I Sold My Soul for Black Sabbath

Wherein an inveterate disco dancer claims Black Sabbath, the overlords of heavy metal, for disco. If indeed guitarist Tony Iommi was a master of riffs, then it holds that the repetitive nature of the riff could be marshaled for dancing as well as head-banging. Add a bassist (Geezer Butler) and a drummer (Bill Ward) who could get all start-stoppy funky whenever they wanted. And now you can grasp why metal boys appreciated this rhythmic license given to their girlfriend-hopefuls who just wanted to dance at concerts. As for Ozzy Osbourne, dead at 76 on July 22nd, it's sad that so many tributes had to satisfy rockist articles of faith by claiming that Osbourne did, in fact, write that lyric or have a hand in creating that melody. Isn't his status as one of rock's greatest vocalist enough? You hear the women of ABBA referred to as sirens for their uncanny ability to beckon you to their pop getaways. But Osbourne's voice was a two-minute warning, capable of emptying entire downtown hotels with a single wail. His enormous lung power propelled you away from him, then swept you up in all those metaphors of flight and escape that peppered his/their lyrics. And thus he became hero to generations of no-account kids who hoped for a better life outside of the capitalist grinder. It's appropriate that the most touching of the many tributes raining down this week came from Geezer Butler:

Goodbye dear friend- thanks for all those years- we had some great fun. 4 kids from Aston- who’d have thought, eh?
So glad we got to do it one last time, back in Aston.
Love you.

What follows is my attempt to siphon off all the Sab I'll ever need. Most of the findings here remain true. My Sab is a fast and dancey one. I don't go to them for ballads ("Changes" is fine but I never need to hear it again), interludes (no matter how short or how much heft they lend to each Album), guitar solos ("Warning" drags the debut into the muck of the River Thames), or even songs (again, "Am I Going Insane" causes little pain but Top 40 nuggetry is not their forte). And I don't go to anyone for prog which explains my indifference to Vol. 4 and Sabbath Bloody Sabbath. Paranoid is the most consistent and contains two of their greatest dance tracks - "War Pigs" and "Fairies Wear Boots," Sabotage features Ozzy's best performance and offers plenty of prog weirdness besides, Master of Reality the dankest, Never Say Die! proof that they could outpomp Van Halen.

The comp below fits on two discs and at the very least includes "Supernaut" which most fans nominate as the best cut off Vol. 4 and which the 1976 We Sold Our Soul for Rock 'n' Roll (notice singular "soul") omitted despite including four (4!) other tracks from Vol. 4.

I Sold My Soul for Black Sabbath

(Bozelkablog, 2025)

"Black Sabbath
"The Wizard"
"Behind The Wall Of Sleep"
"N.I.B."
"War Pigs"
"Paranoid"
"Iron Man"
"Electric Funeral"
"Hand of Doom"
"Fairies Wear Boots"
"Sweet Leaf"
"After Forever"
"Children Of The Grave"
"Into the Void"
"Supernaut"
"Sabbath Bloody Sabbath"
"Hole In The Sky"
"Symptom Of The Universe"
"Megalomania"
"The Writ"
"Never Say Die"
"Johnny Blade"
"Junior's Eyes" 

 

Black Sabbath: B+
Paranoid: A-minus
Master of Reality: A-minus
Vol. 4: B
Sabbath Bloody Sabbath: C
Sabotage: A-minus
Technical Ecstasy: D
Never Say Die!: B+ 

 

Black Sabbath Findings For You!

1. There's not a single Black Sabbath album that's great from start to finish, mostly due to the proggy or jazzy or ballady cuts.

2. Someone on ILM made a mix of nothing but those proggy, jazzy, ballady cuts. It was awful. 

3. Technical Ecstasy is one of the worst albums I've ever heard. Here's bassist Geezer Butler looking back on the album in 2004: "Back then, you had to at least try to be modern and keep up. Punk was massive then and we felt that our time had come and gone." Ok so then holy funk y'all should have kept up and sold your souls to punk!

