Time for another a Pete’s controversial aesthetic opinions tweeted from the bath. Here’s an important fork in the aesthetic road encapsulate by a choice between two things: which is better, Led Zeppelin or Black Sabbath. For me, it’s Sabbath every time.
To qualify, I only really count the Ozzy era here. I don’t care all that much for the Dio era, or that much for Ozzy’s solo work. But those first four albums are the real origin of heavy metal, stoner rock, and much else besides, and their aesthetic experimentation is glorious.
Most people I know think I’m mad. But I’d even go so far as to say that out of the two, Sabbath are the better blues band, because they’re clearly still in the era where rock was defining itself through its rearticulation of blues.
Here’s my key point: Led Zeppelin are obviously more technical musicians, and much more compositionally complex, and as a prog rock nerd I appreciate these things. But Black Sabbath exemplify the virtue of (sincere) simplicity, both in lyrical seriousness and musical play.
No one is ever going to accuse Ozzy of being a lyrical genius. As a good friend pointed out to me, he’s happy to rhyme a word with itself (‘masses’). Yet War Pigs has more direct poetic power in its lines than any Zeppelin ballad: the rich make the poor fight their wars. Simple.
Tony Iommi is not the master of the solo that Jimmy Page is. He’s a few fingers short. But he sold those fingers to Satan for the riff to Iron Man. Sabbath had incredible, chugging, distorted riffs like nothing before them. The musical apotheosis of Brummy industrial noise.
If you don’t believe me that Sabbath are a blues band, let alone the better one, listen to The Wizard, which I’d pick over every note of musical ode to Gandalf in Zeppelin’s catalogue, as much as I enjoy them. Playful, yet simple. Direct, yet innovative. Electro blues.
There’s a heady aesthetic mix of influences and ideas in Sabbath, from the sonic palette of the industrial working class, and the synthesis of the emotional tones of blues and horror cinema, to the narcotic appropriation of fantasy/sci-fi images stripped back to the bone.
I’m a prog rock fan at heart, as much if not more than a teenage metal head, but Sabbath manage more naive conceptual experimentation in those first few albums than most bands ever do. Enough to supply material for a multiplicity of ongoing aesthetic research programs.
To briefly list a couple of the highlights of the genres spawned by Sabbath, I’d suggest Iron Maiden (only with Bruce), Pantera (over Slayer), Kyuss (Welcome to Sky Valley), Earth (The Bees Made the Honey...), and Sleep’s epic monument to the holy weed: Dopesmoker/Jerusalem.
The mythic sorrow of the Delta somehow passes through the noisy filter of blessed Brum and returns as ritual worship, an epic journey into the sacred heart of depressive vice:
Music is undoubtedly the most directly emotional medium that I experience. It is capable of compressing and communicating the concrete failures of the will (rather than its abstract triumphs) in ways that integrate poetic expression and rhythmic vibe. When it cuts, it cuts deep.
This integrated experience is one of the first things that falls apart when I hit a depressive episode. I slowly lose the emotional resonance in songs I know I love; that I know *why* I love. It’s genuinely horrifying. The dissonance makes me avoid music entirely in such states.
The great paradox here is that depression is so culturally connected to sadness and its many melancholic modes that to be unable to *feel* that emotional richness when one is utterly, bluntly miserable is a nothing so much as a brute absurdity. Epic (cognitive) fail.
I’ve been able to revisit so much richly and diversely sorrowful music in the last few months, having both returned from cognitive exile and finally committed to a Spotify subscription, that it feels like the rest of my brain is finally on good terms with my limbic system again:
https://twitter.com/deontologistics/status/1349491639287488515
I explore these tapestries of association and emotion and I find images of my younger self in various states, suited to their myriad sonic moods. Often, it’s sitting with friends in dirty band t-shirts, long haired and frayed, inhaling smoke and song as if they were the same. 🖖
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