1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 193. Black Sabbath – Paranoid (1970)

 

Back to some heavy metal again, and here Sabbath up the heaviness just a notch, as well as the overall quality; this is a much more assured album than the debut one, which was fine but felt perhaps a little tentative at times. Here, musically and thematically, the group are just a little more mature.

The black magic elements are largely gone for this album, except for a reference in the first song War Pigs of generals gathering “like witches at Black Masses”. Which is somewhat ironic as the album was originally going to be called Walpurgis but the band shied away this time from anything too satanic.

There’s more, if anything, a science fiction theme to this album, with Iron Man not being anything to do with Tony Stark, but is closer to Ted Hughes’ Iron Giant. Iron Man in this song is a man returned from the future to warn of an impending apocalypse, but transformed into a metal monster and becoming the cause of the apocalypse (shades of The Umbrella Academy). The following song, Electric Funeral tells of the “electric funeral pyre” of the Earth in a nuclear conflagration; it’s not clear if the two songs are meant to be a diptych or not, but they work well as one.

This anti-war sentiment is echoed throughout the album, with War Pigs beings a much heavier version of a track like Dylan’s Masters of War, a scathing polemic against the politicians who send young men off to die for them, and the arms dealers who sell death. Iron Man is transformed into a machine of war, and in Hand of Doom, the anti-war theme collides with what may surprise many as an anti-drug theme. Driven to despair by “First The Bomb, then Vietnam’s napalm”, the character in the song sinks a needle into their arm and escapes into a drugged oblivion, heedless of the effect that it has on their health – “your mind is peaceful but your body is dying”. Given Osbourne’s later prodigious consumption of substances, it’s a little ironic.

Existential angst is explored further in the title track, the chugging Paranoid. Apparently a woman famously committed suicide while listening to this track, leading to conservative panic about the effect of the music. But to me it seems pretty clear that Osbourne, Iommi, and the rest were actually speaking *to* the dispossessed and desperate. If it had been one of the “nicer” songs about isolation and loss, say James Taylor or Simon and Garfunkel, I’m sure nobody would have blamed the music. Black Sabbath are saying “Yes, the world is bleak and nobody cares, but you’re not alone in thinking that. Get angry at the people who are causing it, not give in to the despair.”