Month: February 2021

Fox News commentators Pete Hegseth and Lara Logan decided to spend part of their Thursday morning tearing into the New York Times for its (accurate) coverage of Rush Limbaugh‘s legacy as a controversial and reactionary talk radio host. The Times obituary didn’t shy away from highlighting Limbaugh’s distinct brand of racist and misogynistic rhetoric along with his penchant for pushing conspiracy theories like the recent “Big Lie” that the 2020 election was “stolen” from Donald Trump. Limbaugh also famously mocked Chelsea Clinton’s appearance when she was just 13-years-old, and he used to do a segment where he mocked homosexuals who died of AIDS. While all of these things are true, Hegseth and Logan were indignant with rage that the Times would bring it up following Limbaugh’s death.

“It’s so sick that I barely feel comfortable putting it on the screen,” Hegseth said about the obit before Logan trotted out the age-old maxim “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” Via Mediaite:

“You know what, Pete? I was raised to be a better person than that,” Logan said. “I can only think of my mother. She would have looked at that and said ‘how small, these people are very small.’ She would have left it at that, and honestly, I’m going to leave it there when it comes to them because I think their actions and their language speak for themselves.”

Notably, the Fox News personalities didn’t refute any of Limbaugh’s long list of controversial remarks, but instead, launched standard boilerplate attacks of liberal bias at the Times. Their indignation over the talk radio host not receiving the proper “respect” echoed that of National Review pundit Rich Lowry who was dragged on Twitter after fondly recalling how “funny” Limbaugh was. People were quick to point out Limbaugh’s checkered history of mocking Michael J. Fox’s Parkinson symptoms and his songs insulting the homeless. Real funny guy!

(Via Mediaite)

In recent weeks, FKA Twigs has spoken openly about her relationship with Shia LaBeouf, which she alleges was abusive. She recently shared some revelations in an Elle profile and now she has given her first TV interview on CBS This Morning.

During her conversation with Gayle King, Twigs said, “I think it reminds me of some of the gaslighting I experienced when I was with him — the taking some of the blame, but not all of it and then denying it.” Twigs described the gaslighting she felt LaBeouf was subjecting her to, saying:

“Nothing was ever true. But this is the thing, but I would really doubt myself, you know? Especially when I’d, like, wake up and he’d be like, ‘You were lying there with your eyes open, planning to leave me.’ And I’d be like, ‘I literally was asleep.’ But then he would, like, only want me to sleep naked because he said if I didn’t, then I was keeping myself from him. So, you know, it’s a tactic that a lot of abusers use. It’s just this, like, constant availability and everything centered around them. And I think, you know, that’s why I wanted to come out and talk about this, because the signs really are there from the beginning.”

Check out the full interview below.

Millions of Texans remain trapped in freezing cold homes without power after a historic winter storm blanketed the region with snow and ice. But just because it was a once-in-a-generation event doesn’t mean that officials shouldn’t have been prepared.

“The main reason Texas has plunged into darkness is that its natural gas industry has been crippled by this storm. And that might, might have been preventable, except that Texas deregulated its power supply in the ’90s, which was clearly not the smartest decision,” The Daily Show host Trevor Noah said during Wednesday’s episode. It has very little to do with frozen wind turbines, no matter what Governor Greg Abbott said (he has since walked back those comments) and Fox News continues to say. It also has nothing to do with the Green New Deal and (sigh) Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

“This is fucking insane,” Noah said after a montage of Fox News clips. “These guys are so desperate to just let fossil fuels off the hook that they are blaming AOC and the Green New Deal ― which by the way hasn’t even happened yet ― for something that is happening in Texas right now. But this just goes to show you no matter what happens, no matter how far removed she is from the problem, conservatives can and will always find a way to blame the bogeyman, AOC.” On a positive note, The Daily Show came up with an idea that “might just solve Texas’ energy problems forever.” Hint: it draws power from the country’s most renewable resource, conservatives hating AOC.

Tucker Carlson’s taste for spreading conspiracy theories to the Fox News audience doesn’t quit. Since his previous Hunter Biden-laptop furor fizzled out, though, he has had to manufacture some new scandal to take aim at Joe Biden. He’s digging deep into his tin-foil hat here, and what he’s dreamed up is truly ridiculous, not to mention so clearly untrue that it’s difficult to understand why he’s wasting air time this way. What’s Tucker’s latest baseless conspiracy theory? He’s claiming that Joe and Jill Biden’s nearly 44-year marriage (since June 17, 1977) is a publicity stunt — one that he’s calling “as real as climate change.”

Yes, it’s ridiculous. That would be the case even if Melania Trump didn’t obviously give no f*cks about Donald, which yes, makes it an unfamiliar sight (after four years of Trump) to see a president and first lady who actually, you know, like each other and celebrated Valentine’s Day together. Yet Tucker’s newest theory is perhaps his most absurd statement yet. It’s a baseless claim, but let’s look at what Tucker said anyway:

“The Bidens’ affection is totally real. It’s in no way part of a slick PR campaign devised by cynical consultants determined to hide the president’s senility by misdirection… No, not at all! Their love is as real as climate change! Not since Antony dined with Cleopatra in downtown Antioch — before they killed themselves, obviously — has a country witnessed a love story as poignant as Jill and Joe’s.. No, ladies and gentlemen, Jill Biden is not Joe’s caretaker. She isn’t his nurse. She’s his fully equal romantic partner. Together they are like besotted teens, yet at the same time they are the wise and knowing parents of the nation.”

So, Tucker is attempting to peddle this “fake marriage” conspiracy theory to argue that Biden is plagued by “senility” and therefore unfit for office, and that Jill and Joe have been playing this long game for… decades? C’mon, there’s not even one ounce of believability here, and perhaps most damningly, it’s a lazy theory.

Led Zeppelin — to paraphrase a quote from a character in a movie named after one of their songs — keeps on getting older, and yet their fans stay the same age.

Formed in 1968 by a hotshot guitarist named Jimmy Page, Zeppelin put out eight albums over the course of a dozen years, until the death of drummer John Bonham ended the band in 1980. In subsequent years, Page and singer Robert Plant have occasionally collaborated, both as a duo and as a reunited trio (for one concert in 2007) with bassist John Paul Jones. Otherwise, Zeppelin has been grounded for more than 40 years. And yet, at this very moment, they remain one of the most popular rock bands on the planet. You can measure this by any number of rubrics — record sales, streams, radio airplay, blacklight posters hanging in head shops, and so on. Even as so many bands of their generation slowly fade into history, it seems that there’s also a new subset of teenagers every year who decide that will be obsessed with Led Zeppelin right as their hormonal activity reaches its zenith.

To figure out why this is, we need to look back on their 50 greatest songs. What, exactly, are Zeppelin’s 50 greatest songs, and who decided this anyway? I’ll answer the second part first: Me. I did it. And I took it seriously. I’m giving you every inch of my Zeppelin opinions here.

Do you need cooling? Baby I’m not fooling. I’m gonna send you back to schooling — Zeppelin schooling that is. Here are my 50 Zeppelin songs of all time.

50. “The Wanton Song”

The Beatles had the best songs. The Rolling Stones were the coolest. U2 was more successful over a longer period of time. But in terms of A-list classic rock bands, no one is more viscerally exciting than Led Zeppelin. This is music that communicates directly to the most primal and non-intellectual parts of your body with greater and more devastating eloquence than anything in rock ‘n’ roll. It’s a force that hits you with unmatched power, starting with John Bonham’s unparalleled drumming, extending from John Paul Jones’ extremely deep bass grooves, carrying over to Robert Plant’s seductively keening vocals, and brought on home by Jimmy Page’s battalion of violently electrifying guitar riffs. It’s the heaviest sound but it’s not bludgeoning — in fact, it’s nimble and funky, like a dancer who also happens to be a serial killer. You put on “The Wanton Song” and it sounds like how you wish all rock bands sounded. Led Zeppelin endures because all of those other bands haven’t succeeded.

