What earth, anyway? And whose? As "Hole in the Sky" from 1975's Sabotage shrieks, (please) "Take Me to Heaven". Which heaven, nohow? It's the heaven of space, of non-planet Pluto, of a future where there is nothing but the future that promises us the future. Black Sabbath had, since their second record, Paranoid (1970), authored a sound of doom they then enrobed in a bucket of glorified sludge, but, weirdly enough, they held this sound at enough of a distance to give you a space into which you could crawl and hide and safely wait, en-wombed, for the sun to crash into the sea. This sound continued down its dark path through each subsequent record -- the pope-on-a-rope-hopelessness of Master of Reality, the cocained-emotion-freeze of Vol 4, the morning-after-Bloody-'ell-Mary of Sabbath Bloody Sabbath -- until the high voltage hero came across the other side of the world to the depressed pill popper, they commingled translucences, and they effervesced a sacred problem child: the complete annihilation of everything, Sabotage, which seems to believe less in nothing than in what is the "less than nothing". "The food of love became the greed of our time / and now we're living on the profits of crime" - these lines aren't even sung, they are smiled over a riff that evokes the electricity of any abandoned power station on any planet not yet learned of in any science fiction novel. What I always thought, when I dropped the needle down on this track, was that the windows over my stereo would implode in a fit of static recognition, since the song wasn't angry as much as it was scolding, explaining to each earthling, with each rabid and overamplified sound, that the narrator's gaze through the heart of the sunrise, beyond the purity of space, was a wish to start everything over again, was to rebel against everything that had driven us all into depravity. This was heaviness in the name of clearing everything and replacing every piece upon the board, cleansing us all in a mud bath of delectable regret.
Of course, after we have catapulted through the sky to the end of things, and we interlude with fluttering butterflies of acoustic guitar layered across the path of the nevermore, we come upon a universe that we won't ever understand. Gug-gug-gug gug-gugga-gug NAH naht - Gug-gug-gug gug-gugga-gug NAHT NAH naht-- the riff of "Symptom of the Universe" breaks open the typical Sabbath heavier-than-thou-lead-doom and spills the blood of punks into the black space, punks who have not yet invented themselves, but whose DNA blueprints the end of history so long as we decide to critique it. As a kid, I longed to know how this riff -- simple to the point of blank absurdity, creating the raw deal that one can only have always lived beneath -- could shake the world to bits and leave behind this trail of dust that one could follow beyond the sun and the yoke of its setting. But the song is stranger than the riff, Sabbath was always stranger than doom and more ambiguous than this metal genre they helped to make into a gorgeous dark joke.
The massive cymballic flash on "Symptom of the Universe" -- it's as if the cymbals create a blankened space for the "A" part of the riff, the guitar and bass a raft hurtling down a desolately endangering river, the cymbals the smooth rock canyon walls on either side. But when part "B" of the riff comes, the guitar and bass stop short and the drums are the raft thrown over the rapids, cymbals fading behind the sound of the falling sticks hucked in panic at the drumskins. This being Sabbath, this song has too many parts for a song to have; they shoved too much music into a small space in order to crack the space open, in order to explode space into a blackness for the world to believe in. "Symptom of the Universe" literally explodes after a series of multiply interchanging parts, --verses, choruses, post shard-shooting guitar star solo -- into a universe where the lone planet is future hippie desire -- "O my child of lost creation / come and step inside my dree-eams" -- this is pattered over a slight funk vamp, with a village of acoustic guitars and extreme post-Woodstock noodling across each passing second, which are hurtled into the asteroids of tomorrow's hallucinatory promise.
"Megalomania" closes side 1, and it closes the hole in the sky, it reverses the exploding universe by imploding everything back into the center of your mind. I had to look the word's meaning up when I was a kid, but even reading what it meant didn't change the absolute otherness of the word itself staring into me from the back cover. What does it mean to name a song "Megalomania"? It is a mania of the metaphysical; perhaps the symptom of this mania can only be known through the universe itself....
The song is a dark cauldron of impossible sorcery, something that seems to be from beyond time, but also in the time that is the time inside your head, which is the same hole as the space in the sky. There are swirls of guitars spiraling within synths stacked atop the dream brain that is the one who thinks only of himself in his blindness. Sabbath has always courted madness as a state of mind in their songs, and "Megalomania" is the pinnacle of the madness that plagues the mind that knows nothing of itself, not even its own pain. We get to deal with this for 9:46, and when everything fades, we are still getting to deal with what faded away.
Side 2 entices the most Vegas-ed of us with "The Thrill of it All", a perfect cynical counterpart to "Megalomania', which ends in a cannibalistic carnival of total confusion. "Thrill" begins with forked tongue guitar, soon overridden by the return of the cannibals in droves, 30 guitars and synths and bass and drums and too many people in too few rooms. But when we get to the verse of "Thrill", everything drops out but a greedy rock riff played with democratic vision, even the singing sliding over it all is the riff, too. The thrill is the fact that the self obsessed autocrat is engaged with only this thrill, everything is included inside it, the entire universe compromised by lying still, lying perfectly in the lap of this lie. The narrator is only all lies, the intent of the lying voice is to thrill you with a forked tongue. Lying leads only to tyranny, a tyrant's fantasy of a swirled world of voices, strings, and death.
"Supertzar", whose only words are the play on words of "star/czar", and whose only song is the chorus that accentuates the ascension of each musical mountain, is the result of this tyranny, this mutation of the real into the space that is behind the mountain, that dominates it with its barbaric yawn. The song is "heavy", but what's weird about its "heaviness" is that there is only a lone guitar amongst the multiplicity of strings and chorus, whose mutivalence atop the simple rock accompaniment of bass and drums (these are there but almost unheard) gives the guitar its extra chainsawing cinder block-ed power, as if the guitar is the black figure of the lone rider (as in Clint Eastwood's "High Plains Drifter") and the strings and voices are the sky and sun and the drums and bass are the impotent ground beneath it all. The future, beyond the sun, lies where there is nothing beneath anything, the ground is helpless to crumble, the mind is everything that is every crumb in any world. Insanity, when I walk into a room and everyone stares at the bright new world painted lazily behind my eyes.
"Am I Going Insane" seems to ground us for a moment, the song disguised as a sheen pop surface with entwined guitars in splendiferous harmony. We hear that everything is right, except for the fact that everything feels wrong in this song, the bass awkwardly loud and thundering and stomping like a zombie stalking the moon, the crunchy edges of the guitars peeled back to reveal only a pierced vein of twisted soloing. The singer seems too loud, too large, a baby crushing the zombie stalking the moon, semi-articulate and semi awake. As the song fades, a crazed chorus (the mirror image of the warlord choir in "Supertzar') arises, cackles and frantic howls and intensities of the inner voice gone to the zombie moon. The voice that wins out over all is the voice that screams the loudest -- the screams of a child whose pain will outlast every universe. Sabbath lets that voice extend 11 seconds into the next track, the exploding monolith "The Writ".
Writing about this is tiring, and "The Writ" is the most tiring of the writing. Why? Why write something formal, something to order and organize the world such that the universe itself is no longer only the singular amorphous mass that is the "it" it is? "The Writ" is made up of many shapes, it is also amorphous, and it seems to slip past you before the 8:17 it occupies. The song is like the presence of something that is in a space, that vanishes, that has vanished even while it was there, a law laid down by ghosts of the never to be remembered future.
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Sabotage is that memory of something that never was; it is the reduction of that thing to what can never have been. It's where Black Sabbath was last seen, before we forgot what it meant to see something appear and mean even nothing. It is the meaning of the "less than nothing" that is the universe you will forget right this minute.
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