 This video is brought to you by Skillshare. The first thousand of my subscribers to click the link in the description will get a one month free trial of Skillshare premium. Pablo Picasso is often quoted as saying, lesser artists borrow, great artists steal. Sometimes a similar quote is given to the composer Igor Stravinsky or the writer William Faulkner. One person that we know for sure said something to that effect was poet and famous anti-Semite T.S. Eliot who wrote the following in The Sacred Wood essays on poetry and criticism. Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal, bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. Perhaps the best remember take on this quote is by Steve Jobs who simplified it to good artists borrow, great artists steal. And if this is true then Led Zeppelin are among the greatest artists of them all because they built one of the most illustrious careers in rock history on theft. Led Zeppelin stole with such bombast and vigor that there's an entire Wikipedia page dedicated to the songs that they ripped off from other artists. There is absolutely no question as to whether Led Zeppelin were music thieves or not. They clearly were, but there is one question on this topic that I think bears discussion. Does it matter? Let's take a closer look. Before we can get our hands dirty on this topic let's get started with some of Zeppelin's accusations of plagiarism and the many, many lawsuits they've caused. I'm not going to play any clips here because of YouTube's copyright restrictions and believe me we'll be getting into copyright in this video, but if you want to check out the similarities I've created a Spotify playlist in the description for you. Alright, so here we go with a very incomplete list. Dazed and Confused was an uncredited cover of an original song by folk singer Jake Holmes and Holmes later sued Zeppelin and settled out of court. Robert Plant's lyrics and vocal performance on Whole Lotta Love are inspired by You Need Love, a song written by Willie Dixon and recorded by Muddy Waters. Dixon sued Zeppelin and the band settled out of court in Dixon's favor. The lemon song is a take on Howlin' Wolf's Killin' Floor, ARC music sued Zeppelin in 72, and Howlin' Wolf was given a songwriting credit. Bring It On Home was another song taken from Willie Dixon, and again Zeppelin was sued, this time by Chess Records without Dixon's knowledge. Since I've been lovin' you is often considered to be a rip-off of Moby Grape's Never. The opening to Stairway to Heaven is very similar to Spirit's Instrumental Taurus, and the band has been in a number of lawsuits around that. Boogie with Stu was influenced by a Richie Valon's song, Oom I Had. Zeppelin credited the song to Valon's mother in an attempt to get her some royalties, but in turn Valon's publisher sued. And of course, T for One is a shameless rip-off of the 1970 song Since I've Been Lovin' You by Led Zeppelin, though Zeppelin have not pursued any legal action. This is just a quick overview of some of the most famous cases, but Zeppelin's career has been mired in these accusations basically ever since it took off. While there's some notable exceptions, the vast majority of songs Zeppelin have been accused of plagiarizing are blues songs. And yes, obviously a big part of that is that they're a blues rock band, but I think there's more to it than that. If we're gonna understand how and why so many Zeppelin songs contain bits of other music, we need to rewind the clock a little and look at the history of blues. In musicologist Philip Tagg's Analyzing Popular Music Theory Method in Practice, he offers up a classification that breaks music into what he calls an axiomatic triangle of three distinct kinds of music. Art music, popular music, and folk music. Tagg isn't the only person to create this sort of distinction, and it's not a flawless classification, but I do think it's one that can help us understand what's going on with Zeppelin's plagiarism. Within this system, art music refers to classical music that are built on formal styles and technical traditions. Pop music is music that's easily accessible to the public, created for commercial purposes, and spread through mass media like radio, television, and these days streaming. And then folk music consists of pieces derived from cultural traditions. They're usually passed down through the generations orally, and are usually performed by amateurs, often as part of community ritual. Chances are that nearly all the music you listen to, including Led Zeppelin, would fall under the umbrella of pop music in this classification. But that's where things get interesting. Because while much of blues can fit under the pop umbrella today, that really wasn't the case at the start of the 20th century. The blues is a folk tradition. It was born out of work songs and slave spirituals in the Mississippi Delta, and grew to become one of the preeminent music among black communities across the American South, and eventually the entire country. As a folk tradition, there are a number of cultural trends within the blues that don't really fit into our pop music framework. Perhaps the most glaring of these is the concept of authorship. Folk music traditions simply don't operate