How Black Sabbath’s 5th album is helping me deal with a 21st century pandemic.
Around forty five years ago, a young man, P, was on the hunt for an elusive Black Sabbath vinyl. The group’s 1970 album ‘Paranoid’ would come to enjoy legendary status – already ranking at 41 in NME's top 100 singles that year – and the eponymous track would eventually be a permanent feature on P’s car CD compilations.
However, P was searching for Sabbath Bloody Sabbath (SBS), the album that marked a definitive shift in the band’s sound. On SBS, lyricist and bassist Geezer Butler pours out some of the most mystical, profound thoughts in musical history – whilst also managing to channel the sharp angst of the band (“bog blast all of you!”). It's also marked by its various allusions to the mysteries of life and death, a theme which is viscerally represented on the cover art.
Funnily enough, P’s disc came without the famous vinyl sleeve. He pounded the streets of West London, trawling through Chiswick and Ealing in his Ford Capri (“Christmas tree green”, he adds) and was finally successful on Hounslow High Street, at HMV. “I think I have something”, the clerk said before checking in the back and confirming “we have it – but no sleeve.”
The man on a mission said yes, received half price off, and headed home to mark the brown paper sleeve with ‘SBS’. Many years later, I was hosting a ’70s themed student radio show at university. Trying to branch out from the Musica Popular Brasilera, Italo Disco and American funk that had become standard for the show, P recommended the album to me, and the rest is history.
A few months have passed since I was hosting that radio show, and our world has upended in the interim. Mauritius, my parent's birthplace and my ancestral home, faces environmental disaster. A mishandled oil spill coincides with the devastating impact of Covid-19, while a similar story abates in Beirut.
Negligence is the word of the day. A Mauritian friend posts on their Facebook story: "I LOVE MY COUNTRY... I'M ASHAMED OF MY GOVERNMENT". We expect our government to resolve crises. But how do we deal with the realisation that they cannot - or apparently choose not - to manage, let alone successfully resolve these crises?
It goes without saying that we should engage with disaster relief; information is widespread and campaigns for donations and assistance abound. We know where to put our support.
But where do we put our pain? Our fears? For the British diaspora of countries in turmoil, there’s an unparalleled loneliness after you close the donation tab and try to prise yourself away from the news abroad and at home.
Enter, Sabbath Bloody Sabbath. This album represents the band's foray into new musical influences and continued experiments with recreational drugs, all of which combined to produce a body of work reflective of their anger, confusion, fear, and deep contemplation. The wrath of the title track felt reflective of the frustrated public mood before England's late lockdown:
the truth is out, the lies are old, but you don't want to know
... a line that is also attributable to Johnson's premiership, with its astonishing faith in herd immunity enveloped in the outro:
Sabbath, bloody sabbath, nothing more to do // Living just for dying, dying just for you.
Flip to side two of the record, and 'Killing Yourself to Live' is a stark reminder of the loss and despair that is inescapable during the pandemic. The experience of frontline workers putting themselves in harm's way so that we can live, combined with infuriating government obfuscation means:
I don't know if I'm up or down // Whether black is white or blue is brown.
This confusion, anxiety and anger spills into the next track, 'Who Are You', pinpointing Westminster's handling of the crisis:
You're just like Big Brother // Giving us your trust // And when you have played enough // You'll just cast our souls // Into the dust.
By this point, parallels between real life and the album comes to a head. We're in desperate need of something uplifting, and the band delivers with my favourite track of the album: 'Spiral Architect'. Frontman Ozzy Osbourne – also known by his moniker The Prince of Darkness – has described how the album strikes a balance between the doom and 'heaviness' of their old plays, and the new, uplifting 'experimental' elements. This is brilliantly showcased in the final track, which returns to themes of life and death: dealing with melancholy.
Geezer Butler suggests 'Spiral Architect' is "about life’s experiences being added to a person’s DNA to create a unique individual", a welcome contrast to all the despair that precedes. The strings swell and I’m alright again. It's a beautiful reminder that despite the pain and difficulties yet to come, there is one thing that I can hold on to: myself. I can be sure that I do want to affect change, and I can use my experiences, knowledge, and passion to do so.
"Of all the things I value most of all // I look inside myself and see // My world and know that it is good // You know that I should!"
I think the power of Black Sabbath's SBS lies in its ability to induce feelings of power, kinship, and above all, contemplation. According to researchers Saarikallio, Maskimainen and Randall, music can evoke a kind of ‘pleasure’ which doesn't always fall into the ‘relaxing’ camp - rather, the pleasure is obtained through listening to music that leads to deep thought, reaching an understanding of our social ties, and producing feelings of "empathy, consolation, tenderness, and relatedness". Best of all, they suggest that this kind of cognitive processing helps us to understand and manage our emotions, which makes it easier to confront personal issues. Guaranteed relief!
So if you do one thing today to help deal with whatever pain you might be experiencing; look inside yourself, see your world and your memories, feel their warmth, and know that they are good.
Take a listen here:
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