Prog Progress 1970: Black Sabbath - Paranoid

Hi, everyone! Welcome to Prog Progress, a blog series in which I journey through the history of progressive rock by reviewing one album from every year of the genre's existence. You can read more about the project here. You can learn about what I think are some of the roots of progressive rock here. You can see links for the whole series here.

[1] Okay, I'll be honest here: Paranoid is not really a prog album. Musically, there's not a gesture toward the avant-garde, jazz, or classical in sight, and overall, Black Sabbath's blend of caveman riffs, blues affectations, and occult imagery fits much more comfortably into the early-'70s hard rock tradition alongside the likes of Led Zeppelin, Cream, and Deep Purple. The band's legacy rests not on any especially proggy credentials but rather on the fact that these Brits (alongside a few other European groups from the era) can be reasonably credited with inventing heavy metal. That and foisting Ozzy Osbourne onto the world.

And yet, here we are, about to devote a full year of progressive rock history to this admittedly not-so-proggy album. Part of that is an issue of timing: 1970 is kind of like 1968 in that it's a year mostly notable for inauspicious releases from bands that would eventually go on to play much more interesting roles in prog's story. Gentle Giant, Egg, Supertramp, Magma, and Emerson, Lake & Palmer all dropped their studio debuts in 1970, and all of those albums land somewhere in the very-bad-to-sorta-good range, which honestly isn't a very interesting range to review. Besides, none of those records left much of a dent in the developing prog genre. Other notable bands—Yes, Jethro Tull, Pink Floyd, Van der Graaf Generator—were busy releasing sophomore and junior records (or fifth-year senior records, in Pink Floyd's case) that would ultimately prove to be second-tier LPs in the context of their entire careers, so I'm saving their turns for their more significant albums. I mean, does anyone honestly want to use up their one opportunity to talk about Yes on Time and a Word? What's more, the two definitively best prog albums of the year, King Crimson's In the Wake of Poseidon and Soft Machine's Third, hail from bands I've already covered for this project, and by my own rules, I'm strictly forbidden from double dipping. Hence: Black Sabbath, Paranoid.

But I've got another reason for covering this album, too: it's not entirely without connection to the development of progressive rock, although that connection isn't quite clear from the immediate context of the genre. Black Sabbath's influence on prog is kind of a long-con, actually; I'd argue that alongside maybe Genesis's Selling England by the Pound and Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, Paranoid is the '70s album that best accounts for the shape that progressive rock takes in the '80s and '90s. And that's because in the wake of mainline prog's implosion in the late '70s, heavy metal became the most visible torchbearer of prog principles. With the likes of Yes, Genesis, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, King Crimson, and Jethro Tull either dead, hibernating, or evolving from their prog roots, it was metal bands like Iron Maiden, Dream Theater, and Opeth who filled the void with their own ambitious, long-winded, high-concept music—and God bless them for it. Given all that, I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say that without Black Sabbath (and, in particular, Paranoid, far and away the band's most popular release), those bands might have taken much different forms and along with it the future of progressive rock.

But how about that album, yeah?

Yeah, about that album: it's great. For those who don't know, Paranoid is the sophomore album from famed heavy metal progenitors Black Sabbath, who, in mid-1970, were fresh off the success of their self-titled Led Zeppelin soundalike debut released earlier that year. The trade-off made between the two albums released in such tight succession was apparent this: Black Sabbath got the cool cover art, and Paranoid got the good songs. It's actually not quite so dire as that (the debut at least has the title cut[2], which is the most metal thing Sabbath would do until Master of Reality), but the leap in quality between Black Sabbath and Paranoid really is remarkable. Paranoid is the glorious sound of a band finding its identity and simultaneously realizing just what a colossal thing that identity is. The guitar riffs here are drowning some poor soul in their sludge; the drums are beating in the heads of animals. Even today, with as much precedent as metal has, this feels big.

