Paranoid

From a moonlit thicket, a soldier wielding a scimitar and a pointy shield approaches, his eyes bulging with terror beneath a bright white helmet. He wears pink leggings and an outlandish orange blazer, an outfit that becomes, in Marcus Keef’s clumsy long-exposure photograph, a garish streak of glowing neon across the midnight scene. These were meant to be “War Pigs,” autocratic henchmen Black Sabbath lampooned during their second album’s bellicose opener and its intended title. From a distance, they look like an errant splotch of paint across a sheet of construction paper; up close, they just look absurd.

Still, in all its grainy ignominy, Paranoid’s cover is one of the most transformative moments in the early history of Black Sabbath and, by extension, heavy metal. 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 nearly 50 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.”

The label was right about “Paranoid,” at least. Propelled by its lead single, Paranoid was the only Black Sabbath album to top the British charts for the next four decades. In the U.S., where it nearly broke into the Top 10 mere months after the band’s small stateside debut, it has gone platinum four times. Record labels realized that heaviness and spookiness could sell and that Led Zeppelin, Sabbath’s favorite band, were just the beginning. In ceding to Vertigo’s commercial instincts about “Paranoid,” both as a single and album title, Black Sabbath helped launch heavy metal not just as a genre but also as a veritable industry.

But “Paranoid” itself foregrounds an adolescent sort of worry—about being depressed and not understanding the symptoms or root of it, about crying when others laugh, about breaking up with someone because “she couldn’t help me with my mind.” 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: In his 1971 review for Rolling Stone, Nick Tosches conjured Satanic clichés and misogynist Manson family jokes before mistaking Black Sabbath for their peers in Black Widow, anyway. The same year, The Washington Post wondered, “Your choice: Is the worst rock band Grand Funk Railroad or Black Sabbath? It’s getting harder and harder to decide.” As late as 1997, Rolling Stone still insisted it was “a campy farce … lumbering, obnoxious, and a total gas.” Had the album been called War Pigs a year after Altamont and months after Kent State, though, would critics have heard it differently? Would they have understood that, even if it sounded like spooky fantasy, this steely strain of rock could address real-world worries—and would even do so for the next half-century?

Of course, Paranoid’s high sales and wide reach, not this critical repudiation, made it heavy metal’s chrysalis. You can point to any of the eight songs here as the partial inspiration for an entire subgenre of metal or rock at large, each prompting decades of creative exegesis. More than the eponymous anthem that began their debut, the drifting verses of “Hand of Doom” are direct arrows into, well, doom metal, turbocharged by sections that feel like nebulous hardcore. The italicized pummel of “Paranoid” itself is the link between Zeppelin and thrash. The starts and stops of “Rat Salad,” and the way Iommi’s guitar line runs like razor wire between the rhythmic shifts, presage the instrumental ecstasy of math-rock, in spirit if not in skill. The beginning of “Fairies Wear Boots” keeps folding and rising, only to empty into declarative verses, like the skeleton of power metal awaiting eventual flesh. Ozzy Osbourne, his voice routed through a whirling Leslie speaker, delivers images of romantic escapism over circular bass and hand-drum patter during “Planet Caravan”—alongside electric Miles, a clear antecedent for metal’s exploratory psychedelic side.

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 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.

The most terrifying thing about Black Sabbath in 1970 shouldn’t have been the ostentatious chrome cross strung around Iommi’s neck, Osbourne’s hand tattoos, or the talk of evil and witches and Lovecraftian horror. It should have been that here were four kids from the lower ranks of bombed-out Birmingham’s society, gaining a popular foothold by openly hoping the ruling class would fall to their knees and beg for mercy beneath the blows. “Day of judgment/God is calling,” Osbourne sings in the immortal opener, triumphantly stretching the syllables until he’s almost out of breath. “On their knees, the War Pigs crawling/Begging mercy for their sins.” In this scene, God and Satan provide the same salvation—the sweet deliverance of overdue vengeance. Black Sabbath spend the next three minutes dancing on the graves of the self-proclaimed mighty, Iommi’s guitar curling upward into an infinite grin.

“We wrote ‘War Pigs’ because many American bands were frightened to mention anything about the war,” Butler later said. “So we thought we’d tell it like it is.” Though Osbourne has insisted that the band knew little about Vietnam, Butler says he paid closer attention to the war than most Americans did, in part because he feared Britain would join. Osbourne even calls the war by name during the second verse of “Hand of Doom.” The song became infamous as a supposed endorsement of heroin, but it’s a warning for deployed soldiers taken with the newfound hobby of trying to kill time with drugs but only killing themselves.

At the end, Osbourne pushes his voice to its early falsetto limits, sharing the pain of the prescription: “Price of life is high/Now you’re going to die.” Despite the indignation for the soldier’s bad choice, there’s a strong sense of pity here for the “fools” following orders, the real judgement reserved for the leaders who have put their people in this position. It’s the hand of invisible doom, of a free market at war with its own citizens.

