So there's an old guy called Robert Plant touring the world right now. He used to be the singer in a legendary rock band, Tin Aircraft I think? Anyway, he's an old dude these days. His beard and hair are mostly white. If you squint, you might recognize the Golden God that he no longer is. Because he doesn't live in the past, however glorious it may have been.
What he does is play music. And he's fucking good at it. His band is fantastic, too. Sure, they don't cater to the power chord-hungry masses. Even if they wanted to, the singer probably couldn't. At the end of the day, this is 2018. The guy is in his seventies. He's moved on, and so have we. Most of us, anyway.
Of course they played some songs made famous by Zeppelin. Bobby would get lynched if they didn't. But their set didn't rely on nostalgia or rock clichés. What we got instead was a bunch of great songs and great performances that drew from the blues (of course), rave, rockabilly, country, north African music and much more.
There are plenty of old rockers playing the nostalgia circuit but Robert Plant just isn't one of them. When the Who are plotting an umpteenth farewell tour, catering to the masses wanting to hear people in their seventies singing how they hope to die before they get old, Robert just keeps looking ahead.
Why is that? What is the difference between him and all his former peers, content to tour their nostalgia-peddling routine from stadium to stadium once every four years? Honesty perhaps. Some spirit of adventure. Mostly it's a little thing called class.