on the same grounds of authorship and intellectual property as pop music. And that's because folk songs aren't really written by any singular person. They're adapted from a broad cultural canon, with melodies and lyrical themes lifted from multiple different folk tunes mixed and matched and rewritten frequently. This is part of the reason why so much of blues is built on forms like the 12 bar blues. These things allow for easy adaptation. In a 1941 interview with the folklorist Alan Lomax, Muddy Waters explains this process in action. For blues musicians, these traditional tunes didn't belong to anybody in particular, they belonged to the broader blues culture. And honestly, this approach to ownership is a lot more accurate as to how art tends to naturally be made. No idea is truly original, artists have always been the sum of their influence, plundering the art they love and putting their own spin on it. This is just as true of Muddy Waters as it is of Led Zeppelin or even William Shakespeare. Art is an iterative process. It's a process in constant conversation with the past, pulling bits of inspiration and twisting them around to create new, supposedly original works. And that's what Led Zeppelin did, especially early in their career. Let's take a look at one of those examples from earlier, the Lemon Song. While much of the Lemon Song's form was indeed taken from Howlin' Wolf, that's not the only blues artist it's pulling from. The line squeeze me baby till the juice runs down my leg is taken from Robert Johnson's 1937 recording, Traveling Riverside Blues. But then Robert Johnson wasn't even the first to use that image. Johnson's take on the words were likely taken from Roosevelt Sykes, who recorded a song called She Squeezed My Lemon earlier that same year. And as far back as 1929, a singer named Joe Williams sang the line, You squeezed my lemon caused my juice to run on a song called I Want It Awful Bad. So then is Robert Johnson a plagiarist? How about Roosevelt Sykes? And as for Joe Williams, well who's to say whether he wrote those lines or borrowed them from another song that he knew before? This is how folk music works. This is the beauty of that cultural conversation in action. I think that for many of their songs, Zeppelin weren't trying to rip off or steal from other musicians, they were trying to partake in that conversation. And even something like Since I've Been Loving You, while not pulled from traditional blues, is a continuation of that. Moby Grape's song is ostensibly an original, but I don't much think that five white guys from San Francisco really invented the idea of the slow electric blues jam. The guitar great Joe Satriani would later praise Pages' work on that song, saying Since I've Been Loving You was a perfect example of taking a blues structure but striking out on your own. They were breaking ground, not copying. And I think that's an important note to all of this. Zeppelin weren't just re-recording songs verbatim. They were taking songs and tropes that existed in the blues zeitgeist and putting new spins on them, creating a wholly unique sound that musicians would spend the next two decades drawing inspiration from. The problem is that a lot of this context got lost in the translation from folk music to pop music. Because pop music, at least as it currently exists, relies on a false notion of authorship, one that is supported legally by the framework of copyright. In theory, copyright and the concept of intellectual property make a lot of sense. If you're going to be commodifying art, there needs to be a system that encourages artists to create by incentivizing a monetary reward. Or at least that's how the argument goes. And to do that, artists need a way of owning their work. But how can somebody really own a song that's piecing together different parts of the zeitgeist? There's all sorts of ways that music will reflect on and build upon the past. homage, illusion, conversation, inspiration? Where do you draw the lines between these things and plagiarism? Functionally, you can't. And that's without even getting into the question of artists coincidentally writing similar pieces of music. Look at something like Stairway to Heaven. The opening chords of that song are almost identical to a section of Spirit's Taurus, yes. But the rest of the song? Taurus is a spacey two-minute instrumental piece. Stairway to Heaven is a seven-minute slow burn steeped in mythological imagery that arguably both invented and perfected the concept of the power ballad. Do a few chords really make that much of a difference? A lot of the time it seems like our dialogue around plagiarism comes down to this perception that talentless hacks steal songs from better musicians. But I don't think anyone can listen to Stairway to Heaven and tell me it's not one of the most fiercely original things they've ever heard, whether they're if sounds like Taurus or not. In the end Zeppelin won all their legal battles when it comes to Taurus, but part of the reason they were able to do so is because they could afford to win those legal battles. And that victory is a small blip in a disturbing rise in absurd copyright claim cases. Because as noble as the intention of copyright law may have been, the