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Comment by JumpinJack_Cash | Hacker News Reader

I have never quite got this band. Everybody says that they are the fathers of Heavy Metal and Hard Rock and this album especially should represent all that, but they are very light celtic tunes to my ear, and especially their most successful single Stairway to Heaven.

Black Sabbath are the fathers of heavy metal and hard rock, I think they must have had a bad promoter (compared to LedZep) and the fact that they'd play just 1h compared to Zeppelin 4h marathons also made them less relevant in the grapevine

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I think they must have had a bad promoter (compared to LedZep)

Turns out there's a lot to this. Read Black Sabbath's Wikipedia entry. As a band, they were always a total mess, with bad management, lack of discipline, loads of wasted money and opportunity, and also a massive amount of turnover among the band members. It's almost a miracle that they were able to create what fans now think of classic rock albums, like Paranoid and Master of Reality.

Led Zeppelin, OTOH, was conceptually very strong, determined, and ambitious. They not only had the toughest, best and most protective businessman among rock managers (Peter Grant), they were like a well-oiled machine where each member was firing on all cyclinders and they were greater than the sum of the parts. Jimmy Page specifically conceived the band to not be like the Yardbirds where it was run by a bunch of mafia guys and producers and had a lot of turnover. That's why when Bonham died, the concept could not work with one guy not in the equation anymore.

I don't care who or what they are the fathers of, I just find that their music resonates with me in a very special way no other band's does. It has tension and & release on many scales and dimensions at once.

Light and shade, as Jimmy Page called it, and very intentionally cultivated in their music.

Black Sabbath seem pretty well-regarded, especially to those into that type of music. I mean, Ozzy Osbourne is a household name which you can't say about any members of Led Zeppelin.

Led Zeppelin are just different. They are just on the right side of musical for me. I really can't stand dissonance or noise in music. I also greatly appreciate dynamic range which they have an abundance.

They have a handful of Celtic-inspired songs, and tons of blues and blues-rock based ones. If you listen to them only expecting to hear the origins of metal, you're going to be disappointed. If you have an understanding of how heavy music was at the time, then you'll understand why they were considered so heavy.

Led Zeppelin is not heavy metal or hard rock, they were just a rock band that did a few nice folk tunes.

I recommend listening to Immigrant Song.

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