![]() ![]() Chuck Berry sang in more repressed times. It’s naive, simplistic, repetitive, absolute doggerel - but in the tradition. I’m not saying that either that or the arrangement it’s set in is the new “My Generation,” but it is a rocking, churning addition to the long line of defiant, self-affirmative and certainly a little defensive songs that goes right back to the earliest whap and wail of rock ‘n’ roll. “Sweet Leaf,” for instance, shows that Black Sabbath have the balls to write a song celebrating grass this late date, and the double entendre, if you can even call it that, is much less tortuous than it would have been in 1966, with an added touch of salvation from grosser potions: “My life was empty forever on a down/Until you took me, showed me around … Straight people don’t know what you’re about…”Įlon Musk and Bill Maher Warn Against the 'Woke Mind Virus,' a.k.a. Thematically the group has mellowed a bit, and although the morbidity still shines rankly in almost every song, the group seems to have taken its popularity and position seriously enough to begin offering some answers to the dark cul-de-sacs of Paranoid. The rest of the songs, while not exactly lilting, have all the drive and frenzy you could wish for in this day and age. Did you expect bones to be anything else but rigid? ![]() Rock & roll has always been noise, and Black Sabbath have boiled that noise to its resinous essence. Which itself is no problem once you stop thinking about how bored you are and just let it filter down your innards like a good bottle of Romilar. The thick, plodding, almost arrhythmic steel wool curtains of sound the group is celebrated and reviled for only appear in their classical state of excruciating slowness on two tracks, “Sweet Leaf” and “Lord of This World,” and both break into driving jams that are well worth the wait. The sound, with a couple of exceptions, has evolved little if at all. It has fewer songs, if you discount the two short instrumental interludes, but it is not that the songs are longer than the first record - the album is shorter. Master of Reality both extends and modifies the trends on Paranoid. If you took the trouble to listen to the album all the way through. Not all of this, incidentally, was rendered in La Brea sinks of lugubrious bass blasts - several of the songs had high wailing solos and interesting changes of tempo, and “Paranoid” really moved. Grand Funk’s vision is one of universal brotherhood (as when they have spoken of taking their millions to the White House with a list of demands), but Black Sabbath’s, until Master of Reality anyway, has concentrated relentlessly on the self-immolating underside of all the beatific Let’s Get Together platitudes of the counter culture. The thing is that, like all the best rock & rollers since the Pleistocene era, Black Sabbath (and Grand Funk) have a vision that informs their music with unity and direction and makes their simple structures more than they might seem. As far apart as they are, Black Sabbath is only slightly more monotonous than James Taylor or Joni Mitchell, and any Stooges or MC5 fan who disdains Black Sabbath is just bigoted. And since when is monotony so taboo in rock & roll, anyway? Rock has been - some of the best of it too in large part monotonous from the beginning, hypnotically so, as rightwingers would say. If nothing else, though, both Funk and Sabbath are for all their monotony at least supremely consistent - as opposed to schtick collectors with no personal vision like Deep Purple. The second-generation rock audience (that is, those who went steady to “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” and got serious with Highway 62 Revisited) suffer mightily wrestling with the phenomenon represented by Grank Funk and Black Sabbath.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |