Prestige television has all kinds of genre conventions, from "complicated" leads to eerie opening credits. One of the more inconsistent is the use of popular music. I guess we can blame this on David Chase, who used music masterfully on The Sopranos. Few of his imitators are as good.
It'd been awhile since any TV show had used popular music in a way that excited me. Plenty, like Handmaid's Tale, were so ham-fisted and maladroit in their use of music that I had to stop watching them. However, Sharp Objects actually did something interesting.
There's a lot of Led Zeppelin, which was a shock since Page and Plant are very protective of having their music used by others. For a long time they would just not license anything. The very fact that they gave their assent was a sign that something good was happening here. After the last episode I thought that I would never be able to hear "Thank You" or "In The Evening" the same way again.
It's rare that a film or TV can alter the meaning of music that is so ingrained in the culture. Usually this happens with obscure songs that get used in things, allowing people to discover them by associating the song with the film or show. Quentin Tarantino has a strong track record of this kind of thing going back to "Stuck In The Middle With You" in Reservoir Dogs, for instance.
Jean-Marc Vallee pulled off this coup because he understands the deeper currents in Zep. On the surface level, Led Zeppelin are the avatars of cock rock, the unfortunate wellspring for every hair metal band in the 80s. (Those groups always name-checked Zeppelin in their interviews.) This is the Zeppelin of "Black Dog" and "Whole Lotta Love," a swaggering parody of male sexual desire.
However, there is another, better version of Zeppelin. Their best songs are less bombastic and more mysterious, evoking uncanny and spooky feelings. Even some of their most famous tracks, like "Kashmir," have this element. Vallee used one of their later tunes, "In The Evening," for this effect. While the lyrics are very cock rockish, the start is spooky, and the riff that comes crashing in has a loopy, disoriented quality to it. The uncannyness of Zeppelin is why I tend to listen to them the most in the spring and especially the fall, when you can feel the life of the earth draining away on a brisk October evening. This feeling is perfect for the very spooky and unsettling Sharp Objects.
Led Zeppelin had an infamous reputation in the 1970s, from the "shark incident" (look it up, if you dare) to Jimmy Page having a relationship with a teenaged girl. The misogynistic pig culture of 70s rock bands was turned up to 11 with them. However, Sharp Objects shows how the music itself is often very appealing to young women. It's a young woman who turns Camille on to their music. When I was in 10th grade it was a junior girl whose Zeppelin fandom inspired me to listen deeper than "Stairway to Heaven." The Led Zeppelin tribute album that came out in the mid-1990s had a couple of good tracks amidst the dross (as all tribute albums do), and Tori Amos' take on "Thank You" was probably the best.
That song was meant as a romantic dedication from a man to a woman, but in Sharp Objects it stands in for the relationship between Camille and the young woman who introduces her to Led Zeppelin in the mental hospital. "Thank You" probably works better as a hymn to deep friendship than romantic love, and that's how I'll hear it from now on.
That such a reinterpretation is possible is down to the depth of the source material. "Thank You" is almost fifty years old now, but hardly feels so. Sharp Objects stands as a reminder that Led Zeppelin made far more meaningful music than we often give them credit for.
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