1970: Black Sabbath, Paranoid
By Patrick Blagrave
Travel through time to the right moment, to a city nearly obliterated just twenty years earlier but rebuilt as an industrial core to power a bygone empire, and you might see among the dread and the drudging workers a man and metal converging. A pivotal moment: after the pain and the shock that some things might never again be within his reach, the man thinks for a moment that Birmingham 1965 is the end of the world. Or his world, anyway. Certainly one of his worlds: the only one without droning toil, pressing and pulling to ensure the sound movement of machines for other people’s profits, like so many others like him. He was trapped, and there was a cleaving: he tore his hands from the metal, tore the life off his fingertips, saw the skeleton that would outlive him, regardless of how his life was used, taunting him underneath.
Replacing pieces of himself with melted household plastic, learning that some darker sounds are easier to find when you’ve had a life like his, resentful of how much it can take from you while giving so little back, Tony Iommi set to making a score for the apocalypse he glimpsed in that moment and in so many others, in the everyday struggling of the futureless people around him: one characterized by terror made only more frightening by its punishing reiteration.
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In Black Sabbath’s songs, the world is ending all the time and it’s someone’s fault. It’s the person with their finger on the launch button; it’s the politicians who send people to kill and to their deaths; it’s an inscrutable time-traveler; it’s some version of a devil that’s all too human; it’s often ourselves. And the world does end constantly and it always has and too often there is someone to blame, but in real life that culpability is harder to parse than it is in a pulp fantasy turned to thick sludge and a haunting wail and echoing chords.
On Paranoid the world ends at least three times, in nearly every other song. By war, by nuclear annihilation, by revenge plot, by anguish, the characters in Geezer Butler’s lyrics document myriad and maybe inevitable ways that life becomes doomed.
At the core of the album is an especially memorable apocalypse, likely Iommi’s most enduring composition: “Iron Man.” The riff here in particular is indelible: almost cinematically evocative on its own, it’s hard to imagine Geezer writing anything else but about heavy footfalls and impending doom; even the dizzying back and forth at its center suits the narrative perfectly. The lyrics tell the story of a hero who goes to the future to save humanity from some unnamed danger but who, through the mysterious hazards of time travel, is transformed into unspeaking metal on his way back to his past. Those who should celebrate him scorn and ignore him until he takes revenge and “kills the people he once saved,” ultimately becoming exactly the villain that he once set out to defeat.
It is a neat cycle and frightening not only because of its trepidatious score and scary monster but because of the deep implications being explored in what might seem like a simple and sensational story. If asked to imagine the world as a battle between those who are good and those who are evil, it is perhaps easy to think of ourselves as good. But how often do we spurn the helpless? And how often do we, when pushed, become the thing that we hate, that we know the world needs less of, that we task ourselves with overcoming in better times?
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Maybe a riff is a way to command time, a spell to control endings. A riff has a clear open and close but employed and reiterated within a song it becomes potentially infinite, so much so that when it stops it feels arbitrary and jarring until the next track starts with a new one. It holds you still even while everything else—a brief thought or a newly constructed universe—flits by you.
A good riff allows us to live forever in a few seconds at a time, making it past the expected expiration again and again. We exit each vicious cycle, but not unscathed. It’s at once a fantasy about superhuman resilience—death-defying—and a tragic acknowledgment of limits: we live on only to experience the same brief thing over again, each time more complicated by what else has passed alongside it, with stakes getting higher until, finally, silence.
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Go back in time again, further, to many worlds ago where an aristocratic Anglo-Saxon woman with the name Walpurga came from a line of saints and then on May 1, 870, was herself canonized a saint for her life’s work directing Germanic pagans to Christianity. If you fear black magic it has been believed since her death that she is especially adept at protecting those who pray to her from the perils of witchcraft. But over the ensuing millennium, her feast on May 1, called Walpurgis, and traditional pagan customs around May Day and folktales of witches (which prevailed despite her best efforts) converged in some areas of Europe. On its eve, either to celebrate or to scare away spirits depending on one’s beliefs, people dress as witches and demons, revel and dance, play pranks, and light bonfires. It is impossible to know what rituals are done to ward off supposed evil and which are welcoming manifestations of it.