49. “Traveling Riverside Blues”

Led Zeppelin is also the most complicated classic rock band, in that if you know anything at all about them, you are aware of some pretty despicable aspects of their career and legacy. Let’s begin with their long and undistinguished history of pilfering Black music and making millions off of it. Blues history of course is ultimately a tale about artists drawing from the same well, re-using the same raw musical and lyrical materials in novel ways. The obvious difference with Zeppelin is how much wealthier they became from drawing on this tradition. But any attempt to dismiss them in retrospect as mere rip-off artists breaks down once you hear “Traveling Riverside Blues.” Originally written by Robert Johnson, it didn’t appear on a proper Zeppelin album until the 1990 Led Zeppelin box set. It also doesn’t sound much at all like Robert Johnson, a man whose every utterance on record is laced with a profound sense of doom. Zeppelin’s “Traveling Riverside Blues” however is positively ebullient. Think of the most charismatic person you’ve ever encountered, and remember how their incredible sense of confidence lifted you up like a wave. That’s what this song feels like. That magnetic swaggering arrogance is Zeppelinesque through and through.

48. “Tea For One”

A different kind of Zeppelin blues, from their first non-masterpiece, 1976’s Presence. “Tea For One” doesn’t telegraph a feeling of strength; it’s expresses weakness and depression, imbued with a knowledge that the terrible things you’ve done in pursuit of absolute pleasure are finally catching up with you. In the late ’70s, Page lived like a vampire in a series of darkened L.A. hotel rooms, feasting on heroin and groupies and maybe a single sandwich every two weeks. Plant meanwhile was in a serious car accident that put him in a wheelchair for months, while Bonham slid deeper and deeper into the worst drinking problem in human history. Jones, judging from The Song Remains The Same, allowed himself to get a truly terrible haircut that made him look like The Little Dutch Boy, but otherwise escaped this era relatively unscathed.

47. “Out On The Tiles”

A lot of this stuff is outlined in Stephen Davis’ Hammer Of The Gods, the most compulsively readable work of rock semi-fiction ever committed to paper. I read it a decade after Led Zeppelin broke up as a pizza-faced junior high schooler, and it instantly put me into an extended Zeppelin phase that never really ended. They will always be my comic-book superheroes of choice — even now, they provide the comfort of the familiar while also seeming mysterious and irredeemably dangerous. Surely someone is reading Hammer Of The Gods right now and experiencing the same thing. When the first generation of Zeppelin fans heard them, especially the boys, “they would become cocky and full of themselves,” to quote one-time Jimmy Page girlfriend Bebe Buell. The music was so powerful — even a relatively straight-forward rocker like “Out On The Tiles” — it made the audience feel like they were greater than themselves, just by virtue of being in its presence. This naturally affected the band members themselves by a factor of 1,000, especially Jimmy Page, whose well-publicized fascination with writer/occultist/mountaineer/hedonist Aleister Crowley had less to do with worshipping Satan (or selling your soul, one of the major plot points of Hammer Of The Gods) and more with the idea that you can self-actualize yourself into exactly who you want to be. That Jimmy Page did exactly that for most of the ’70s makes his Crowley stanning — which includes etching the Crowleyisms “Do What Thou Wilt” and “So Mote Be It” in the inner groove of Led Zeppelin III — slightly less looney.

46. “Gallows Pole”

A big part of the narrative of Zeppelin’s early career is that critics hated them. Upon seeing them perform live in 1969, Jon Landau — the guy who famously wrote that line about seeing rock’s future and its name being Bruce Springsteen — called Led Zeppelin “loud … violent, and often insane.” (Incredibly, he didn’t mean this as a compliment.) Even Lester Bangs, the one first-generation rock critic you might expect to like Zeppelin, called them “utterly two-dimensional and unreal.” (This initial critical reception is Zeppelin’s only authentic connection to Greta Van Fleet.) While Zeppelin responded to the criticism by immediately locking most of the press out of their inner circle, Led Zeppelin III feels like an overt gesture to prove that they aren’t “two-dimensional.” They took out the acoustic guitars and mandolins and marinated in mellow hippie vibes, like a British Music From Big Pink on seriously dank weed. The magic of “Gallows Pole” is that even in this mode, Zeppelin still seems dangerous and sexy.

45. “House Of The Holy”

Zeppelin’s secret weapon, even when it downshifted into Hobbit-y folk tunes, was its innate ability to swing. This is due of course to Bonham, who is properly recognized as the greatest rock drummer of all time. But it also derives from Jones, the most underrated member of a capital-G greatest band ever. Jones was underrated in his own band, apparently, given that Page and Plant basically ghosted him after Zeppelin broke up. (A fact that Jones acknowledged, hilariously and awkwardly, when they were inducted in the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall Of Fame.) Jones’ unassuming, even nerdy demeanor clearly works against him — he’s a distant fourth in the Zeppelin “cool guy” rankings. But none of that actually translates to his playing or his understanding of what made Zeppelin worked. “You could dance to Zeppelin,” Jones tells Barney Hoskyns in Led Zeppelin: The Oral History Of The World’s Greatest Rock Band. “As a session musician, I did all the Motown covers because I was the only one who knew how to play in that style.” You can hear that James Jamerson-style feel in this song, which indeed works as a killer dance number as well as bloodthirsty hard rock.

44. “Hey Hey What Can I Do”

Like Jones, Jimmy Page was a top session man in the British rock scene in the days before Zeppelin. Plant and Bonham were relative novices from the Black Country, but they learned fast. This combination of experience and youthful energy is what enabled Zeppelin to attack a wide range of music from the beginning — Page and Jones were accustomed to working in different genres, and Plant and Bonham were too young and dumb to be intimidated. If the idea was to sound like a throwback Americana act on “Hey Hey What Can I Do,” why couldn’t they pull that off? Sadly, this B-side did not make Led Zeppelin III, even if it is inarguably better than “Bron-Y-Aur Stomp.”

43. “Four Sticks”

The worst song from the best Zeppelin album, Untitled, also known as “Led Zeppelin IV.” There are people who will argue that Physical Graffiti (aka “the double-album career summation”) is their best, or maybe Led Zeppelin II (“the horniest and hardest rocking one”) or Led Zeppelin III (“the one about Vikings and sunsets”). But the worst songs from those albums aren’t on the list. However, every single track from Untitled is here. Like Leo says in The Wolf Of Wall Street, Led Zeppelin asks that you judge them not by their winners but by their (relative) losers, because they have so few of them.

42. “Misty Mountain Hop”

If you talk to 10 Zeppelin fans, three of them will insist that “Misty Mountain Hop” is the best track from Untitled. (Yes, this is based solely on my personal experience and no actual data, but like the song says, I’m just takin’ a look at myself and describing what I see.) It’s the most “interesting” choice, given how many monster radio hits are from that record. Of course, “Misty Mountain Hop” is also a big radio song, it’s just not quite as famous as “Stairway To Heaven” or “Black Dog.” But it’s definitely the poppiest track on the record, with a hook that John Paul Jones apparently pulled out of thin air one morning at Headly Grange while fiddling with an electric piano while the rest of the band slept off a hangover.

41. “Your Time Is Gonna Come”

None of the songs from Untitled were released as singles, because no Zeppelin songs were released as singles. Zeppelin’s visionary manger Peter Grant —a 6-foot-5, 300-plus pound ex-wrestler whose menacing professional demeanor belied a gentle hand as a father and husband, the perfect physical manifestation of the Zeppelin essence — insisted against record company demands that avoiding pop hits would ultimately boost Zeppelin’s mystique. That the band took this stand from the time of their first record, in spite of songs like “Your Time Is Gonna Come” that could have been big on pop radio, is both courageous and canny. As it turned out, Zeppelin arrived at precisely the moment that free-form FM radio became important in America, and their absence from the AM side made them superstars in the opposing format. Taking a stand against singles in order to become one of the most overplayed radio bands in rock history defines Grant’s strategic genius.

40. “All My Love”

Zeppelin stuck to the “no singles” policy even in the twilight of their career, when they made their most obvious pop song ever with “All My Love” from 1979’s In Through The Out Door. This was the period when Page was so zonked out that Plant turned to Jones as his new primary collaborator, which explains the lack of guitar and the abundance of synths and songs about carouselambras. In the Hoskyns book, rock photographer and Page’s guy Friday Ross Halfin claims that Jimmy hates this song, “but because it was about Karac” — Plant’s 5-year-old son who died in 1977 of a stomach virus – “he couldn’t criticize it.”

