What Made Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page Change His Mind About Rap Music
Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page is an icon in rock and roll music. However, the Led Zeppelin guitarist wasn’t scared of sharing his thoughts on other genres, including rap. Jimmy Page did have a negative view of rap music, but he changed his tune after working with Puff Daddy.
Jimmy Page had a harsh opinion of rap music
Jimmy Page is a legendary guitarist who found international success with Led Zeppelin after leaving The Yardbirds. Led Zeppelin dominated rock and roll in the 1970s before the band broke up in 1980. Since then, the music industry has drastically changed, with rock and pop all changing directions. Hip-hop emerged in the 1970s but didn’t become massively popular until the 1980s.
Page wasn’t a fan of rap, mainly because of how hip-hop often sampled other music and rapped over it. The guitarist once said of rappers: “They steal your riffs and then shout at you.” Many people find rap to be an acquired taste, and Page’s views on rap weren’t surprising. However, he changed his mind about the genre after working with Puff Daddy.
Jimmy Page learned to appreciate rap after working with Puff Daddy
Puff Daddy, or P. Diddy, is a rapper who emerged in the 1990s. In 1998, Diddy and Jimmy Page collaborated on the song, “Come With Me,” for the 1998 Godzilla movie. After working with Sean Combs, Page began to change his tune toward rap music.
“It was a real privilege working with him,” Page told the Independent in 2004. “He has incredible energy and a great imagination.”
In an interview with Rolling Stone, Page opened up further about how working with Diddy improved his appreciation of rap.
“Hip-hop fascinated me, the whole culture of what it was and breakdancing and all this whole thing coming from the street. I thought it was great. It was really good and some brave stuff. And I tell you, when Puff Daddy, as he was at the time, got in contact and said that he wanted to do this thing, I thought, ‘Wow. Yeah, yeah. We’ve been sampled enough. Why not do it for real?’ So I thought it was great. And it was an epic thing that he did. He put two orchestras on it, for heaven’s sake. We never had that sort of luxury. And when I did Saturday Night Live with him, it was phenomenal. He did a couple of run-throughs and then the take, and he was different on each one. He was somebody who was improvising, and I admired his work.”
Rap changed Page’s view of ‘Kashmir’
In “Come With Me,” P. Diddy sampled Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir.” While Page’s quote about rap largely condemned sampling, Page says Diddy’s version made him think differently about the song, and it opened his mind toward other artists sampling his work.
“The whole riff of ‘Kashmir’ is like a round, and then you’ve got this cascading stuff, like you hear the brass parts on the final record. It’s just like ‘Whole Lotta Love.’ Have you seen any of these mash-ups that’ve been on the internet, with the James Brown one and there’s Black Sabbath, and there’s this and there’s that, Snoop Doggy Dogg? There’s all these various versions with ‘Whole Lotta Love’ because it’s a great riff.”
“There’s some super-clever stuff, but what it is for me, it’s like, ‘Great. If people think that riff is so inspiring that they want to do this with James Brown, for heaven’s sake, thank you very much. Count me in.’ And I’ve had great fun with seeing all these things, and what it is, is something like ‘Whole Lotta Love,’ people sort of love that riff, and when they play [it], it brings a smile to their face, and that’s great. That’s why I play music. That’s why I want to create music.”
