RIP Ozzy

 

Melody Maker, November 18, 1989

BLACK SABBATH
The Complete 70's Replica CD Collection 1970-78
(Sanctuary Records)
Uncut, 2001

by Simon Reynolds


The mystery of the riff--so crucial to rock, so oddly neglected by critics. Or perhaps not so strangely, given that riffs are almost impossible to write about: just try explaining why one monster-riff slays you where another one fails to incite. Riffs just seem to bypass the aesthetic faculties altogether and go straight to the gut. A killer riff is by definition simplistic--which is why self-consciously sophisticated rock tends to dispense with them altogether in favor of wispy subtleties. Riff-based music seems lowly, literally "mindless" because it connects with the lower "reptilian" part of the cerebral cortex which governs flight-or-flight responses, the primitive emotions of appetite, aversion, and aggression.

Talking of reptiles, Black Sabbath--perhaps the greatest riff factory in all of rock---irresistibly invite metaphors involving dinosaurs. For a group that wielded such brontosauran bulk, though, Sabbath were surprisingly nimble on their feet. Listening to this box-set, which comprises all eight albums of the classic Ozzy-fronted era, I was surprised how fast many of their songs were, given the Sabs' reputation as torpid dirgemeisters for the downered-and-out.

Even at their most manic, Sabbath always sound depressed, though. Rhythmically as much as lyrically, Sabbath songs dramatise scenarios of ordeal, entrapment, affliction, perseverance in the face of long odds and insuperable obstacles. Tony Iommi's down-tuned distorto-riffs--essentially the third element of the awesome rhythm section of Bill Ward and Geezer Butler--create sensations of impedance and drag, like you're struggling through hostile, slightly viscous terrain. Joe Carducci, Sabbath fiend and theorist supreme of rock 's "heavy" aesthetic, analyses about how bass, drums, and guitar converge to produce "powerfully articulated and textured tonal sensations of impact and motion that trigger hefty motor impulses in the listener." But let's not discount Ozzy's role: his piteous wail is one-dimensional, sure, but it sounds utterly righteous in this abject context. And he's effectively touching on forlornly pretty ballads like "Changes" too.

With a few exceptions (Lester Bangs, notably) the first rock-crit generation abhorred Sabbath. Criticism typically lags behind new art forms, appraising it using terminology and techniques more appropriate to earlier genres. So the first rock critics, being postgraduates in literature, philosophy, and politics, treated songs as mini-novels, as poetry or protest tracts with tasteful guitar accompaniment. Expecting rock to get ever more refined, they were hardly gonna embrace Sabbath's crude putsch on Cream, which stripped away all the blues-bore scholarship and revelled in the sheer dynamics of heaviosity. Riff-centered rock--Zep, Mountain, ZZ Top, Aerosmith---was received with incomprehension and condescension. But while Seventies critical faves like Little Feat and Jackson Browne have sired no legacy, over the long haul Sabbath's originality and fertility have been vindicated by the way their chromosones have popped up in US hardcore (Black Flag/Rollins were massively indebted), grunge (Nirvana = Beatles + Sabbath x Pixies), and virtually every key phase of metal from Metallica to Kyuss/Queens of the Stone Age to Korn. Sabbath are quite literally seminal.

Sabbath dressed like hippies: check the groovy kaftans and loon pants in the inner sleeve photos of these CDs, which are miniature simulacra of the original gatefold elpees. And they clearly hoped to contribute to the post-Sgt Pepper's progressive tendency: hence pseudo-pastoral interludes like the flute-draped "Solitude," an idyll amidst Master of Reality's sturm und drang. But critics deplored them as a sign of rock's post-Sixties regression , mere lumpen bombast fit only for the moronic inferno of the stadium circuit, and as a symptom of the long lingering death of countercultural dreams. In retrospect, with Sixties idealism seeming like a historical aberration, Sabbath's doom 'n' gloom seems more enduringly resonant, tapping into the perennial frustrations of youth with dead-end jobs from Coventry to New Jersey: headbanging riffs and narcotic noise as a cheap-and-nasty source of oblivion. Sabbath's no-future worldview always becomes extra relevant in times of recession, like the economic down-slope looming ahead of us right now. Looking back, the much-derided Satanist aspects seem relatively peripheral and low-key, especially compared with modern groups like Slipknot. In old TV footage of Sabbath, the group seem almost proto-punk, their sullen, slobby demeanour recalling The Saints on Top of the Pops. There's little theatrics, and the music is remarkably trim and flatulence-free.

