Black Sabbath - Paranoid (Pitchfork review, good story)

Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the dawn of metal, a document of dreary working-class blight and anti-war screeds.
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In 1970, Black Sabbath?s self-titled debut did something few were expecting?it sold very well, charting both at their home in the UK and in the United States. Their label, Vertigo, soon dispatched Black Sabbath back to the studio to record a follow-up, stretching their already-indulgent impulses into eight-minute songs about war and heroin and the glory of the guitar. When they needed one more tune, the band headed to the bar while guitarist Tony Iommi stayed behind and spent a few minutes writing a simple riff that chugged, paused, and kept prowling, like a predator always in search of its next meal. They recorded the song in a flash and called it ?Paranoid,? the fulfillment of a legal obligation.

Vertigo didn?t hear filler; it heard a hit, a trouncing three-minute assault by a young band that still favored excessive jams. Six months after releasing Black Sabbath, they issued the song as Black Sabbath?s second single and demanded that the album?s title be changed from War Pigs to Paranoid. They wanted to remind potential customers of the song they?d seen four long-haired weirdos headbang to on ?Top of the Pops? while avoiding the nasty business of saying something controversial in an era already fraught with civil unrest. But in the sprint to get the record into stores, Vertigo never bothered to commission an image that fit the new name. The soldier simply stands there, an embarrassment in neon. After 40 years, bassist and songwriter Geezer Butler (and most everyone else) still hates it: ?The cover was bad enough when the album was going to be War Pigs, but when it was Paranoid it didn?t even make sense.?

[...]  At the heart of Paranoid, however, are very adult concerns about the raging war in Vietnam, the button-push annihilation of atomic weapons, and the oligarchic structures that suppressed the working class in the band?s benighted hometown of Birmingham and beyond.

Paranoid is rightly seen as an essential metal template, but it should also be seen as an essential document of its time and place. Despite the pugnacious sound (?the new standard in power rock,? one early advertisement called it) and macabre promotional images of these proto-heshers stalking churchyards and cemeteries, it is a reflection of a troubled globe teetering on the brink of another world war or even a nuclear apocalypse, made by four blue-collar kids from a tough city. Those who worry about end times are ignored, while those who do the government?s dirty work are born to suffer. These are laments for a world gone wrong, coupled with calls to battle back and fix it.

Still, for decades, that?s not what the critics heard:  [...]

These eight songs have become scripture because they are breathless explorations of possibilities, unfettered by expectations or half a century of heavy metal history. Paranoid, after all, captures Black Sabbath at a moment when the future must have seemed suddenly tantalizing and limitless. The humble adolescent vision of making a living through anything other than going to war or going to the factory were suddenly within reach, if only for a spell. Iommi, Osbourne, Butler, and drummer Bill Ward had nothing to lose now except hard jobs. They write, sing, and play with the zeal of liberation, the incandescence of potential.

During World War II, Axis bombs had splintered Birmingham, stripping the city of its economic engines and making working-class existence odious for decades to come. In the 1960s, Birmingham suffered spates of anti-immigrant racism, desolate storefronts, and miserably cramped living conditions. The Brummies of Black Sabbath were the sons of factory laborers and office cleaners, shopkeepers and strict Catholics. When he was a teenager, Osbourne worked in an abattoir and went to prison for burglary; Iommi lost the tips of two fingers on his last day at a sheet metal factory and made his own prosthetics so he could play guitar. At home, they had seen stabbings and street brawls. ?It had constant steam and smoke,? Ward remembers of the city and the way it shaped Sabbath?s sound, ?so it has a very drab-looking landscape.? A career in rock?n?roll was not only a way out of Birmingham but a way to circumvent this cruel industrial order.

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