I'll be the first to admit that metal is not my forte, and it's only been recently that I've been giving the genre much of a glance[3]. But, as I said earlier, at this point, heavy metal was just a nubby little offshoot of hard rock, which means a few things. First, that this album doesn't really sound all that metal in the modern sense. At least, not in the cool way of Opeth, Mastodon, Slayer or um... those other metal bands[4]. If anything, the brand of post-Sabbath metal that Paranoid most resembles (my metalhead readers[5] are going to crucify me for this) is Black Album-era Metallica, by which I mean that there's an emphasis on melody and whistleable riffs that you don't necessarily see in purer strains of metal. Songs like "War Pigs" and "Iron Man" became staples of classic rock radio for a reason: first and foremost, they rock in a very universal, non-niche way. Which is probably why metal n00bs like me find this record so appealing and immediate. And it is: almost every track on here is a master class of melding blunt force trauma rock dynamics with an impressive quotient of tunefulness.

The second thing that Paranoid's kissing-cousin status with hard rock means for us is that it shows just how permeable all the different rock subgenres were at this point in history. For a long time earlier in this post, I made a point of drawing lines between what was prog and what was not, but there's no real convincing evidence that there was all that much line-drawing going on in 1970, or even that "progressive rock" was its own thing set apart from people on the fringe like Black Sabbath or even folks like John Lennon or David Bowie (RIP). I mean, this is clearly different stuff from, like, what The Rolling Stones or Credence Clearwater Revival were doing at the time, but once you get anywhere left of that, my impression was that these guys were all kind of lumped together. So you get early Yes albums compared to Led Zeppelin.

All that is to say that Paranoid is not quite so un-prog as I led you to believe at the beginning of this post. The most obvious progginess on the album comes from the track lengths. Prog loves its long songs, and Paranoid's got that, with half of the record's eight songs hit the six-minute mark and one, the eight-minute opener, "War Pigs/Luke's Wall," overshooting it by a country mile. The texture of a lot of the songs fits the prog bill, too, relying on long, twisty instrumental passages punctuated by tempo changes and solos. Arguably, that's the Zeppelin influence at work, since that band was also known for long, twisty instrumental passages punctuated by tempo changes and solos. But that's just what I'm getting at: at this point in left-of-center rock history, there's a level of collaboration, influence, and outright inbreeding among bands who would eventually forge their own path in diverse, separate subgenres that it's hard to tell where some end and others begin. Even if prog wasn't a direct influence, there was clearly something in the air[6] of these British studios, something that imbued bands with outsized ambitions, extreme song lengths, and sci-fi lyrics.

There is one moment on Paranoid that I feel is pretty definitively prog-influenced, however, and that's on the side-two opening "Electric Funeral," which begins with the standard muddy Sabbath riff before morphing into a minute-long boogie that bears the unmistakable mark King Crimson—specifically the "Mirrors" passage in "21st Century Schizoid Man." The drums become syncopated and jazzy, the guitar screeches, and Ozzy Osbourne actually sounds a little like the the sax flourishes in the KC track. Granted, it's a good deal clumsier than King Crimson ever played it (Black Sabbath were hardly virtuoso musicians, especially when compared to Robert Fripp and co.), but the relationship is there nonetheless.

While we're on the subject of clumsiness, though, I think it's only fair to admit that Black Sabbath is nobody's idea of a perfect band, even at their arguable height on Paranoid. Ozzy Osbourne is a famously limited vocalist, and even on something as brisk as Paranoid's 42 minutes, his inflexible shouts wear a bit thin. It doesn't help that the lyrics range from the nonsensical (if he was turned to steel in the great magnetic field, why is he iron man?) to the plain stupid ("Make a joke and I will sigh and you will laugh and I will cry"—will someone give this guy a hug so he'll stop making these rhymes?). I realize that Black Sabbath is one of those quintessential "It's not a bug, it's a feature" bands, and when it comes to the music, that works more often than not, the primal playing taking on its own lumbering beauty. But man, even by the admittedly low standards of prog lyrics, those are so baaaaad lyrics[7] when you stop to listen.

Which is why it's great that this album doesn't need you to stop and listen. Any lyrical criticism is almost beside the point. This is an album meant to be felt, not contemplated, which is probably what most separates it from the prog albums we'll be covering in this series. Still, brain-dead or not, the prog spirit is alive and well in 1970, and it will only grow in the coming years.

Until 1971! 


1] For all five of y'all out there who are interested in my writing about prog, sorry that it's been so long (almost six months???) since I've posted in this series. For those who don't know, I'm now teaching full time, which cuts quite a bit into my prog-listening/blog-writing time. I make no promises for increased regularity, but hopefully now that I'm in my second semester, I'll get the hang of time management a little better. At this rate, Prog Progress won't be done for decades.