39. “Heartbreaker/Living Loving Maid”

What Zeppelin lacked in pop radio exposure they more than made up within classic rock stations from coast to coast who implemented “Get The Led Out” segments. In my town, you were encouraged to get the Led out at 5 p.m., also known as quitting time for Zep’s blue-collar fanbase. And because there was quite a bit of Led that we all needed to get out, you would usually hear at least two songs. We all get the Led out in different ways, but in my community the song most likely to be played in this segment was this double-shot from Led Zeppelin II. The first part features one of the most iconic riffs in the Zeppelin canon and the wankiest guitar solo. The second part was supposedly considered garbage by the band, who never played it live, but I remember loving it as a virginal teenager who aspired to one day date beautiful sanitation workers.

38. “Achilles Last Stand”

Page and Plant have been outspoken over the years in distancing Led Zeppelin from any association with metal, which is kind of like Francis Coppola pleading to never been mentioned in context of gangster films. But there’s simply no other way to describe “Achilles Last Stand” than as one of the great prog-metal songs of the ’70s. As much as Rush ripped off Zeppelin early on, “Achilles Last Stand” sounds like a band who just heard “By-Tor & The Snow Dog” for the first time and then became immediately obsessed with topping it.

37. “The Song Remains The Same”

More prog-metal, though this might actually just be straight-up prog. Originally Page wrote it was an instrumental piece intended to eventually tee up “The Rain Song” on Houses Of The Holy. But then Plant heard it and was inspired — as one often is — to write about Honolulu starbright and sweet Calcutta rain. And, luckily for all involved, the latter phrase just so happened to rhyme with “the song remains the same.”

36. “Black Country Woman”

Untitled is the best Zeppelin album, but Physical Graffiti is the one I listen to the most, because it has the highest percentage of tracks that haven’t been beaten into the ground by every rock radio station on the planet. The second disc, especially, is wall-to-wall quality deep cuts like this song, a throwback to the muscular British folk rock of Led Zeppelin III with a dash of Rod Stewart’s early work. Unlike Exile On Main St., Physical Graffiti is the rare double album that never feels like an exercise in decadence. This a band in complete control of themselves and their music, their final stand before the decadence crushed them.

35. “D’yer Mak’er”

About half of the material on Physical Graffiti is culled from Untitled and Houses Of The Holy outtakes. This is when Zeppelin was operating at their full potential, and therefore working at the highest metabolism for any rock band ever. The wonder of Untitled is how every gesture is fully realized; with Houses Of The Holy, the execution is similarly perfect, even when the chances they’re taking are way riskier, like attempting a reggae song with a title that every white male Zeppelin fan is destined to spend years mispronouncing. On “D’yer Mak’er,” Zeppelin dared to be goofy and yet they still came off sounding like pouty-lipped sex gods.

34. “Friends”

Led Zeppelin III, along with being “the folkie record,” also was the album where Page and Plant really bro’ed it up, writing the record as they hiked around Wales and stared at sunsets. “Friends” is their “dudes rock” positive jam: “The greatest thing you ever can do now / Is trade a smile with someone who’s blue now.” Though, again, Jones provides an essential element on “Friends,” arranging the string section to give it an exotic, Indian feel.

33. “Communication Breakdown”

The first Zeppelin album was recorded in 36 hours, and it sounds like about 10 minutes of that was spent on this song. The antipathy that punks had for “dinosaur” bands like Led Zeppelin in the late ’70s is such ancient history that even the original punks have moved past it. (Johnny Rotten once called Physical Graffiti one of his favorite albums.) At this point, “Communication Breakdown” might as well be a Sex Pistols tune. It certainly sounds like one, capturing the raw energy at the core of Zeppelin before it was even barely refined.

32. “Sick Again”

It’s been a minute since we discussed the problematic aspects of Zeppelin, so let’s talk for a moment about their misogyny. The stories about Zeppelin’s mistreatment of women abound in every book written about them, though “Sick Again” is one of the few Zeppelin songs that’s actually about their shameless pursuit (and often cruel disposal) of every woman, young and slightly less young, in their orbit. But it’s also true that many of the biggest Zeppelin fans (and the ones most insightful about what made them great) happen to be women, whether they’re journalists like Jaan Uhelszki or lovers like Bebe Buell or hybrids like Pamela Des Barres. Based on accounts of people who were there, Zeppelin treated women like sex objects, but they also allowed women to treat them as sex objects, a dynamic that ultimately comes across vividly in “Sick Again.”

31. “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You”

Musically, Zeppelin also has a pronounced feminine side that often came across strongest in their open and passionate appreciation of Joni Mitchell. This was not common in the hard-rock world of the ’70s, or even among men in general. (Mitchell herself called Zeppelin “very courageous” for being such outspoken fans. “Straight white males had a problem with music,” she added.) And then there was “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You,” a song popularized by Joan Baez in the early ’60s and transformed by Zeppelin on the debut. But while the Zeppelin version hits harder, Plant hardly tries to make his vocal sound “masculine” in the manner of most knuckle-dragging rock singers of the time. He sounds like he’s trying to be a female folk singer, and he pretty much gets there.

30. “Thank You”

Zeppelin has dozens of songs about sex — I think every song at least has sex in the subtext of Bonzo’s drums. But there aren’t all that many romantic love songs in their catalogue. This is one of them. “My love is strong / With you there is no wrong / Together we shall go until we die.”

29. “Custard Pie”

Lest this list get too saccharine, we’re doing a hard pivot into a song that is unabashedly about female genitalia. Yes, this is crude, but Zeppelin was standing on the shoulders of giants, referencing similar pie metaphors from bluesmen like Blind Boy Fuller and Brownie McGhee. Plus, this song is an excellent example of the connection between Page and Bonham, in which the latter closely follows the former in order to create one of the most gloriously bombastic Side 1, Track 1’s ever.

28. “In The Light”

Just as they took a hard stand against radio singles, Zeppelin rarely allows their music to be licensed for movies and TV shows. This is a shame, given how cinematic and atmospheric the music is. But it also makes Zeppelin really stand out when you hear a song pop up in an unexpected context. For instance, the use of Zeppelin’s most Black Sabbath-sounding track, “In The Light,” in the season one finale of Mindhunter is one of the best uses of a rock song in a TV show in recent years. Though, in terms of sheer perversity, I suspect that most serial killers prefer In Through The Out Door to Physical Graffiti.

27. “Nobody’s Fault But Mine”

From here on out, I could just write about how sick Bonham sounds on every song. (Even the acoustic tracks he doesn’t actually play on, I swear I can hear him breathing in perfect time in the background.) But Bonzo sounds especially sick on this song. Significant portions of Zeppelin books is spent on describing the John Bonham drum sound. You can learn about where the mics were placed in the studio, or the way he tuned his drums, or the way the air felt in the room in which he was recorded. But I’m going to fall back on one of my favorite vague muso terms — he just had unbelievable feel. He is aggressively attacking his kit, but it’s not reckless or imprecise. It’s also not not reckless or overly technical. It’s tight but loose, booming but also weirdly … soothing? What I’m saying is that “hammer of the gods” stuff wasn’t just classic-rock bullshit.

26. “Over The Hills And Far Away”

Houses Of The Holy truly is the most “fun” Zeppelin album, the one where they pretty much tried everything. This one is the “let’s revisit our Led Zeppelin III guise but do it slightly better” track. It’s also the song of choice for dorm-room guitar pickers. This probably goes without saying, but it’s best to avoid anyone who’s opening line is, “Hey lady, you got the love I need / maybe more than enough.”

25. “The Battle Of Evermore”

In 2018, I interviewed Robert Plant and it was a rare instance where I got really nervous before talking to a rock star. I’m talking “knot in the pit of your stomach a full 48 hours before the phone call” nervous. It was inconceivable to me that you could actually talk to this person. How in the hell do you interview Thor? Compounding my anxiety was Plant’s well-documented aversion to talking about Zeppelin, especially when he’s ostensibly promoting a solo project. I decided to take an indirect angle into the subject by asking Plant about Sandy Denny, his duet partner on “The Battle Of Evermore” and one of the giants of 20th century British folk. Fortunately, Robert took the bait and soon we were talking about the recording of Untitled. It turned out that Thor was actually a fairly normal and approachable dude.

