OPE! Mixtape #56: Becoming Led Zeppelin & The 2025 Rock Hall Nominees

This week's winner: Gen-X and Millennials rewriting Boomer history

Welcome to OPE!, the ranch dressing of music blogs, by writer and music journalist Brady Gerber. This newsletter is where I share the top music news of the week, my favorite (and new-to-me) songs and links, and various musings on life. All typos are intentional.

Well, hello there. How are you?

Programming note: No OPE! newsletter next week. I’m getting surgery this Monday and I’m taking next week off to recover. Assuming everything goes well, OPE! will be back in early March.

For paying subscribers: This week, I break down this year’s nominees for the 2025 Rock Hall. The nominees went live the morning I sent out last week’s newsletter, so forgive me if it already feels like ancient news. Overall, it’s a boring year that’s 95% filled with my comfort foods. So, a wash?

In the meantime, I wanted to share my latest New York Magazine feature: my break of the new Led Zeppelin IMAX documentary.

You can read it here: https://www.vulture.com/article/becoming-led-zeppelin-isnt-trying-to-tell-the-whole-story.html

Overall, despite its many eye-rolling “everything we did was smart and correct and everyone else was wrong to disagree with us” moments, I do recommend checking out this documentary, especially if you’re a casual Zeppelin fan and don’t know the band’s early history, even if that early history isn’t as interesting as all the myths surrounding them, some of which I try to break down in my features (including mudshark, which, yikes). I’m serious when I say this is the best Led Zeppelin has ever sounded in a theater. I smiled like an idiot when “Whole Lotta Love” started blasting on the IMAX speakers.

Crazy thought: Led Zeppelin is pretty great.

But enough about all that. Here are this week’s top music news, and my favorite links and songs …

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