004: Sabbath Bloody Sabbath

I got into a bunch of hot water with Hastie a week or so ago. He was extolling the virtues of Black Sabbath (much as he extolled the virtues of DMX yesterday) and I was having none of it. He was all "Sabbath bla bla bla" and "Ozzy bla bla bla" and I was like "Nuh-uhh."

My thinking was, Black Sabbath is a band built around a concept. That concept is that they are evil. It's pretty basic. Their name is Black Sabbath, and literally everything they do is draped and shrouded in gloom, murk, doom, and terror. It's the essential conceit of metal music. Just like rap: we are harder than you. Now just as rap has its Will Smiths, metal has its Mike Pattons as well. But the majority of metal bands are hell-bent for leather on seeming tough and evil and mysterious. It's why they use Latin words as song titles, it's why Scandinavia has produced so many seminal metal bands, and so on. In many cases, the posturing works.

Why does it work? Because the music backs it up by actually sounding evil. This is where my problem with Sabbath comes in: they don't. They don't fucking sound evil. They don't sound scary. I remember watching a video of Ozzy doing an acoustic cover of the Beatles' "In My Life" a few years ago and there was nothing incongruous about it. For one, Ozzy doesn't have a particularly intimidating voice. For two, he doesn't really push it to its limits. He doesn't scream, he doesn't growl. He sings. He practically fucking croons. And for three, the music he sings over is... blues-based rock. It's not very heavy, it's not very fast. It doesn't sound like it's going to tear the shit out of your house. It... it's just not powerful-sounding.

Now, the main thing to keep in mind here is that it's not Sabbath's fault. They are old as hell. When they were getting started, there were no pre-existing metal bands for them to evolve from. They represent a logical step in the progression of music from black American blues to white British rock and so on through the NWOBHM and then to the present. Without them, none of the heavy music I respect—Cancer Bats, Protest the Hero, Propagandhi, Genghis Tron, HORSE the Band, etc.—would probably ever have come to be. But when it comes to that short path between my ears and my brain, they leave me dissatisfied. I like Chuck Berry and I like the Rolling Stones. Sabbath? Not so much. They're a heavier, gloomier version of the Beatles parading around like they're the most evil and Satanic thing on the planet. Please.

So. I will stick to listening to Trap Them—who sound like the sort of horrific, shit-tearing-up music that I mentally associate with Sabbath's posturing—and Hastie can have his old-school metal.

Coming Later: Part 2: Why this doesn't apply to The Clash, but does apply to the Sex Pistols.