2] But seriously, though—a self-titled song on a self-titled album?

3] But I'm learning! I just bought a Sunn O))) album! BRAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHMMMMM BOOOOOOOOOMMMMMM.

4] Again, let me stress that metal is not my forte.

5] Do I even have metalhead readers? If so, don't hurt me for kinda sorta liking Metallica.

6] Possibly marijuana or some airborne strain of LSD?

7] On the subject of lyrics, how hilarious is it that this album's lyrics were considered scandalous back in the day? It's not like the lyrics are on Satan's side or anything—"War Pigs" compares the military industrial complex to a coven of witches, after all. Given how far some metal has gone down the route of actual Satanism (or at least play-acting at allegiance to the Prince of Darkness) since the '70s, Geezer Butler's lyrics on Paranoid have a hard time coming off as anything but quaint nowadays.

Review: The Hateful Eight

Note: I saw the 70mm "roadshow" release of The Hateful Eight, a version of the movie that includes an overture, intermission, and about 20 minutes of footage not in the regular wide release. Having not seen the wide-release cut, I can't say what parts are unique to the roadshow, so if you see this movie and are wondering what the heck I'm talking about with parts of this review, well, that's probably why.

When I announced on Facebook that the 70mm showing of The Hateful Eight had sold out but that I had secured a seat in a seat for another showing after the new year, several of my friends commented that they wanted to hear my review for the film once I'd seen it. It's not unlikely that these friends just wanted a quick blurb on Facebook ("Michael gives The Hateful Eight two thumbs way up!!"), but it's too late now. It's the last day of winter break, and y'all have released the beast! The reviewing beast, that is. Anyway, I'm also bummed that I saw this movie too late to include it on my Favorite Films of 2015 list, so this post is a sort of corrective to that omission.

For those who don't know, The Hateful Eight is the eighth movie[1] from acclaimed writer-director Quentin Tarantino, a man who most famously brought us the likes of Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill and most recently brought us Django Unchained. This guy probably doesn't need that much introduction—at this point, even outside of the cinema-enthused crowds who tend to crown acclaimed writer-directors, Quentin Tarantino is well-known as a maker of witty, self-aware thrillers with a penchant for shocking violence and winking allusions to movie history (particularly B movies and Italian "spaghetti" westerns). That last point makes The Hateful Eight a particularly appropriate entry in Tarantino's canon; he's long flirted with the western (particularly in his last movie, Django Unchained), but The Hateful Eight marks the first time he's completely committed to the genre. And it's glorious.

Plot-wise, you really don't need to know much more than this: at an unspecified time in 19th-century, post-Civil-War America, eight strangers—a crowd which most significantly includes a couple of former Confederate soldiers, a pair of bounty hunters, and their wanted-alive bounty (plus one coach driver named O.B. who for some reason isn't counted in the total—the Death Proof of the cast?)—converge at a lonely outpost in Wyoming at the onset of a blizzard. Armed to the teeth and unsure of whom to trust (that's a recipe for success, isn't it?), these people must hunker down together in the shelter until the blizzard passes.

So yeah, first and foremost, The Hateful Eight is a western: six-shooters, big hats, isolated vistas, long and pregnant pauses, mile-long stares. And the fact that you can call a Tarantino feature "first and foremost" any genre is a huge part of the movie's success. This may be the most straightforward, homogeneous film in the notoriously genre-fluid director's filmography, proving that although Tarantino is most famous for being clever, his true talent lies at a fundamental filmmaking level. While it's not a huge surprise, it is immensely satisfying to see just how well-suited to this kind of fare Tarantino proves to be. His penchant for long, twisty passages of dialogue, a method of joke delivery and pop-culture allusion in his earlier work[2], becomes a classical device for building tension; his deliberate camera movements and framings adapt perfectly to the western inclination for capturing both subtle facial tics and evocative landscapes. Contrary to his reputation, Tarantino is working with very little tongue-in-cheek here. More than any other film in his career, The Hateful Eight is focused on delivering a tense narrative driven by traditional character motivation and few self-conscious bells and whistles.