4.  Qua album, Never Say Die! may be their very best. I prefer it to Vol. 4 and Sabbath Bloody Sabbath. It makes up in loopy, try-anything desperation what it lacks in archetypal rockers. And the title track can stand with any of their archetypal rockers. Don't believe me? Check out John Darnielle's Last Plane to Jakarta flowchart proving the album's greatness. 

5. Heaven and Hell, Mob Rules, and Born Again are NOT good albums or even all that heavy. If you're going to go for one of these, try Born Again. It's the campiest.

6. I couldn't care less about anything after Born Again. 

I finished Middlemarch!

Reading George Eliot's Middlemarch was like being trapped in a well-appointed but claustrophobic room with an intimidatingly capacious mind for a looooooong time - in my case, many, many months. I had an easier time getting through Ulysses. The person who suggested it to me "compared it to a diamond: a pure, beautiful, brilliant thing that compels attention and admiration, but that is also somehow hard and icily cerebral. I[t] certainly never struck [him] as a warm novel." Attention and admiration it got. But I received not much pleasure in return, especially in the first half.

No doubt some of my agitation stemmed from Eliot's tough-mindedness, her disinclination to suffer fools lightly. She even says as much at the book's snootiest, if not deadliest, point: "I am less uneasy in calling attention to the existence of low people by whose interference, however little we may like it, the course of the world is very much determined. It would be well, certainly, if we could help to reduce their number, and something might perhaps be done by not lightly giving occasion to their existence." And how, pray tell, should we reduce their number? Is she getting all Raskolnikov on the minor but narratively crucial character Raffles here?

But maybe Middlemarch is supposed to remain pleasureless, like heavy metal. And like metal, maybe we're to use it to reveal the fool within, the fuckup in us all ('cept for Eliot) that we are loathe to confront but that the power of the riffs (literary and otherwise) are meant to whip into shape. The Middlemarch/metal connection reminds me of a recent exchange on ILM. Someone was whining about not wanting to start a zine to which Scott Seward (crucially, a metal expert) replied in a manner most Middlemarch-like: "duh, i'm not talking about you slackers. people with energy. and pep." Certainly, there have been times in my life when I could feel myself in Fred Vincy's "dead men's shoes" (where Idleness resides) with Mary Garth admonishing him/me for reneging on a loan guaranteed by her father Caleb. "What does it matter whether I forgive you?" says Mary, passionately, Eliot tells us. But also icily - her family will be now be in ruins. The utility of "I'm sorry" or "you're forgiven" evaporates in the need for action to make things right. I read much of Middlemarch at the gym, a locale that was holding me back, or so I was informed, from loving the novel. But in retrospect, it seemed entirely appropriate. Steel never forgives. But work hard and you'll get a six pack. And pay back that loan. And get through a 900-page behemoth.

And then you'll get rewarded in those moments where you feel as haughty and worthy as Eliot herself as when she drops a line that you muttered just yesterday about cell phones: "The bias of human nature to be slow in correspondence triumphs even over the present quickening in the general pace of things." Or when she quotes one Sir Thomas Browne to support your thesis that "back in the good ole days" dorks are forever with us: "It is the humor of many heads to extol the days of their forefathers, and declaim against the wickedness of times present. Which notwithstanding they cannot handsomely do, without the borrowed help and satire of times past; condemning the vices of their own times, by the expressions of vices in times which they commend, which cannot but argue the community of vice in both." Or when Dorothea Brooke gives up her fortune for love, i.e., the hunky-you-just-know-it Will Ladislaw (I'd never been so elated at the formation of a heterosexual couple). Or when Eliot revels in the connectedness of the universe: "For there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it." Or in the very last line when Eliot finally comes down to our level and gives it up to all the fools, fuckups, and slackers: "For the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."

 

Osmium-tipped phonograph needles!

Forgive the iPadness of the snap and just swim in all those heavy metal signifiers.



P.S. Osmium is the heaviest of metals (or as Wiki puts it, "the densest natural element...twice as dense as lead").