven spacing between notes, so that instead of going up in nice even steps you get a gap larger than a normal tone followed by a semitone. By wandering back and forth between those three notes you get really quite a seductive effect (or at least that sort of sound has become associated with the exotic and erotic). You can also hear the use of quartertones (often slightly nasal sounding, wobbles in tuning), which are again a feature of Indian, Middle Eastern and other cultures of the east, but which don’t typically appear in western music.

Throughout the piece there is this dialogue between eastern and western musical traditions, tensioning against one another but also blending to create a rock masterpiece. Feels like there might be a lesson for humankind in there somewhere….

Hope you enjoy it or feel inspired to listen to something new today.

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