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By 1970, the feast was so muddled with its antithesis that Geezer understood that “‘Walpurgis’ is sort of like Christmas for Satanists.” Walpurgis was the original name of the album and its opening song, both of which were changed to “War Pigs” at their record company’s insistence.
It’s clear in many early interviews Geezer gave that he believed fiercely in the power of something that he referred to as “the Devil,” and understood many of the problems he saw in the world around him—especially war and inequality—as the Devil’s work. In one interview from 1971, he claims first that “It’s a satanic world. […] The devil’s more in control now, and happier than ever before. […] People can’t come together, there’s no equality […] and it’s a sin to put yourself above other people, and yet, that’s what people do” and later that: “people don’t live a spiritual life, they only live for now, the devil rules them. That’s what my poems are about, things that are happening now. War and paranoia, death and hate. It gets people to thinking about what’s going on.” Speaking about “War Pigs” in particular, he clarifies however that “Satan isn’t a spiritual thing, it’s warmongers. That’s who the real Satanists are, all these people who are running the banks and the world and trying to get the working class to fight the wars for them.”
In that song and in others, Satan is depicted as a very real presence nonetheless. Here, generals and politicians are his perverse servants, leading the working class to cause devastation as part of a ritual to appease some wicked supernatural agenda. By the end, gleeful over the sacrifices made, so empowered by sin that even those acting on his behalf cower, inheriting a world of ash and darkness we prepared for him, Satan, laughing, spreads his wings.
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As the band was gaining some notoriety, they caught the attention of practicing Satanists, who contacted them to ask if they would perform at a ritual. They said no, for which, the story goes, they were cursed. To ward off the evil, the band wore large metal crosses around their necks. Ozzy’s father fashioned them at the factory where he worked.
Though their first self-titled album, which had come out only months before Paranoid, was perhaps less political in its evocation of Satan than would be the case in “War Pigs,” and, in songs like “N.I.B.” and “Black Sabbath,” more about capturing the shocking horror the band saw in Hammer Film movies, the association of the band with Satanism is something that would heavily impact the way their music came to be interpreted. On this album at least, where almost every track is filled with nightmarish sequels to real world scenarios, and where, granted, the Devil wins often but it is only ever tragedy, it is hard to imagine the music itself—outside of the branding and reputations that would develop—as anything but a warning rather than an invitation. Nevertheless, for reasons in and out of the band’s control, they clearly hold both contradictory parts within them. As often happens when dealing with the Devil, we can seem partial to his party and not even know it.
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I am traveling time once more, hoping to save myself.
I am playing Paranoid on my portable CD player on the nearly empty yellow bus that collects the students who live in the city-limits and brings them to the private Catholic high school I attend in a lush suburb of Philadelphia. They are singing about the wickedness of those with power and wealth. The guitar sounds great when played loud enough to block out whatever the kids in the back are saying. The people in power are begging for mercy for their sins. They’re laughing. Or they are singing about a paranoia that looks more like depression, how inescapable it feels. Even if we didn’t all get off the same bus together everyone would know we didn’t belong there. Or they are singing about someone I thought I would have recognized from a comic book, but this hero can’t talk, is consumed by resentment.
Very few who know me now knew me back then because very few people knew me then. People who know me now might say I’m quiet or sometimes shy, but between the ages of about ten to sixteen, my anxiety was so strong that I could hardly ever speak. I would go days, possibly weeks if not called on in class, without a word uttered publicly, my body arranged to take up as little space as possible despite being taller than everyone else already, often desperate for isolation.
Geezer Butler once explained Black Sabbath’s lyrics by saying “I'd been raised a Catholic so I totally believed in the Devil,” and so did I. There was a lot of ornamentation and some strained sense of community and a lot of bad politics and occasionally something approaching celebration, but what I remember most from my childhood religious education was the absolute dread. Constantly attempting to tally my relative guilt from the age of eight in case of death, I lived for a long time paralyzed by fear of doing evil, of committing any act that could mark my conscience or ruin my chances of enjoying the paradise I was told about. Surely it is easier to stand still, to keep silent, than to engage in a world where sin is unavoidable.
