About the Album:
After Black Sabbath (originally called Polka Tulk Blues Band) TL recorded their debut self-titled album, they toured Europe for six weeks and then headed right back to the studio. Considering the negative reviews from the rock press, bassist Geezer Butler said, “it felt like the four of us against the world.” LW They didn’t realize what a loyal fan base they were developing in the U.S. Their main goal was to prove to their families that they weren’t wasting time on music. LW
The band’s second effort, Paranoid, is “the most influential album in the history of heavy metal.” CM “Metal is what it is now because of this very record.” PM It carved out “an essential metal template.” PF “Radical songwriting. Ear-shattering riffs. Unforgettable vocals. An all-time great rhythm section. Even a slower love song set in outer space. Paranoid had it all.“ NPR
The Band
“Paranoid transformed the landscape of metal” PM with “a dizzying onslaught of distortion and bass-heavy power chords” CS thanks to “Tony Iommi’s crushing, granite-fuzz guitar chords,” 500 “the weighty basslines of Geezer Butler and the pounding percussion of Bill Ward.” PM
With his “eruptive screech,” PM lead singer Ozzy Osbourne delivered vocals “in line with the eerie, apocalyptic nature of the music.” PM He sang “as if chained up somewhere down the corridor.” TB When he “screams, he sounds like he wants to drag you down to the bottom of the ocean and eat your brain.” VB He “would eventually be respected as one of rock’s great showmen and the father of heavy metal.” CS
Their Background
The band wouldn’t be the same without their factory hometown of Birmingham, England. Joel McIver, who wrote two books about them, says, “You cannot separate the environment of Black Sabbath from the music that they made.” NPR The town was ravaged by bombing in World War II and the future looked bleak for anyone born in the late 1940s, such as the members of Black Sabbath. As McIver said, “your future was 45 years on a factory assembly line.” NPR
Abandoning the Book of Rock
“Sabbath took the Book of Rock and handed it on with 90 percent of its pages missing: blues, psychedelia, hippie mysticism, soul basslines, folk, rock ‘n’ roll – you name it, Sabbath dumped it. And they were asexual, immune to the erotic pulse that dated back to Elvis’ gyrations.” TB Their songs weren’t about girls, cars, and partying but about death, doom, and destruction. Black Sabbath’s reinvention of rock and roll came to define heavy metal.
The Big Three
“Sabbath is rivaled only by Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple as the most important early metal act.” CS “The metal bands with huge libidos borrow from Led Zeppelin” TB but musically “Zeppelin incorporated a great deal of folk and blues into their songs.” CS “The flashy neo-progressives look up to Deep Purple” TB who were “as much progressive rock as it was metal.” CS However, Black Sabbath were “the first pure-metal band, with every song thunderous, weighty, and bordering on chaos.” CS
The Sound and Look of Heavy Metal
Black Sabbath owed its unique sound to Iommi who, because he’d lost the tips of two fingers while working in a sheet-metal factory, lowered his guitar tuning and fashioned prosthetic fingertips from bottle caps. Butler then also lowered his tuning to match Iommi. This practice of “downtuning” “became such standard practice in heavy metal that it has come to define the sound as much as the guitar’s distortion and the volume at which the songs are meant to be played.” CS
The band’s second effort, Paranoid, furthered the template Black Sabbath established with their self-titled debut. The band subdued the blues influences prevalent on their first album CQ by refining their “signature sound – crushingly loud, minor-key dirges loosely based on heavy blues-rock – and applied it to a newly consistent set of songs with utterly memorable riffs, most of which now rank as all-time metal classics.” AM
It is “monolithic and primally powerful,” AM “heavier than seven lead elephants [and] metaller than a fork factory.” VB Quite simply, “Paranoid defined the sound and style of heavy metal more than any other record in rock history.” AM
