OK today we pay tribute to one of the great singles of heavy
metal music. And it’s Ozzy Osbourne’s birthday. Oh, I know Ozzy has been a
TV-star clown for most of recent memory, with his reality show
The Osbournes (2002-05), but before he played himself as an addled middle-aged rock star, he was known
only as the frontman, and the shrieky, whiny voice, often sounding strangled by
passion, of Black Sabbath.
My older brother brought home
Paranoid after its release in 1971
in the U.S. And we all got onboard. Me, by then I was already a confirmed
reader of Poe and those collections of tales published under the banner of
Alfred Hitchcock or with names like
11 Tales of Terror, to say nothing of
sci-fi as in Ray Bradbury, and, of course
Creepy and
Eerie magazines, and Hammer and Universal monster movies. The sound
of Black Sabbath was, indeed, a bit creepy and eerie, not least the lead-off
song on the album, “War Pigs”—which was the original title of the album—with its
searing opening line “Generals gathered in their masses / Just like witches at
Black Masses.” These were songs that sounded like they were meant to be unsettling, Gothic. And “Hand of Doom,” about a heroin-addicted vet, scared the
bejeesus out of me. This wasn’t the kind of flirting with heroin addiction that seemed a badge of hipness as with the Stones. This was dismal and deadening.
But what we mainly took from Black Sabbath’s second album—and to
some extent from its debut,
Black Sabbath (1970)—was the power of Tony Iommi’s riff-rock,
and Bill Ward’s sledgehammer drumming, and the mordant lyrics and thick slabs
of bass guitar from Geezer Butler, and, of course, the gasping frenzy of Ozzy’s
vocals. For a brief shining moment, they were
the band—because, when you’re 12, nothing gets you going like death
and destruction and apocalyptic visions and, yeah, the supreme dissociation of
today’s song.
Finished with my woman
/ ’Cause she couldn’t help me with my mind / People think I’m insane / Because I
am frowning all the time. As a pre-teen, the idea that a woman could
actually help you with your mind was news to me. But that part about frowning
all the time was key, as I felt myself to be a rather dour dude, where others
were concerned anyway. I’m not saying I was proto-Goth or anything, but, like
many kids that age, felt exiled to my own personal fantasia where the only saving
grace would be: if the world would change, change utterly. Down with suburbia!
Down with mediocrity in taste and entertainment! Down with the war in Vietnam!
Down with mandatory church services! Etc.
As an adult hearing this song—and I went back and picked up
this kind of staple of my early years around 1999 in an effort to get closer to
that kid I was—I’m still floored by that snap and fuzzed guitar at the end of
each verse’s second line. It feels like jaws clamping. And the bridge is so
incredible because it’s so fast and so unencumbered by any purpose other than
giving us a breather from trying to fling words into that relentless, driving
rhythm. And I swear to God I always heard the end as “And so as you hear these
words / Telling you now of my state / I tell you to end your life / I wish I
could but it’s too late.” Granted it doesn’t make too much sense—when is it
ever too late to end your life?—but it never occurred to me that he says “I
tell you to enjoy life,” simply because that would be so unlike the Oz.
Happiness I cannot
feel / And love to me is so unreal. As the Geezer himself has said, what
the song really describes is depression, not paranoia per se. I won’t say that
I was ever actually depressed, in that sense, nor ever paranoid, but I do
recognize the pithy virtues of those lines. It’s not that one doesn’t feel “loved”
(whatever that means) as a kid, but one hasn’t yet understood what it means to
be in an adult relationship. All of that eludes one, stuck in kidstuff and
bored by what adults seem to find acceptable as pastimes.
The song plays, lyrically, as a cri de coeur of someone lost
and hoping to find someone or something to give purpose to his life. But the
song feels like an adrenalin rush, a fully empowered exultation in feeling
cut-off from one’s fellows, of shunning the cheap emotions that pass for “happiness”
among the dazed and confused. “Can you help me occupy my brain?” he asks, and
that’s a key line. The idea that being “wasted” is actually the state of
wasting one’s time by having nothing worthwhile to think about. That “mindless”
occupations occupy one’s time but not one’s brain is the rub. That sort of thing certainly jells with middle school, and all too often the rest of life as well.
All day long I think
of things / But nothing seems to satisfy could well be my motto
.
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