24. “Whole Lotta Love”

This song is a lot. Along with Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love,” it is the most notorious example of a faked orgasm in modern popular music. Only Zeppelin did it before Deep Throat mainstreamed pornography; this is proto-John Holmes rock. (It also brings to mind one of my all-time favorite quotes about Led Zeppelin, courtesy of journeyman hard-rock singer Michael Des Barres: “Robert was Marilyn Monroe, and Jimmy was Hedy Lamarr with a Les Paul.”) Hearing this as a kid felt incredibly unseemly, though now when I hear “Whole Lotta Love” I focus on the filth of Page’s guitar. Jack White once called the little solo during the break “some of the greatest guitar notes ever played,” and I don’t think that’s hyperbole.

23. “Rock and Roll” (The Song Remains The Same version)

The Song Remains The Same is rightfully considered one of the most ridiculous and tedious rock films of the 1970s. I’ve watched it at least 20 times but I don’t think I’ve ever actually finished it once without falling asleep. (Consider that I normally start watching The Song Remains The Same very late at night, and never in the most sober frame of mind.) People love to make fun of the Peter Grant sequences, where he struts around pompously in his vintage gangster clothes like a white English Suge Knight. But for me the least coherent scene is when John Paul Jones is seen reading Jack And The Beanstalk to his kids while dressed like Dirk Diggler. (Were they trying to make John Paul look like a huge dork?) All of that aside, The Song Remains The Same is a five-star rock movie for me solely because of the performance of “Rock And Roll,” which is an incredible portrait of arena rock at its absolute peak. The shot behind the band as Bonzo kicks into the opening drum fill while still in the dark, and then the explosion of light as the rest of Zeppelin falls in feels like having a rocket ship strapped between your legs.

22. “Trampled Under Foot”

A tremendous Stevie Wonder homage, just as “Pastime Paradise” is a tremendous Led Zeppelin homage.

21. “Going To California”

More Joni Mitchell worship, via a song so good that it could’ve ended up on Blue. In Joni’s “California,” she sings about hanging out in Paris and pining for home. (“I’m going to see the folks I dig / I’ll even kiss a Sunset pig.”) For Zeppelin, California — Los Angeles specifically — was a home away from home, a fantasyland they never stopped idealizing even after immersing themselves in the sleaziest of sleazy L.A. underbellies. “Going To California” marks the point where melancholy started to creep into Zeppelin’s music, an acknowledgement that they were at their zenith and it wasn’t going to last much longer. Coming from a band so alpha, the vulnerability of “Going To California” hits hard. “Tellin’ myself it’s not as hard, hard, hard as it seems,” Plant sings, and if you know what’s ahead for him and his band, you heart might ache a little, too.

20. “Good Times Bad Times”

By all accounts, Led Zeppelin was the Led Zeppelin pretty much from the moment they first plugged in. “It was just an unleashing of energy,” Plant later said. “But it felt like it was something that I’d always wanted.” You can hear it in this song, the first track on the first album. It’s rare for a band to arrive in that moment as fully formed as Zeppelin was. But the instrumental alchemy was there immediately — the way Bonham’s start-stop drums play off Page’s riff and is held together Jones’ deep-in-the-pocket bass line, and then sent off into outer space by Plant’s screaming vocal.

19. “How Many More Times”

Led Zeppelin I is just so tight and focused. Even “Dazed And Confused” comes and goes in less than seven minutes. But “How Many More Times” is where they really blow it wide open. Page had pioneered jammy rock with The Yardbirds, and he met his match with Plant and Bonham, whose improvisations with their previous group, The Band Of Joy, emulated the West Coast groups that Plant was enamored with. But whereas The Grateful Dead made head music, “How Many More Times” is a jam directed at the crotch.

18. “What Is And What Should Never Be”

As good as the debut is, Led Zeppelin II is the first real masterwork, the record that officially brought the ’60s to an end and heralded a new age. (This album replacing Abbey Road at the top of the album charts in the last week of 1969 is for boomers what Nevermind displacing Michael Jackson at the end of 1991 is for Gen X.) It’s the main reason why critics of the time hated them so much — Led Zeppelin II made them feel old. But they needn’t have worried. All they had to do was heed the words of Robert Plant in “What Is And What Should Never Be” — take his hand, child, and let him take you to the castle.

17. “Fool In The Rain”

“What if Led Zeppelin was Steely Dan?” is a pretty wacky idea, though it’s not even in the top five of wacky brainstorms that exist on In Through The Out Door. (“What if Led Zeppelin was Buck Owens?” takes the cake in that regard.) John Bonham’s masterful execution of the Purdie shuffle is one of his all-time greatest moments on record, an achievement that seems all the more impressive considering that Bonzo wasn’t in the best of shape at this time. If he somehow could’ve cleaned himself up, I have no doubt that Bonzo would’ve ended up playing on The Nightfly.

16. “Ten Years Gone”

A rare glimpse at the “emotionally mature” Led Zeppelin. This is not a band you put on when you’re seeking deep insights into the complex dynamics that occur between men and women in adult relationships. But “Ten Years Gone” is their Blood On The Tracks move, with Plant reflecting on a relationship that ended right around the time he joined Zeppelin. It also ranks among Page’s most intricate constructions of guitar overdubs. Later, when he did his (pretty underrated!) tour with The Black Crowes in the late ’90s, Page found that he was finally able to replicate all those parts to his satisfaction. All it took was having three guitarists on stage.

15. “Immigrant Song”

Robert Plant once claimed that all of the big-balled viking imagery in this song is intentionally funny, and I’m inclined to believe him. “Immigrant Song,” “The Lemon Song,” “The Crunge,” “Hot Dog” — Zeppelin was sillier than they get credit for, probably because Page’s riff and Bonham’s drums are kicking too much ass for anyone to laugh.

14. “In My Time Of Dying”

At just over 11 minutes, this is the longest Zeppelin song on record, and it feels even longer. But that’s not a complaint. “In My Time Of Dying” really does build like a deathbed confession, starting off slow and painful and then speeding up as the ghosts descend to take our protagonist … well, it’s probably not to heaven, right? “In My Time Of Dying” demonstrates that Zeppelin could groove even when they were moving at a snail’s pace, which is nearly impossible for most bands to do without falling apart. This song verges on collapse several times, but it suits the thematic concerns (mortality, Jesus, moaning, etc.) addressed in the text. Zeppelin lurches on purpose, and then (at the 3:46 point) suddenly they’re doing the opposite of lurching. The showmanship is impeccable — it’s a total “put the cape on James Brown’s back” flourish.

13. “Ramble On”

A highlight of the Lord Of The Rings subgenre of Zeppelin songs, as well as an excellent, early example of Zeppelin’s ability to mix acoustic and electric guitars beautifully. In every Jimmy Page interview, he is inevitably asked to give the secret of the Zeppelin sound, and he always goes into his pet riff about his interest in veering between “light and shade,” mixing up heaviness with jangly melody. “Ramble On” was the first time he really nailed it, before refining it to perfection on the next four Zeppelin records. While Radiohead isn’t often mentioned in the same sentence as Led Zeppelin, they emulated that “light and shade” electric-acoustic mix on The Bends and OK Computer, and pulled it off with nearly as much flair.

12. “The Rain Song”

Coming after “Stairway To Heaven,” it’s possible that listeners perceived this as an attempt to top (or just copy) their most iconic power ballad. But while “Stairway” can’t be denied — contrary to what happens in Wayne’s World — “The Rain Song” is the epic “quiet to loud” Zeppelin ballad that I play the most. This band’s willingness to sit back and be extremely twee for several minutes — and on the second track of Houses Of The Holy, no less — is perhaps their most underrated attribute. I’m sure to some ears this just sounds like bad Moody Blues, but I don’t care. When I put on Zeppelin, sometimes I want to hear a million guitar overdubs, a drippy string section, and Robert Plant cooing about how it’s the springtime of his loving. And then after five minutes I want to be snapped out of my coma by John Bonham kicking me in the face.

11. “Tangerine”

Along with “The Rain Song,” “Tangerine” was used by Cameron Crowe in Almost Famous as an elegiac hymn evoking the sun-soaked glory days of rock’s bygone past. Even more than “Tiny Dancer,” it’s impossible to extricate my feelings about these songs from my feelings about the movie, which are complicated but mostly affectionate. Led Zeppelin is one of those bands that each new generation grows up with, no matter how far they happen to be from the band’s actual life span. That’s because Zeppelin embodies the youthful ideals of boundless energy and potent libido, obviously. But there’s also a sneaky melancholy embedded in this music, as if Zeppelin could also see the end even when they were in the midst of taking over the world. If this band were only a bunch of dumb teenaged noise, I would have probably moved on by now. But the melancholy speaks to me now in ways I would have never anticipated back when I was poring over mud shark stories in Hammer Of The Gods.

