139. Black Sabbath, "Paranoid"

 

This past Saturday I went, as I do most years, to the Huichica music festival in Sonoma, which usually has an eclectic lineup and a mellow, stoned crowd.  This year, one of the most fun bands was Starcrawler, who have been described as "blending the sludgy, doom-laden riffs of Black Sabbath with the urgent pop-punk of the Runaways."  (They were great, btw.)  I bring this up to note that Black Sabbath still continues to cast a lengthy shadow on today's music, one long enough to reach a female-fronted glam-rock band from LA.

This album, Sabbath's second, is also their best-selling and most well-known.  It is just chock full of metal goodness.  The band originally wanted to call it "War Pigs," after the opening song of the same name (which Ozzy Osbourne originally wanted to title "Walpurgis," after some Satanic thing or another, just imagine), but their label heard the song "Paranoid," thought it would be a hit, and insisted on the name change.  Lo and behold, it was a hit, but "War Pigs" survived to become an legendary metal song as well.

This is also the album with "Iron Man," the first riff anyone plays when they're trying out a new distortion pedal.  My very favorite thing about this song is that Ozzy originally titled it "Iron Bloke," I mean how screamingly English can you get.  Ozzy was a great metal singer, but lyricist he was not.  Still, the lyrics to Iron Man kinda crack me up:

Has he lost his mind?
Can he see or is he blind?
Can he walk at all
Or if he moves, will he fall?
Is he alive or dead?
Has he thoughts within his head?
We'll just pass him there
Why should we even care?

I can't explain why these are funny, they just are.  Maybe because "Has he thoughts within his head" sounds so genteel and later in the song he's crushing people with his "boots of lead."

Ozzy was reintroduced to American audiences as the lovable, doddering patriarch of his clan in the MTV reality series "The Osbournes," but old heads know that Ozzy was considered a dangerous and transgressive character in his prime in the 70's.  His drinking and drug use were legendary, and the story about him biting the head off of a live bat is an indelible part of rock n roll lore.  And this album, of course, influenced an entire generation of metal and metal-adjacent artists.  It's really amazing how much you can still hear this album today, in Metallica and modern metallers like Mastodon and even in a glam-rock band from LA.

Since every album from here on out is probably going to belong in the top 500, I'm introducing a new feature, "Is this album in my personal Top 500?"

Is this album in my personal Top 500? I think so!