“Nearly every heavy-metal and extreme rock band of the last three decades…owes [it] a debt of worship.” 500 It “set the standard against which all heavy music would forever be judged.” GW It is “the landmark in the history of heavy metal.” CR
The band’s followers created “an entire wardrobe of black leather, heavy jewelry, and brooding complexions that would come to define the world-weary posture of heavy-metal fandom.” CS By giving the music a defining sound and look, Black Sabbath would “launch heavy metal not just as a genre but also a veritable industry.” PF
The Songwriting and Recording
The songwriting was much more systematic than on the first album. Iommi would start the process with “one of his killer massive roaring riffs.” CR Ozzy would work on melodies for the vocals, Butler would pen most of the lyrics, and then Ward would “top it off with a pounding beat to complement Butler’s thunderous bass.” CR
“Iommi’s stump-fingered leads and down-tuned riffs provided the perfect platform for songs about war-mongering generals, boots-wearing skinheads and nuclear fallout.” GW The album “perfectly captured the rage, confusion and, yes, paranoia of the Vietnam era” GW as well as “the struggles of Britain’s working class.” PM
“The subject matter is unrelentingly, obsessively dark.” AM “Listeners hear their basic existential fears amplified so that they sound like the end of the world.” CM It’s as if “the band members were tasked to deliver warnings of doom to the world.” CR The themes “that we must atone for the inherent evil of mankind” TM came to define “the philosophical disposition of heavy metal” TM by becoming “the obsessions of every other band aspiring to hardness.” TM
With only six days in the studio (an eternity compared to the one day they had for their first album), LW they recorded the songs as if playing a live concert. The songs had largely been written on the road while the band toured in support of Black Sabbath.
Satanism
The band’s “alling was to express downer sentiments evoked by pentatonic riffs fit to make a television evangelist’s head revolve.” TB When the album was released, “the world was convinced that these working-class chums…were either satanists or an incredible facsimile.” TL Ozzy Osbourne’s biting-the-heads-off-bats incident didn’t come until he’d embarked on a solo career, but he had people nervous with his “declaration that he had sat through The Exorcist a gazillion times.” TL
Ozzy once told an interviewer, “We’ve never done anything really devilish. Perhaps Tony has sacrificed a few too many virgins in his time, but nothing you could really call wrong.” CS
The Songs
Here are insights into individual songs.
“War Pigs”
“Where the extended, multi-sectioned songs on the debut sometimes felt like aimless jams, their counterparts on Paranoid have been given focus and direction, lending an epic drama to now-standards like” AM the “apocalyptic songs…War Pigs and ‘Iron Man’ which are no less great for being totally incomprehensible.” TL Butler said the band “wrote ‘War Pigs’ because many Americans were frightened to mention anything about the wary so we thought we’d tell it like it is.” PF
Lines like “Satan laughing spreads his wings” furthered the image of the band as Satanic, but it wasn’t about the devil at all. Butler said, “To me, war was the big Satan. It wasn’t about politics or government or anything. It was evil. So I was sying ‘Generals gathered in the masses / Just like witches at black masses’ to make an analogy.” LW
It's also worth noting that the album was originally to be called War Pigs and the artwork had been designed with that in mind. As Tony Iommi said, “There’s a guy standing there with a shield and a sword, with the album title called Paranoid…’What’s that have to do with Paranoid?” Well, nothing really. But that’s how it was.” LW
“Iron Man”
Meanwhile, “the stadium-ready riffer Iron Man” CQ “sports one of the most immediately identifiable riffs in metal history,” AM It’s also been called “one of the most devastating two-measure riffs in all of guitardom.” TM