10. “Dazed And Confused” (How The West Was Won version)

A weird tic about my Zeppelin fandom is that I’ve actually become more tolerant of super long live versions of “Dazed And Confused” as I’ve grown older. I suppose this song should represent the self-indulgent side of the band that made punk “necessary” or whatever gets repeated in one million rock documentaries. But the jamband aspects of Zeppelin can’t be excised from the overall picture; if anything, their ability to veer between doom-y sludge and extraterrestrial squeaks for a half hour in front of 20,000 people and still bring down the house speaks to their unique status and power as an arena-rock band. What could be annoying about Zeppelin is also a crucial part of what made them transcendent. Also, including this specific version assuages my guilt about not putting “The Crunge” on this list, as “The Crunge” is actually tucked inside of this performance.

9. “No Quarter”

Take a bow, John Paul Jones. I was tempted to include a live version of this song as well, so that we could all luxuriate in an endless JPJ keyboard solo that sounds like Chick Corea on quaaludes. But the studio take from Houses Of The Holy more than does justice to what is unquestionably the greatest stoner song in the Zeppelin canon.

8. “Bring It On Home”

The best example of them taking a familiar, John Lee Hooker-style blues shuffle and taking it to an entirely new Zeppelin zone. The whole point of this band was to not bring it on home, as Zeppelin was about as far from the home of the blues as you could possibly get. Instead, they had the audacity to take the blues and use it to make themselves seem larger than life, and take them as far from their own homes as their own power of will could take them. You hear that explosion take place at about the 1:45 mark in this song, and what follows is about as electrifying as blues-based rock gets.

7. “The Ocean”

The first of two songs sampled on Licensed To Ill to make it in the top 10. Like Zeppelin, the Beastie Boys were outsiders operating in a culture that was not theirs, and they endured by not even trying to fit in, but instead emphasizing their otherness. Also like Zeppelin, the Beasties liked really fat, bombastic, and swaggering riffs that made you feel cooler and dumber. If I can extend this comparison a bit further, is it fair to say that the drunken sea shanty that Bonzo is doing at the start of “The Ocean” is kinda sorta similar to rapping? He truly was the beastiest boy of all.

6. “Since I’ve Been Loving You”

I know this is technically a blues ballad, but to me this is the most emo Zeppelin song. It’s definitely the one I played the most when I was a romantically inexperienced teenager who fantasized about one day being in a relationship so intense and tumultuous that I sounded as miserable as Robert Plant. Not that “Since I’ve Been Loving You” entirely made sense to me — for instance, I could not relate to the rigors of working seven-seven-seven to 11-11-11 every night, but I was willing to accept the premise that it was a drag. Also, for a band that somehow couldn’t find the bridge on “The Crunge,” they absolutely crush the bridge here.

5. “Black Dog”

The first song on Untitled, which was my first Zeppelin album, which means “Black Dog” was among the first Zeppelin songs I ever heard. This is like going to a bar for the first time, and instead of handing you a beer they give you a Scarface-sized pile of pure, uncut Colombian and tell you to ingest it all in exactly 1.2 seconds. As is usually the case with Zeppelin, the talk is big but the band delivers — you sweat, you groove, you can’t keep away, and in the end you can only say “oh yeah!”

4. “Stairway To Heaven”

If this song existed in a vacuum, it would probably be No. 1. It’s incredibly well constructed and gorgeous, a real Lawrence Of Arabia of rock ‘n’ roll. It’s so epic and sweeping and beloved and overplayed and seriously it’s way overplayed but it’s still awesome and here comes that guitar solo sweet Jesus but man the overexposure eventually embarrassed Robert Plant so much that he couldn’t sing it with a straight face because does anybody remember laughter?

3. “That’s The Way”

The more approachable “Stairway To Heaven,” the one with less cultural baggage, the luminous Zeppelin ballad that’s down-to-Earth like the girl next door. Almost Famous is also responsible for giving this Led Zeppelin III deep cut some extra shine, but ultimately “That’s The Way” ranks among my very Zeppelin songs because (like all of the band’s best tracks) it feels like a perfect place that you can live inside of for about four minutes. “That’s The Way” is the shire — lush, green, eternally sunny, and then it’s suddenly gone.

2. “Kashmir”

Duh duh duh, duh duh duh, duh duh duh, duh duh duh, duh duh duh, duh duh duh, duh duh duh.

1. “When The Levee Breaks”

It’s all here — the contradictions and darkness and orgasms and drugs and life and power and death and Bonzo’s hammer of the gods and Jimmy’s otherworldly guitar and Plant’s pleading and Jonesy holding it all together as it all hangs over hell’s flames.

Zeppelin appropriated the blues, and rappers appropriated this titanic drum break. They sang about the end of the world, and made it feel like a rebirth. When Plant talks about “going down,” he’s somehow talking about sex and visiting Satan. “When The Levee Breaks” is just so dense and hard and it has no top and no bottom. I’ve heard it hundreds of times and it still seduces and terrifies me a little. It’s neither fast nor slow — it feels like it’s 20 minutes long when it’s on and 20 seconds when it’s over. But as long as this song is playing, I can believe every word of Hammer Of The Gods and forget that any other rock band existed.

Led Zeppelin is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Judas And The Black Messiah is a tough movie to criticize, because not only is it a relative win for even existing, it also does many things right. Some have been critical of the decision to cast 31-year-old Daniel Kaluuya as 21-year-old Chicago Panthers chairman Fred Hampton, and 29-year-old Lakeith Stanfield as then-20-year-old Bill O’Neal. Maybe that’s fair on paper, and doesn’t do justice to the youth of the movement, but it’s also hard to argue with a performance as electrifying as Kaluuya’s, or with casting two generational talents in a chronicle of an iconic event. It’s a film of fantastic performances and stirring compositions.

Yet while it does most of the “movie” things close to perfectly, a few of the choices late in the movie add up to something that’s maybe less inspiring than it could be and slightly contradictory. As Assistant Professor of History and African American Studies at the University of Iowa Simon Balto put it to me this week, “We didn’t really get a movie that had a lot to say coherently about what the Panthers were doing and why that was important.”

Part of that perhaps comes down to the decision to frame the story around Bill O’Neal, the FBI informant within the Panthers played by Lakeith Stanfield. Director Shaka King has said the pitch he accepted from the film’s co-writers, the Lucas brothers, was “The Departed in the world of COINTELPRO.”

Politics aside, it’s certainly a killer pitch. Yet something about the events leading up to the finale feel slightly off in some elemental way, smudging the reality of certain events without much payoff. We’re getting into spoiler territory so stop reading here if that’s an issue (assuming it’s possible to “spoil” historical events depicted in a movie).

The Inciting Incident

As the movie tells it, there’s an incident in which a Panther, “Jimmy Palmer” (played by Ashton Winters) sees Chicago cops frisking three black men inside a store. Palmer struts inside, and demands to know what the men have done to deserve this treatment while reaching for a pistol behind his back. The police pull their weapons and a gunfight ensues, with Palmer wounding a cop and getting shot in turn. Palmer goes into the hospital seemingly in stable condition, but never comes out.

Balto, the author of Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power and who’s currently at work on a biography of Fred Hampton, says he believes this was based on a real incident, involving a man named Larry Roberson.

“He and another guy were selling copies of the Black Panther newspaper, which was a common fundraising strategy. They were out on the street and saw these police harassing a bunch of elderly Black men. They went to intervene and police claimed that Roberson shot at them first,” Balto says. “The Panthers said that that wasn’t true, that Roberson wasn’t even carrying a gun. I think that the contours of what happened are represented there, where Roberson was shot by the police, was admitted to the hospital in good condition and then ultimately died very unexpectedly under very suspicious circumstances.”

But if the “contours” of the event are correct, what about the part where a Panther walked upon two police officers with his hand on a gun?

“I think that if that sort of thing did happen, it would’ve been a break from the guidance of Panther leadership like Hampton,” Balto says.