reality is that copyright as it exists now does very little to help artists and a lot to help the labels that have already gotten rich exploiting these artists. Even if you look at Zeppelin's copyright lawsuits, half of them are not actually the songwriters themselves coming at Zeppelin, they're the labels, sometimes doing so without the original artists knowing. That was the case with Bring It On Home. About half of that song is an homage to a Sonny Boy Williamson song written by Willie Dixon. The rest is an original electric blues jam, the thing that Zeppelin were the best at. And even though chess records sued Zeppelin without Dixon's knowledge, the 2014 reissue of Led Zeppelin II includes Willie Dixon as not just one of the songwriters on the song, but the soul songwriter. That would have you believe that Willie Dixon was the one that wrote Jimmy Page's swagger-filled guitar lick that Willie Dixon is responsible for the engine that is John Bonham's drumming in the midsection of that song. Copyright Law, as it exists today, promotes a narrative about creativity that is fundamentally false. Art is not created by individuals boldly coming up with ideas from out of the blue. It's created by communities, iterating upon each other's work in constant conversation. If you really want to dive deep into this thing, I can't recommend Kirby Ferguson's Everything is a remix highly enough, I'll throw a link to that in the description. But let's get back to Zeppelin. If art is theft and copyright is bunk, does that mean Zeppelin can get off scot-free for all their alleged plagiarism? Unfortunately, I don't think it's that easy. Because while everybody steals, Zeppelin had a particular habit of doing so without crediting those that influenced them. Now, I don't really think that's a capital crime in a world where we understand the iterative nature of art, but within the pop music system as it exists, this often meant that Zeppelin were taking money out of the pockets of the people who helped shape them. Being a blues band, this disproportionately meant taking money from people who were already marginalized as black performers in America. And in some cases, Zeppelin seemed pretty unwilling to give credit. In the early 1980s, Jake Holmes wrote to Zeppelin to ask for credit on their version of his song Dazed and Confused. He never heard back. It seems that Zeppelin were very happy to participate in this conversation, but a lot of the time, they weren't willing to give credit where credit was due within the framework that would have meant them giving up their money. So where does all of this leave us? Like with so many aspects of Zeppelin, it's complicated. There are some that seem to use Zeppelin's supposed plagiarism to write the band off as having committed base thievery. And clearly, that's not the case. I don't really think there's that much wrong with the way that Zeppelin used these individual songs. If we go back to that TS Eliot quote, I think a lot of people would say that Zeppelin's songs are better than their original influence. I certainly think that at the very least they're different. They used those inspirations to forge music that would really change the way that all popular music sounded for the next few decades. And that act is part of a continued dialogue that dates back to one of America's richest folk traditions. But when given chances to acknowledge their influence, Zeppelin would often shout them out in interviews, but would rarely be willing to put their money where their mouth was. And there's one more aspect of this that hangs over the entire conversation as well. Led Zeppelin may have been continuing a cultural conversation, but they weren't traveling bluesmen on the Mississippi Delta, they were middle-class white kids from the UK. So then, were Zeppelin even really in the right to be having this cultural conversation? That's a very complicated issue and a topic that we'll get into in next week's video. Learning how to steal like an artist is an important part of any creative journey, but there comes a point when you need to take your influences and turn them into something that is distinctly yours. If you're a creative of any variety and you're struggling with discovering that distinct voice, you should check out Andy Pizza's Skillshare class, Find Your Style. That class will teach you techniques that you can use to help solidify your creative works into something that represents who you truly are as a person. If you want to check it out, the first thousand people to click the link in the description will be able to do so absolutely free for an entire month. And not only does following that link get you a month of Skillshare free, it also really helps support my channel. You know the deal with Skillshare, thousands of courses on all sorts of topics, it's the best place online to seek out self-improvement or even just hone your existing skills. If you want a place to start, why not check out Philip D'Amico's 2D motion graphics class and learn many of the skills that I used to make this very video. If you want to get started, the first thousand people to click the link in the description will get a month of Skillshare absolutely free. Thank you all so much for watching.