And like Geezer and the other members of Black Sabbath I grew up without money, in a working-class neighborhood where some of my struggling family had been for generations, though at the point I was born most of the factories and warehouses had been closed for a decade or more. You could drive by them and see their infinite shattered windows, the way weeds worked with whatever they had to to thrive. Anxiety about money was inherited, as even from a young age one can discern what certain secret kitchen conversations between adults mean, or how fearful they can look counting their groceries and coupons one more time before check-out against the bank balance in their head. Still I hoped I could be immune to it somehow, and I vowed to be, despite all the evidence that it was inevitable. As if my parents or theirs wanted any of it. As if it was a shameful choice to be complicit in a system powered by our ruin rather than something coerced. As if one can opt out of it.
We all learn, and I did very soon after, that it is not possible to opt out. We all become in some ways a disappointment to earlier, easier ideals. We can often become the thing we hated and feared in another time, whether in the eyes of others or in our honest reflection. We have no control over the ruin sometimes. We can be made to seek it out, to be agents of ruin. As an American, as I work for a company that profits by making the world a little worse, as I give money to banks and student loan companies that make the world a lot worse, even as I drive and eat and clothe and shelter myself, I can no longer pretend to see no evil as I desperately hoped to. There is no detaching ourselves from a system that consumes us and forces us to consume. When every day I actively or passively sin in ways that may foreclose a better world, when I allow my life to repeat the same progression I know to be doomed, how is it possible not to be paranoid? How can we make peace with our damned selves?
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What are you going to do? The band raises a question on this album that they would revisit often in their work, though something approaching an answer doesn’t come until Master of Reality’s “Children of the Grave” with its call for revolution. In Paranoid all the options are dire, and none of its songs capture the repercussions of an impossibly complicated world on an individual as well as “Hand of Doom.” It’s the story of a Vietnam veteran—precisely one of the poor that politicians mobilized earlier in “War Pigs”—home after causing devastation who, disgusted and disillusioned, turns to drugs. The song addresses the subject in the second person: “Now, you wait your turn, / You know there's no return.” He is convinced by his grim experience of what we might all at times fear: that the pain we contribute to the world and the damage done to us by systems that keep it running the way it is are sometimes unforgivable, and in the absence of redemption there is only darkness and death. He knows this; he hastens toward that oblivion.
It is a dirge, devoid of any romanticism. We are shown the depths of his addiction, its effects on his mind and body, down to the spasms at his death. Ozzy’s anguished voice recounting it as if it is happening to the listener is chilling; it forces us to live through the self-hatred and the slow meaningless demise, the few futile moments where he might still reconsider. By making it feel like the listener’s own, the song instills an especially intimate horror. For the right listener maybe it even gives cause to re-evaluate their own life and the ways they sometimes seek escape from it.
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I believe Ozzy when in “Paranoid” he sings “I want you to enjoy life, / I wish I could but it’s too late.” Even when he cannot believe in love, when happiness seems illusory, there is hope the next person might have it better. Paranoid is a bleak album, its morality plays often ending before they share what might redeem us, but “it gets people thinking about what’s going on,” and maybe that’s enough to change what’s going on. But it can also show us that if we can name the ways that this degraded world demands we become a worse version of ourselves to survive, and if we can remember that damnation is not as inevitable as it feels, there’s still a hope that we can avoid the day we feel the Devil’s wings stirring closer, or at least not hear his delighted laughter as we pass. And even if not, maybe in another world or another time, someone else after us can save themselves, or their world, or their future.
Patrick Blagrave is a poet, editor, and debtor from Philadelphia. His first book, Profit | Prophet, is available from Recenter Press. Some other writing can be found in Peace, Land, and Bread, SORTES, Recenter Press Poetry Journal, Apiary, and Bedfellows. Prolit Magazine, which he founded in 2019, publishes writing and art about money, work, and class.