The song found a whole new audience as the title song for 2008’s super-hero movie, Iron Man, starring Robert Downey, Jr. Of course, the original had nothing to do with the Marvel Comics character. It is “a surreal fantasy” PF “about a man who travels to the future and sees the apocalyptic destruction on mankind.” CR When returning to the present, he is turned to steel by a magnetic field and is rendered mute, leaving him unable to warn anyone about the apocalypse. “He’s ostracized and ignored he lashes out, iron fists falling on the city with the weight of Iommi’s monstrous riff and Ward’s colossal Bonham drums.” PF
“Paranoid”
That song and the album’s title track even “scraped the U.S. charts despite virtually nonexistent radio play” AM in an era “when it was far more fashionable to sing gentle acoustic songs about ‘getting back to the garden.’” GW The title cut, “a three-chord classic dashed off as last-minute album filler,” GW isn’t only a heavy-metal classic and “arguably Black Sabbath’s most popular tune” CQ but a pivotal song that “presaged the coming of punk rock.” GW
Tony Iommi wrote the “simple riff that chugged, paused, and kept prowling, like a predator always in search of its next meal” PF while the rest of the band headed to the bar. PF The song “foregrounds an adolescent sort of worry – about being depressed and not understanding the symptoms or root of it, about crying when others laugh, about breaking up with someone because ‘she couldn’t help me with my mind.’” PF
“Butler sounds like he’s using a brick for a plectrum, but the arrangement is perfectly balanced, taking in drum cracks, doom-laden feedback, and clusters of electric punctuation that dazzle by way of contrast. The song is a pocket symphony: an Old Testament that successors will always look to.” CM
The record company, Vertigo, heard a hit and issued the “three-minute assault” PF as a single just six months after the band had released its debut album. Vertigo also pushed for renaming the album Paranoid (instead of the originally planned War Pigs) “to remind potential customers of the song they’d seen four long-haired weirdos headbang to on Top of the Pops.” PF
“Hand of Doom”
“The drifting verses of Hand of Doom are direct arrows into…doom metal, turbocharged by sections that feel like nebulous hardcore.” PF “The song became infamous as a supposed endorsement of heroin, but it’s a warning for deployed soldiers taken with the newfound hobby of trying to kill time with drugs but only killing themselves.” PF
“Ozzy’s horizon-reaching yowl was made for songs like ‘Hand of Doom,’ where the rhythm virtually demands that head banging be invented.” CM
“Electric Funeral”
The band weren’t just tackling the tragedy of Vietnam, but the threat of the Cold War. “Anchored by a hangman riff and guided by Osbourne’s best sorcerer vocals, Electric Funeral lashes out at the woe of that atomic age and the endless destruction it enables.” PF As Butler said, “It was always touch and go whether Russia would drop the atomic bomb on us or we would drop the atomic bomb on them.” LW
The “churning, discombobulated riff that underpins ‘Electric Funeral’…takes psychedelia to new extremes.” CM
“Rat Salad”
“The starts and stops of Rat Salad and the way Iommi’s guitar line runs like razor wire between the rhythmic shifts, presage the instrumental ecstasy of math-rock, in spirit if not skill.” PF
“Fairies Wear Boots”
Fairies Wear Boots grew out of an incident in which the band members “were harassed and threatened by a gang of skinheads wearing Dr. Martens boots.” LW It “boasts one of the best grooves of Sabbath’s entire discography, some of Osbourne’s most effortlessly soulful singing ever, and a bridge and solo that feel…triumphant.” PF “The beginning…keeps folding and rising, only to empty into declarative verses, like the skeleton of power metal awaiting eventual flesh.” PF
“Planet Caravan”
Ozzy “delivers images of romantic escapism over circular bass and hand-drum patter during Planet Caravan…a clear antecedent for metal’s exploratory psychedelic side.” PF The “brooding” CQ song “showcases the band in a softer setting, where it proves equally able” CQ and “ventures into a desert soundscape.” CM
Notes: A 2009 deluxe edition added a second disc of the album in a quadrophonic mix and a third disc of instrumental versions and versions with alternate lyrics. A 4-CD deluxe edition was released in 2016 which included two live 1970 shows, one from Montreux and one from Brussels.
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