While the Panthers frequently spoke of and treated the police like an occupying army, they also weren’t stupid. Claiming a dead suspect had a gun or shot first was a well-known police tactic at the time. In The Assassination Of Fred Hampton by Jeffrey Haas, Hampton himself recounts an incident in which police had arrested him for an old traffic warrant to keep Hampton from a planned TV appearance, and left him uncuffed in a police car that had a gun in the back seat. Hampton immediately spotted it for what it was — a setup. “I put my wrists outside the car and started screaming, ‘There’s a gun in the car that somebody left.’”

This speaks to why this initial scene feels off — its perspective is more the police than the Panthers. And the Palmer incident is only the first of a few scenes in which Judas And The Black Messiah is, as Balto puts it, “essentially adopting the police versions of events.”

It’s a strange choice in the context of a movie about an event where the police’s initial version was proven conclusively to be very wrong, and in this exact way.

The Retaliation

In the movie, the Chicago Police retaliate for this incident by setting up camp outside the Panther headquarters. We see the police drinking beer and harassing bystanders, telling the Panthers that “either you come out or we’re coming in.”

Balto says this is probably a composite of a few different events, a common, and what I would deem “fair,” way to streamline facts into movie form.

“There was a series of raids over the course of 1969 on Black Panther headquarters by the CPD,” Balto says. “The Panther headquarters was burned a couple different times with specific targeting of supplies for Free Breakfast for Children program.”

In Eyes On The Prize 2, a 1990 PBS documentary (an excerpt of which appears in Judas) another Panther recounts the police having burned their cereal.

“In those raids,” Balto says, “things generally never happened in broad daylight in the way they’re depicted in the film. Raids generally took place some time between 1:00 am and 5:00 am to try to move in under cover of darkness.”

Again, not an egregious fudging of the facts. The odd part is the sequence of events as the movie depicts it. In the film, it’s again the Panthers who up the ante, when Judy Harmon, played by Dominique Thorne (said to be a composite of real female Panthers) appears at the open window, cocks a shotgun, and points it at the crowd of police.

Even without knowing the history of the exact incident, it defies common sense. This was a group of people hyper-aware of the fact that police would take any excuse to shoot or arrest them. The reason Fred Hampton had even stopped driving by the time of the movie was to prevent the police from constantly giving him frivolous traffic violations.

“It’s again sort of adopting the police version of events,” Balto says of the scene. “Generally speaking, the Panther version of events was that the police arrived, initiated violence, and Panthers fired back in self-defense. I mean, the full title of the Black Panther Party is ‘The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense.’”

This scene is also a weird echo of the way the police described the eventual raid that killed Hampton, right down to the shotgun. State’s Attorney Edward Hanrahan, whose office coordinated the raid on Hampton, said during a press conference after the raid, that as soon as the cops leading the raid announced themselves, “Occupants of the apartment attacked them with shotgun fire. The officers immediately took cover. The occupants continued firing at our policemen from several rooms within the apartment. Thereafter three times Sergeant Gross ordered his men to cease firing, and told the occupants to come out with their hands up. Each time one of the occupants replied ‘shoot it out’ and continued firing at the police officers.”

While the conventional wisdom would dictate that every story has multiple sides and the truth probably lies somewhere in between, in this case Hanrahan was found to be, shall we say, “lying out of his ass.” Many of what the police initially claimed were bullet holes coming from Panthers firing at them turned out to be nail heads. Later forensic analysis showed that while police fired more than 90 times during the raid, only one shot came from the Panthers. And that one shot was likely a “reflexive death-convulsion” fired after being shot.

The Death Of Jake Winters

In the movie, following the shootout at Panthers headquarters, Jake Winters (played by Algee Smith) finds out that his friend, Jimmy Palmer, the Panther who was in the hospital, has died. Winters is furious and suspects foul play, and he shows up at the house of a black janitor at the hospital demanding to know what happened. The janitor blows him off, saying something to the effect of, “Do you have any idea how treacherous these crackers down there is?”

The janitor is almost certainly invented, but it’s an effective device and a great line. In the film, Winters drops a gun while pounding on the janitor’s door. The janitor sees it, gets scared, and calls the police, setting the scene for the real-life shootout between Winters and the police. Winters wounds a police officer, who we see lying on his back, moaning “Please… please…” Winters walks up and shoots the cop in the head just before dying in a hail of bullets.

“I think that for the most part, that did sort of play out in the way that they depict it, in terms of the closing moment of that scene where he executes the cop at point-blank range,” Balto says.

“It’s important to also be conscious of the fact that we are singularly reliant on a police version of events because Jake Winters, when he had his last stand in Washington Park on the South Side, didn’t make it out. The eyewitnesses who were there to tell the story about what happened were all cops. But at the end of the day, two police were dead, one of whom with basically an execution-style wound to the head, and Winters was gunned down in a hail of bullets.”

Still, it wouldn’t have been unusual for the time for police to have exaggerated how savage or brutal a political enemy’s killing of an officer actually was. In the aftermath of the Attica Prison Riots (the story of which takes up the second half of the same Eyes On The Prize episode the Bill O’Neal interview came from), the warden initially claimed the prisoners had castrated their hostages and cut their throats. In reality, they turned out to have been killed by bullets, almost certainly fired by the officers who stormed the prison.

In Winters’ case, you could say that the film depicts “the facts as we know them.” Yet it’s also stripped of some important context. It’s also included in such a way that suggests a tit-for-tat gang war between the Panthers and the Chicago Police, rather than a fairly established pattern of oppression.

“It wasn’t just the fact of his friend getting killed that drove him to do this,” Balto says. “I mean, it was almost assuredly a response to this broader pattern of violence against young Black men and women at this time by police.”

“When Hampton goes and visits with Jake Winters’ mother after Winters is killed, she makes a passing reference to ‘Do you suppose the officers who killed the Soto brothers are getting these types of harassing phone calls?’”

“It’s a reference to two of the most recent and alarming murders of young Black men by the Chicago Police Department in the days and weeks leading up to the Winters standoff. John Soto was a teenager who was shot without provocation while unarmed by the Chicago Police Department. And then his older brother Michael, who was also very young and a community organizer, was home on leave for Vietnam. Michael organizes some protests against police brutality and within a few days of him burying his brother, the police kill him too.”

The way the film chooses to show the most graphic part (and the most graphic version of the most graphic part, with police as the only witnesses) seems to create a false equivalency with the police murder of Hampton. Who was himself killed with two shots to the head by members of the police raid. Who, according to Hampton’s girlfriend, Deborah Johnson (played by Dominique Fishback) were then overheard through the door saying “he’s good and dead now.”

Why do we get a Panther looking bloodthirsty while the Chicago Police get to commit their murder on the other side of a door? Certainly, there may be a justifiable reason, from that just being how the events were recounted by witnesses, to not knowing who actually pulled the trigger during the Hampton raid and not wanting to speculate, to simply not wanting to cheapen Fred Hampton by depicting his murder in too graphic a fashion. Lots of moviegoers might not want to see Fred Hampton get shot in the head, and that’s understandable.

Still, the result is 1: the two events are connected more in the film than they were in real life. 2: Hampton’s murder feels like the less “sensational”of the two in the movie, and perhaps less “outrageous” as a result. In reality, Winters was a guy trying to shoot his way out of a gunfight; Hampton was killed in a political assassination while he was drugged and asleep.

FBI Agent Roy Mitchell And The Informant, Bill O’Neal

That the pitch for Judas And The Black Messiah was “The Departed in the world of COINTELPRO” meant necessarily framing the story of Fred Hampton’s killing around this “lesser” character of Bill O’Neal, the FBI informant, played by Lakeith Stanfield. We see O’Neal stealing cars in the beginning of the film, and agreeing to inform for FBI agent Roy Mitchell, played by Jesse Plemons, both of which actually happened.

In both Eyes On The Prize and in Panthers lawyer Jeffrey Haas’ memoir, The Assassination Of Fred Hampton, the relationship between Mitchell and O’Neal was said to be like mentor/protege, or even father/son, with O’Neal seeing Mitchell as a kind of role model he’d never had (which is where the age of the principal characters does become relevant). The film runs with this version, largely revolving around these two characters. Yet the character of both men proves elusive, and hard to pin down.

“The story of how insidious that relationship was between Hampton and O’Neal didn’t just end with the assassination. William O’Neal literally carried Fred Hampton’s casket at his funeral, as one of the pallbearers,” Balto says.