This isn't exactly a new development in Tarantino's career, although The Hateful Eight is certainly the most committed to it yet. Although he's best known for making flippant, smart-alecky features, Tarantino has been flirting with sincere emotions and character development for most of his career. There's no doubt that Pulp Fiction is an exercise in snake-eating-its-own-tail irony and self-referentiality, but 1997's Jackie Brown, Tarantino's less-seen followup, is a movie almost that, when it's not referencing '70s blaxploitation films, is entirely devoted to straightforward emotional stakes and honest affection for its characters. This trend took a more permanent turn in 2009 with Inglourious Basterds, whose linear storytelling and furiously charged imagery seems to have kicked off a new era of political awareness and character affection for Tarantino that extends through his next features, Django Unchained and now The Hateful Eight. For the first time in Tarantino's career, the violence in Inglourious Basterds has an ethical and emotional sting; the opening scene, in which Christoph Waltz's terrifying Nazi officer interrogates a man hiding a Jewish family, bears a structural and stylistic similarity to the "say 'what' one more time" scene in Pulp Fiction where Vincent and Jules question Brett, but the effect is wholly different. Whereas Brett's death at the end of Pulp Fiction's scene serves as both catharsis and a dark joke, Inglorious Basterds depicts the murder of the Jewish family with a sense of horrifying tragedy, cemented by the image of the fleeing girl. We are invited not to laugh or be entertained but to care about the pain of this violence. This invitation to care about Tarantino characters goes even further with the slaves in Django Unchained, which remains the only QT film that can legitimately be called "sentimental." Significantly, these two movies are also the first openly political movies of Tarantino's career: Django focusing on the idea of reparations for slavery and Basterds pointing fingers at film's complicity in historical tragedies. Once you start regarding human life with empathy, you can only go so far before you start caring about changing things in the world.

Although The Hateful Eight lacks the naked sentiment of something like Django and Broomhilda's romance, there's still the sense that these characters' lives have weight and meaning to them beyond their roles as gears in a cinematic machine. This is very much a sincere political movie in the vein of Django and Basterds, a grim, brooding look at race relations in America cemented by one of the most ideologically provocative final scenes I've seen in ages, one that posits the reconciliations offered by Lincoln as a necessary lie. Like Inglourious Basterds (and, to a lesser extent, Django Unchained), The Hateful Eight is a movie about the half-true historical narratives on which we prop up our notions of social progress. It's fascinating, it's riveting, it's thematically and emotionally complex, and it's one of Tarantino's best films[3].

The downside to this commitment to sincerity and straightforward political and cinematic statements is that it makes the few forays into classic Tarantino territory stick out. The presence of a White Stripes song is an unnecessary anachronism that violates the careful tone of the film's opening minutes, and a post-intermission narration is one step too far down the cheeky meta-artificiality of his '90s features. It's clear that Tarantino is still working out a balance between his classic stylistic quirks and his newfound straightforwardness, and even with a film as accomplished as The Hateful Eight, that balance isn't quite stabilized yet. That said, several Tarantino hallmarks serve this film very well: the tense, talky first half operates like a feature-length extension of the circuitous, monologue-driven scenes from Pulp Fiction and Inglourious Basterds discussed earlier, and the bloody (so, so bloody) second half feels very much like an old-west take on Reservoir Dogs's cramped, gruesome "and then there were none" mechanics. It's also worth noting that for all its gorgeous, American-west imagery, this is by far the most claustrophobic of Tarantino's features, and that closed-in pressure elevates the normal Tarantino techniques to even more riveting and sinister levels than normal.

All in all, I loved it. The Hateful Eight is a fun, stately, significant film that presents an exciting evolution in Tarantino's career. TWO THUMBS WAY UP!!

If any of y'all out there have seen the movie, I want to know what you think, too! Let me know your opinions in the comments, on Facebook, etc.

Until next time!


1] Though this number depends on whether or not you count Death Proof, his half of the double-feature Grindhouse collaboration with Robert Rodriguez—if you want the cool title synchronicity of eight, you gotta ignore Death Proof. You've also gotta ignore the handful of films that Tarantino has had a hand in writing but not directing: this includes mostly '90s stuff like From Dusk till Dawn and True Romance.

2] Think the "Royale with Cheese" speech in Pulp Fiction or the "Like a Virgin" monologue in Reservoir Dogs—not that those two moments were devoid of tension, but it was tension of a more elliptical kind, focusing on mundane cultural elements before whipping those digressions around to surprise with violence.

3] Probably top three for me, right there alongside Pulp Fiction and Inglourious Basterds.