The GB Album Club 021 - Paranoid by Black Sabbath

Duders! Welcome to the 21st edition of the Unofficial Giant Bomb Album Club! We're old enough to drink now, which is convenient for us not just because we can buy the requisite 40s to pour one out for beloved Jason and Jess, but also because this week, we're discussing a band whose lead singer is the very embodiment of substance abuse in rock 'n' roll. That's right, our album this week is @thatpinguino's submission Paranoid by Black Sabbath! Your links for listening:

Spotify

Apple Music

Youtube

Here at the Unofficial Giant Bomb Album Club, we made ourselves a pool of albums and we pick one at random to discuss every week. Also, this time around, we have a theme: Albums You Always Meant To Listen To, But Didn't. So if you have a classic you're embarrassed you never got around to or something with a cult following you always wanted to check out or whatever, join us at our Discord and submit your pick! Do it! Right fucking now!

Not only am I someone who has spent way too much time reading people's thoughts about music on the internet, I'm also someone who has spent too much time railing against "the canon," be it the music one or the movie one or whatever. It's not that I want to tear down the canon, it's that I want us to consider why the canon exists and I want us to be more open to questioning what's on it and why it's there.

That is a very long way of saying that I've hit a point where I default to thinking that everything in said canon that I haven't listened to is overrated, not because I haven't listened to it, but because the tastemakers all look and think the same. Blame the internet. Blame my shitty attitude. Blame the media forces of evil that created the very limited rock centric view on what albums should be considered classics. Blame whatever.

That said, this is my first time listening to Paranoid, and it's very much an album that deserves its place in musical history.

There's really no need to intellectualize or analyze it, it just fucking rocks. Its influence on everything that came after it is self-evident, it's varied and unpredictable, it's more substantive and sonically rich than albums that are double its length, and even in some parallel universe where I didn't like it, I'd still respect that absolute shit out of it.

What surprised me the most is that all the tracks that have achieved ubiquity, mainly "War Pigs," "Paranoid," and "Iron Man," still somehow work for me. There are certain songs, let alone classic rock songs, that I'm no longer capable of enjoying because I've heard them too many times. The returns don't diminish so much as vanish into thin air, and anything that I once enjoyed or respected about a song just becomes a flatline. Those three songs are very much examples of those, despite the fact that I've never listened to this album before. Yet, in the framing of listening to this work as a whole, I rediscovered why they work so well and why they have the cultural weight that they do.

If I have one problem, it's the aspects of the last song that haven't aged well. Of course, I can't say that I'm surprised that a bunch of late '60s/'70s rockers don't have the most accepting or empathetic attitudes toward homosexuality. But even if they did, call the problem by its name. Say, "Fuck these stupid ass skinheads." Don't go to the slurs.

But yeah, other than that, I'm glad I got to experience this finally. Sometimes there's a good reason why we love the albums we love.

I'm not someone that closely followed their catalogue, but I do think that their top three albums were in their first four released (Black Sabbath and Vol. 4, being the other two), and Paranoid may be the best of them all. The differences between this album and Sabbath's first, self-titled, album are significant. Especially given that there was less than a year between releases. The first album has a bit more of a blues feel to it, has a darker sound, and features Iommi's guitar less. Paranoid is defined by the singles, though. War Pigs is a truly fantastic song (The CAKE cover is very good as well), Paranoid is an all time classic, Iron Man is one of the most famous (and parodied) songs out there, and Fairies Wear Boots is... well... unfortunate now, but still a great groove. The other songs are mostly filler. Good filler, but filler all the same.

Yeah, this is a classic for a reason. I don't rate the second half as strongly but it still feels experimental from top to bottom. Aside from the very 'of it's time' lyrics, I also found most of them to be fairly bland. It's a credit to Ozzy that he can wail out anything.

It does drop off, though. Typically after Iron Man when all the hits have been belted out. Worth it, all the same.

I like metal quite a lot, but most of my tastes lie in progressive or death metal – I don’t often go digging into Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, or Iron Maiden. I like Maiden, at least when their songs aren’t running for a minute too long, but I don’t listen to them all that often, and I’ve never really dived into Priest or Sabbath. I listened to Sad Wings of Destiny a few months ago for the first time, that was all right.

So listening to this was a lot different from what I listen to these days. Oh, it’s definitely good stuff, but the blues influence on metal was so, so, so much more pronounced in the 70’s than it was in even the 80’s, and “the blues” is hardly the first thing that comes to mind when you’re listening to, I dunno, Amon Amarth or Black Crown Initiate. But I can still hear a through-line from here to what we call “metal” today. It’s very pronounced in Iron Man, a song that starts with a pounding simple drum beat and then turns into a really thick, really low-end guitar riff that sounds so much “darker” than most things of the day. Not just thematically, either, the whole album just occupies a sonic space that I don’t feel most things of the early 70’s even knew existed, and I don’t know exactly how to describe that.

However, I don’t think it’s necessarily the harshest thing of the time. The Beatles’s Helter Skelter has maybe a harsher sound, King Crimson’s 21^st Century Schizoid Man is flat-out a lot crazier, The Who’s Boris The Spider is the first pop song to ever use a death metal growl, and you could almost certainly find some stuff in jazz fusion or punk of the time that’s just as, if not more, influential on modern metal than this album.

I guess I just spent most of my time listening to this album from the perspective of “how did this turn into Metallica, then into Death, then into Opeth, and where do all of the other massive varieties of metal songs fit into this”? And I’m not academic enough to really want an answer to that question. I’ve got a pretty good idea, but I’m not experienced enough in talking about music to put it in words in a way that satisfies me. Maybe at some point in the future.

I just want to prop my feet up and enjoy. And I did. This album holds up! You should probably listen to it! I have little more profound to say about it than that.

...I suppose a note must be made on Fairies Wear Boots.