The members of Black Sabbath had been born in the wake of World War II, some even the sons of veterans. They had lived much of their lives surrounded by its fallout, the Cold War, and were teenagers during the Cuban Missile Crisis, an existential flashpoint about whether we valued pride more than survival. They began to play music together just as the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia and just as the Cold War began to spill into more territories. Anchored by a hangman riff and guided by Osbourne’s best sorcerer vocals, “Electric Funeral” lashes out at the woe of that atomic age and the endless destruction it enables. The song feels entirely uneasy, wobbling at the lip of a future where “Rivers turn to mud/Eyes melt into blood.”

Perhaps that’s what the deathless “Iron Man” has seen in his intergalactic voyage. Though the song has nothing to do with the Marvel comic of the same name, it is a surreal fantasy. A man has been shot into space to look backward at Earth’s future (that’s how time travel works, right?) and share some insight on how to make it better. He sees disaster, but the journey back through the atmosphere renders him mute, unable to share the dire truth. He’s ostracized and ignored until he lashes out, iron fists falling on the city with the weight of Iommi’s monstrous riff and Ward’s colossal Bonham drums. Black Sabbath again delight in revolt, from the relish in Osbourne’s voice as he sings “Now he has his revenge” to Iommi and Butler’s hyperkinetic score for the imagined fight scene.

The sense that these kids are almost always looking for a brawl during Paranoid comes to fruition at the end. According to band lore, the long-haired, heavy-drinking members of Sabbath encountered a crew of skinheads sporting boots after an early gig, as they often did. These weren’t the skinheads of the neo-Nazi variety; this was just a different set of working-class youth with alternate values and fashion choices, making for an S.E. Hinton-styled clash of subcultures. They fought, and Sabbath won. On what’s thankfully the only song he penned here, Osbourne immortalized the victory by calling the skinheads fairies, which had become a vogue insult for an image of gay men before World War II.

Sure, “Fairies Wear Boots” boasts one of the best grooves of Sabbath’s entire discography, some of Osbourne’s most effortlessly soulful singing ever, and a bridge and solo that feel every bit as triumphant as their alleged victory that night. But it plays up the budding egos of 20-somethings from a rough town now on the verge of rock’n’roll stardom with a lazy insult, an early flash of the machismo that would become hard rock’s lifeblood during the next decade. Youth is the perfect fuel for most of Paranoid; here, it is the puerile folly, getting the best of Black Sabbath’s armed hippie vision.

But Paranoid began to make stars of Black Sabbath, and the music of the boys from Birmingham reflected that almost instantly. Butler once (suspiciously) insisted that, during the salad days of their first two albums, they couldn’t even afford cheap booze, let alone a lot of weed; a year later, Master of Reality launches stoner metal with its first track, “Sweet Leaf.” The next seven years with Osbourne hinged largely on songs about feeling low on breakups, high on cocaine, irritated at the record label, and irate at one another.

Political songs didn’t entirely disappear from Black Sabbath’s catalog, but they did become more sporadic and ham-fisted. A year later, on Master of Reality, the bracing and relentless “Children of the Grave” offered a rallying cry for the kids, as society’s supposed heavy metal boogeymen urged the kids to organize and “show the world that love is still alive.” There is an odd rendering of an Orwellian world on 1973’s Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, and, improbably, a very bad piece of political theater about a cross-dressing woman who becomes president of the United States on 1976’s sleek and largely miserable Technical Ecstasy. What’s worse, a thread of class condescension began to ripple through Black Sabbath’s songs, too, criticizing the commoners and their inability to just cut free of society, to get wild. By then, Black Sabbath played from the pedestal of fame, not from the pit of Birmingham turmoil that had made Paranoid so timely and vivid. And slowly, the élan at work during Paranoid began to fade, too. The band made records because it was now a career.

At the start of the millennium, the original Black Sabbath quartet that created Paranoid and a map for heavy metal to come reunited in the studio alongside Rick Rubin. It took a decade and Ward’s acrimonious departure, but they eventually finished 13, their final album and first with Osbourne since their initial eight-album volley ended in 1978. In the interim, Black Sabbath had become a microcosm of behind-the-music melodrama, with Osbourne and Iommi infamously spending the better part of their adult lives trying to one-up each other by searching for a better singer or guitarist. There were reality shows, patrician lifestyles, and, presumably, more money than Satan.

In those sessions, Iommi later said, they wanted to recapture the essence of Paranoid—four kids locked in a room, letting off existential unease by plowing through tunes about everything that has gone wrong in the world. The best songs on 13 excoriate wicked demagogues and fret over the Earth’s precarious existence, like the best of Paranoid. The plan worked, intentionally harnessing some of the accidental urgency that helped make Black Sabbath famous 40 years earlier and shaping a reunion album better than anyone had a reason to expect. That is the strange power and sad relevance of Paranoid, a record whose technophobe fears and atomic anxieties are as salient in this age of brash politicians and international blunder as they were in that one.