The film depicts O’Neal, who was clearly crumbling in his Eyes On The Prize interview and committed suicide the day it aired, as a victim of the FBI, coerced into being an informant to avoid jail time or worse. Certainly, there was some justification for this.

The odder choice is the film’s treatment of FBI agent Roy Mitchell, who they also depict largely as someone who started fairly innocent, but was coerced into going along with J. Edgar Hoover’s nefarious plans by extreme intimidation.

In the film Mitchell (played, again excellently by the deft Jesse Plemons) is sort of a dowdy “both sides” kind of guy in the beginning, trying to build rapport with his informant by bragging that he helped take down the corrupt cops and Klansman who murdered some civil rights workers in Mississippi in 1964 (incidentally, an event that was depicted in the film Mississippi Burning). This apparently real chapter of Mitchell’s life was also mentioned in his 2000 obituary in the Chicago Tribune. We’re clearly meant to see Mitchell as sort of a “good guy” at the beginning, if flawed.

The question is, why?

This was a guy who, according to the same obituary, had nine different informants in the Black Panthers. Depicting Mitchell as genuinely a boy scout — rather as single-mindedly focused on catching whoever the boss told him to, or simply manipulative — requires giving Mitchell a kind of “heel turn” later in the movie to explain how he knowingly ends up planning Hampton’s murder. The film achieves this in the form of a visit by J. Edgar Hoover, played ghoulishly by Martin Sheen (a characterization Hoover almost certainly earned) who asks Mitchell pointedly, “What would you do if your daughter brought home a negro?”

Mitchell seems taken aback as to why Hoover would be asking these things about an infant, and the scene is a little convoluted, but the idea seems to be that Hoover got Mitchell to participate by threatening his family. It’s hard to understand how this benefits the story.

“J. Edgar Hoover was an absolutely horrible human being. But to the degree that that then translated into J. Edgar Hoover turning the screws on an otherwise unwilling FBI field agent is just… sort of unnecessary,” Balto says. “There’s plenty related to the assassination that is still withheld from the public, but I’ve gone through a couple thousand pages of FBI documents about the buildup to their surveillance of the Panthers and of Hampton, and there’s never been anything in it to indicate to me that Roy Mitchell was anything but just down to do what was necessary to just sort of neutralize Hampton.”

—

Who knows, maybe they thought it was more interesting to give Roy Mitchell an arc. Jesse Plemons was certainly entertaining to watch. Obviously, turning a time period that could easily make for five separate movies into a single definitive portrait of Fred Hampton and the Panthers requires cutting some corners. Not to mention that the history is so disputed that it’s impossible to do without making everyone angry. The filmmakers deserve credit just for finally getting a Fred Hampton movie made, let alone in a form the general public might actually see.

Even beyond that, the film sings in some of its more rousing Hampton moments, like when he’s building his Rainbow Coalition, uniting the Young Patriots and the Young Lords, and speaking in front of college students. Yet the film also weakens its own impact by including what feel stunted attempts at “both sides,” and by telling the story through O’Neal, whose personality even now seems largely inscrutable.

“I think that there’s so much to be said about why Fred Hampton not only mattered, but continues to matter,” Balto says. “There are so many lessons about the work that he did and the political philosophies that he articulated — there’s just so many lessons in his brief life’s work that would be valuable, especially for young organizers today.”

‘Judas and the Black Messiah’ is currently streaming via HBO Max. Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can access his archive of reviews here.

There are hundreds of quotes out there from celebrities who are grateful for their fame but share some of the downsides of being a household name. For Billie Eilish, it took her a while to come around to being famous, but now she “f*cking [loves] it.”

She made that reveal on a recent episode of SmartLess, a podcast hosted by Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes, and Will Arnett, on which she was joined by her brother Finneas. Eilish said:

“The parts I hated three years ago, those are the parts that I’m digging now. Fame, in general, I used to just despise it, I hated everything about it. I hated being recognized, I hated not being able to go out, I hated not being able to post a place because then people would show up at that place wherever it was because they’d figure out where it is. And I felt stupid because I had this thing that like, is really cool, people would kill for, and I didn’t like it at all. And I was also forgetting that I was really, really depressed and that can make you hate almost anything. I don’t really know what changed, but I f*cking love fame. I love it. I definitely like what I’m doing with it. I feel more confident with it.”

She also said something similar during a 2019 interview with Vanity Fair: “I like being famous, but I used to hate it. I hated doing press and I hated being recognized and I hated kind of everything that had to do with it. There’s a lot in fame that’s f*cking gross and horrible and just miserable, but I’m very grateful for it, and it’s really rare and I’m very lucky, so I’m done with complaining about it.”

Check out the full SmartLess episode below.

Conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh died on Wednesday, leaving behind a complicated legacy. You had people like Ben Shapiro calling him an “iconic” voice, while others pointed out that it’s tempting to “treat Rush Limbaugh with the same dignity, respect, and humanity as he showed to rape victims, Michael J. Fox, Sandra Fluke, Iraq War veterans, refugees, and the victims of mosque shootings.” Even Donald Trump broke his radio silence to call into Fox News for the first time since he left the White House in January to mourn his friend — and whine about the election.

“After 27 days in hiding, Trump called into Fox News today to talk about his friend Rush Limbaugh who died. And what a beautiful tribute it was,” Jimmy Kimmel said, dripping with sarcasm, at the beginning of Wednesday’s Jimmy Kimmel Live. Trump said Limbaugh “thought we won, and so do I. I think we won substantially… He thought it was over at 10:00; 10:30, it was over. A lot of other people feel that way, but Rush felt that way strongly.” This is somehow a worst tribute than “rest in piss” trending on Twitter.

“Anyway, who died again?” Kimmel joked after playing Trump’s sound clip. “There’s no ‘I’ in eulogy, Don.” He also pointed out that Fox News crew “did everything possible to tee him up to talk about Rush, but somehow, it kept coming back to the election that he still thinks he won. Well, I have to believe that listening to Trump blather on nonsensically about himself is what Rush would have wanted.” You can watch the clip above.

Texas’ current nightmare has made this one hell of a week for Lone Star State residents. The devastating ice storm has ripped the state’s free-standing power grid apart, leaving millions of people without power (electricity, heat, and in. many cases, water) for days. They’re literally freezing (and the death toll is climbing), and that led to the resurfacing of poorly aged tweets from Texas politicians, including the much maligned Senator Ted Cruz, who previously mocked California during its past power outages. Cruz appeared to gain an uncharacteristic slice of humility while tweeting, “I got no defense” and adding several “stay safe!” tweets throughout the day.

Cruz even stopped throwing a tantrum over people laughing at him for falling for a conservative parody story. It was strange! It didn’t feel right for Cruz to roll over and play nice, and as the day wore on, people noticed that the dude was quiet. As Vox’s Aaron Rupar noted on Twitter, “Ted Cruz isn’t shi*posting or trying to own libs on Twitter which strongly suggests something is up.” As it turns out, Cruz wasn’t “sh*tposting” because his phone was probably on airplane mode.

Photos surfaced of a man who looked very much like Ted Cruz flying out of Houston late Wednesday afternoon on a flight to Cancun, Mexico (which is currently sitting at a balmy 80 degrees). This seemed, at once, to be something that Ted Cruz would actually do — flee to a warm and sunny vacation spot while his constituents suffered without being able to warm their families — and something that he’d probably be too smart to actually do during a crisis. Well, people dug into clues (it sure looked like this guy has the same questionable haircut), and as Keith Edwards (a Jon Ossoff staffer) tweeted, “Ok, at first I didn’t think this was ted cruz, but this person has the same mask as the senator.” Screencap times aided the impromptu online investigation.

Journalist David Schuster confirmed the reports of #CancunCruz as truth, and he tweeted, “[H]is family flew to Cancun tonight for a few days at a resort they’ve visited before. Cruz seems to believe there isn’t much for him to do in Texas for the millions of fellow Texans who remain without electricity/water and are literally freezing.”

Ted Cruz couldn’t have picked a worse look during his state’s emergency. Former Rep. (and almost successful Cruz senatorial challenger) Beto O’Rourke blasted Cruz (who he called a seditionist) for apparently hightailing it to Cancun “when people are literally freezing to death in the state that he’s elected to represent and serve.”

Obviously (and justifiably), people are outraged that Cruz would do this during his state’s widening emergency (and while people are still suffering during a pandemic, too).