But then no one really goes on about Iommi's solos, do they? The riffs are what it's all about, and Sabbath's productivity on that score is rivalled only by AC/DC. "Sweet Leaf", "Iron Man", "Paranoid", "Children of the Grave," "Wheels of Confusion", the list goes on. So we're back with the mystery.... just what is it that makes a great riff? Something to do with the use of silence and spacing, the hesitations that create suspense, a sense of tensed and flexed momentum, of force mass motion held then released. If I had to choose one definitive Sabbath riffscape, I'd be torn between the pummelling ballistic roil of "Supernaut" and "War Pigs", whose stop-start drums are like slow-motion breakbeats, Quaalude-sluggish but devastatingly funky. "War Pigs" is that rare thing, the protest song that doesn't totally suck. Indeed, it's 'Nam era plaint about "generals gathered... like witches at black masses" has a renewed topicality at a time when the military-industrial death-machine is once more flexing its might.

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This is my favorite 

I remember this came on the radio once when we were in the car.  I turned up the volume and started air-drumming to those great breakbeat-like rolls. And then - a second after Ozzy's voice came in, like it was the final straw - this indignant voice piped up from the back seat:   "This is the WORST music in the world!!!". Kieran, aged 11, sounding genuinely appalled. I drily replied, "no, this is in fact one of the most purely powerful pieces of recorded rock, actually". He wasn't having it.

Mind you, I would probably have felt the same at his age. 

Well, more to the point, I felt the same when I was about 18. Not based on any deep exposure. Passing hearing of "Paranoid". Mostly just postpunk indoctrination, high-minded disapproval of all things metal.

Then two things changed my mind: I read that Black Flag were fans of Black Sabbath, which explained the grueling dirge of "Damaged I"

And then my friend Chris Scott played me one of their albums - maybe the Greatest Hits. "Iron Man" was the one that turned my head around. 

And then "War Pigs".

Then within a few years you had the Beasties sampling Sabbath, there was Buttholes's with "Sweat Loaf", etc

Over time I've come to really like the dreamy hippie-ish side to Sabbath

What were they going for here? Santana? Something from the San Francisco scene? 

It actually reminds me a bit of "Maggot Brain" by Funkadelic 

And then there's this pretty instrumental 

And this is a beautiful ballad 

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The first time I paeaned Sabbath was indirectly, via the greatest of their epigones: Saint Vitus

January 16 1988

The album had actually been out at least a year, possibly two, when I reviewed it, but it came in a big box of STT albums mailed to MM, which I pounced on.

At that time I didn't realise "St. Vitus Dance" is a Sabbath song. 

Also discovered much later that  Born Too Late - which is not only epigonic but an analysis of the epigone mindstate - was produced by Joe Carducci. 

JC's analysis of "heavy" is unbeaten - check this piece, spun off Rock and the Pop Narcotic but not an extract, with some great probing into the Sabbath riff-and-rhythm engine.  

Carducci has opined that "Supernaut" is the most physically dynamic and potent example of recorded rock in existence

Now I could have sworn I spoke to one of Saint Vitus on the phone for a piece on STT and its late 80s splurge out into heavy, proggy, jammy-bandy expansiveness - but all I can find is this small patch of exaltation, quote-free. But yeah I distinctly recall a distant voice, a subdued mumble. 

Another Sabbath-related speck of writing is this piece on the unfortunately named 1000 Homo DJs aka Al Jourgensen who covered "Supernaut". He does address the isssue of the name in the conversation.

How weird to think I spoke to Mr Ministry on the phone!

I wonder what Mr Carducci would have made of this cover? I'm sure he would have disapproved of the inelastic rhythm section (a drum machine?) and diagnosed it as a typically top-heavy misunderstanding of rock music - taking it to be all about attitude rather than phatitude. Literally top-heavy:  all noise and distorted vox, no bottom. Fatally lite - devoid of heaviness. 

In that sense almost as bad as British things like The Cult and Grebo. 

He would further have diagnosed the Wax Trax thing as bound up with a fatal Chicago failing: Anglophilia - which he also diagnosed as a ruse of projecting to London to bypass New York. 

I have strayed far from Ozzy...  

Repeated exposure on the radio here in LA over the years has made me a fan of this, even though its clean frantic high-energy style is a million miles from the Sabbath dirge style. 

I'm sure Carducci thought this was a terrible waste of Ozzy's wail.