Within just over two years, Black Sabbath released four albums and birthed something much bigger than themselves: heavy metal. Many critics found the songs overly theatrical, but the public was ravenous for them. 'Paranoid' is a song by the British heavy metal band Black Sabbath, featured on their second album Paranoid (1970). This is heavy subject matter, and the band developed a musical vocabulary to match it, with ponderous drums and scowling guitars that felt light-years away from, say, CSN&Y. Watch 'Paranoid' from The End The final song, from the final performance from Black Sabbath which happened on Feb 4, 2017Available soon on Blu-Ray, DVD, LP. “Hand of Doom” deals with heroin addiction among soldiers, while “Paranoid” traffics in depression. “Iron Man,” bearing one of the most recognizable guitar riffs on the planet, is told from the perspective of a man who, after being blasted into space, has seen humanity’s grim future but is unable to communicate it upon his return.
“War Pigs”-meant at one point to be the album’s title track-opens with air-raid sirens and ultimately envisions the evisceration of warmongering politicians. Despite critics’ misreading of the album as a Satanic screed (a perception Sabbath played up), the album in fact contained searing indictments of the elite. Out of that despair came this furious, uncompromising record. But by the late ’60s, the death toll in Vietnam was rising, the band’s native Birmingham remained studded with World War II bomb sites, and these blue-collar boys saw only mind-dulling factory work ahead of them. Whist Black Sabbath just can not be denied the adulation they deserve as pioneers and producers of rock/metal at its best, Paranoid has to be their greatest. It wasn’t always this way, of course: Confirmed Beatles fans, Sabbath’s members had their psychedelic period. Entertainment Magpie Limited t/a Music Magpie is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority FRN 775278. Gone were the flower children, peace chants, and Day-Glo paint in came monumental, vicious guitar riffs, Ozzy Osbourne’s snarling twist of a voice, and stories of doom, drug addiction, and death. If any album signaled the definitive end of the ’60s, it was Paranoid.
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