This tweet may sum up the situation in the best possible way.

A lot can change in a year. For hip-hop, that year was 2011. Coming in the middle of the blog rap free-for-all that spawned many of today’s top-line performers, 2011 was the year that set the tone, style, and direction of the decade to come. Think about it: With the exception of a handful of explosive breakouts in the interim, rap and hip-hop have been dominated by artists who either debuted or came into their own that year. Between then and now, we’ve seen many of those artists evolve, regress, take wild left turns, and become reclusive, legendary figures, but their innovations and influences have reverberated out into the wider pop culture universe like ripples in pond water. These albums are the stones that created those ripples, changing the course of hip-hop and helping to make it the global force it is today.

ASAP Rocky — Live Love ASAP

Wait a minute. You mean to tell me that a born-and-bred Harlem kid could produce a mixtape sounding like a demon death-child of Houston screw and Memphis crunk, rapping almost solely about the high-low collision of streetwear and luxury labels, and not only have an indelible hit on his hands but also near singlehandedly revive both regional styles on a national level and make that sort of cross-country mashup not only acceptable but the de facto default mode of hip-hop in ten years?

Sign me the f*ck up.

Big KRIT — Return Of 4eva

Big KRIT brought back the era of the self-produced rapper — or the rapping producer, depending on how you look at it. While his fortunes waned in the wake of his ill-fated major deal with Def Jam, Return Of 4eva helped spark a new wave of producer-rappers and helped keep the Pimp C/DJ Paul-style soul-sample-and-heavy-808 production alive. Return Of 4eva is still considered one of the definitive projects of the so-called “blog era” and I would dare to go a step further in saying it was probably the capstone of the “mixtape era” that preceded and bled over into it. Previous to Return Of 4eva, you could get away with filling out a mixtape with radio record freestyles and throwaway tracks. After that, the bar was raised; anything less than a straight-up album wouldn’t cut it, because KRIT gave us 21 songs and 75 minutes of original production, razor-sharp lyricism, and raw, unfiltered Southern realness — and he did everything himself.

Danny Brown — XXX

Without Danny Brown’s druggy, cantankerous yowl and misfit storytelling, hip-hop may never have had space for the sort of weirdoes that he inspired. Just look at Jpegmafia, who switches from glum-raps to antic shouts over some of the glitchiest, least radio-friendly production imaginable. There’s no doubt in my mind that XXX also paved the way for the apocalypse-in-progress beats and bracing, face-punching wrath of Run The Jewels to complete for Grammys.

Drake — Take Care

The album that more or less birthed the entire generation of hip-hop that succeeded it, Take Care is considered by many to be Drake’s sole classic — debatable — as well as the most cohesive effort of his career. When he boasted that every song “sounds like Drake featuring Drake,” those words would prove to be prophetic, as his filtered ’90s soul-sampling ways would form the foundation of seemingly every new artist’s sound from Bryson Tiller to Doja Cat, with even the more rebellious and original-sounding acts riding the border between reactionary rejection to begrudging homage. This is not fame; this is clout.

Frank Ocean — Nostalgia, Ultra

In 2011, Frank Ocean was the odd man out of the Odd Future collective. Although he’d shown he could deliver snarky bars right alongside his Fairfax-raised brethren, his stock in trade was singing and emotive songwriting in the mode of the then-burgeoning alternative R&B style some publications at the time tried to dub “PB&R” — thank goodness that never stuck. Nostalgia, Ultra was somehow the perfect term to describe the dreamy often fictionalized world of this tape’s tracks, which voraciously pillaged Eagles samples and the glitchy pop of Mr. Hudson alike, laying the groundwork for the omnivorous intake of hip-hop’s producers for the decade to come.

J. Cole — Cole World: The Sideline Story

It’s almost quaint to go back and revisit J. Cole’s grasping debut effort, but let’s be honest; without “Work Out,” the North Carolina neo-backpack rapper may well have maxed out with Friday Night Lights and finally chased those hoop dreams, consigned to the heap of hyper lyrical underground forebears who couldn’t hack it in the mainstream. For better or worse, Cole World solidified Jermaine’s standing in pop-rap fans’ collective awareness, ensuring that the version of him we’ve come to know, love, and make memes about would be able to go multiple times platinum with no features.

Jay-Z and Kanye West — Watch The Throne

The “Black Excellence/materialistic success as revolutionary act” wave started here (and I’m still not sure that’s a good thing), with Jay-Z and Kanye kicking open the doors to nominally white spaces (shout-out to class solidarity) and contemplating million-dollar canvases for their illustrious cribs. Not to mention, Kanye helped Jay remain relevant after some critical missteps — Kingdom Come and Blueprint 3 nearly did irreparable damage to Jay’s cool quotient — while Jay lent Kanye the artistic credibility for which he’d longed but had always been a tad bit too crass to carry off. Since then, they’ve both done their best to undo that good work, but it’s a testament to how good it was that the slew of joint albums that followed are unavoidably compared to The Throne.

Kendrick Lamar — Section.80

I almost didn’t even want to add this project, because its influence is… highly debatable? I mean, Kendrick Lamar is just so unique, so inimitable, he’s practically a self-contained universe of rap unto himself. There still isn’t anything out like Section.80. But maybe that’s the point. Kendrick influenced his damn self. Then, just to showboat a little, completely cracked the direct-to-consumer digital distribution model before anyone else had really figured it out. Was Section.80 a mixtape or an album? What did it matter in the long run, when it showed that an independent artist could put out a project and make money on it, with no major label budgets or marketing at a time that the music industry was still struggling to get its head and hands around the digital age? While everyone else panicked, TDE made moves and those moves made the singular Kendrick the defining artist of a generation.

Mac Miller — Blue Slide Park

Blue Slide Park won’t be remembered as Mac Miller’s best project. That honor likely belongs to The Divine Feminine or Swimming. It was also not his most groundbreaking or innovative work, or his most beloved. It received mixed reviews from critics on arrival and unsurprisingly failed to help him rise to the star status he would later achieve. But with all that against it, it rose to No. 1 on the Billboard 200 — the first independent album to do so since the mid-90s. It was the first inkling that the rules of the music world as we knew them had shifted in favor of the little guy. Even mixtape juggernauts like Drake, J. Cole, and Kendrick Lamar all eventually linked up with majors to rack up major sales. Miller’s feat proved that all it took was major love from a small but dedicated cadre of fans. Eventually, the Frick Park playground for which he’d named the album was unofficially renamed in his honor (it’s eligible for an official change in September of this year).

Phonte — Charity Starts At Home

Beyond statistical achievements or critical awards, Phonte’s first solo effort independent of Little Brother and The Foreign Exchange proved one thing: Hip-hop could grow up. The genre had long been considered the purview of teens and young adults (with good reason when you consider the genre was basically invented piece by piece by basically a pack of 8th graders in New York), but with Charity, Phonte pushed the boundaries toward topics like marital malaise, having a career outside of hip-hop, and yes, aging gracefully inside a genre that wants you to do anything but. Six years before 4:44 was hailed as the evolution of “dad rap,” Phonte quietly carved out a new niche, unheralded but content with his contribution, knowing that hip-hop would eventually have to catch up. Father Time is, after all, undefeated.

Tyler The Creator — Goblin

Goblin didn’t exactly reinvent any wheels. Horrorcore-style shock raps had been around for a cool decade and a half when Tyler The Creator first pretended to eat a cockroach and hang himself in the video for “Yonkers.” But no one before or since has been so thoroughly capable of capturing the public’s attention, gluing it on, and running with it for so long, through so many evolutions and artistic detours that the artist today is hardly recognizable from the one who broke every industry convention a decade ago — something he seems content with. He’s since become the convention himself; just check out the remnants of Raider Klan or Brockhampton, the heirs apparent to the Odd Future mantle.

The Weeknd — House Of Balloons

If Nostalgia, Ultra showcased all the bright prospects of the 10 years ahead, House Of Balloons exposed their seedy underbellies, its icy, disaffected take on the era of ever more extravagant corporate-sponsored parties reflected in the deconstructed pop culture posts that held up Tumblr’s decaying framework well after the platform had been cannibalized by… well… corporate sponsors. Abel’s immaculately curated artifice is evident in the rollouts of mysterious artists like HER and RMR, who emerge from seemingly nowhere, swathed in shadows but glittering with potential.

Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.