[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.
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