Sabotaged by Tomorrow's Dream

It's funny to think of Sabbath now -- not "funny ha-ha", but "funny strange", maybe even "funny wistful", or "funny sad" -- after all that's happened in rock music, heavy music, popular culture and with every parody of what rock music is. It's tough to remember that there was no such thing as "self-consciousness" when rock began as we know it to now be, no empty reflection on the lack of meaning or absurdity of intended meaning, which we now have and by which we will always be plagued. I don't mean an "innocence" here, though  -- there is nothing like that anywhere on this earth, which is unearthed with the sound of what has always lain beneath. Nothing is innocent there, because there is no guilt where no one has ever been.

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.

....Like Sand Under Glass....

Eberhard Weber's 1975 album (is this jazz?) Yellow Fields contains the 15:34 track "Sand-Glass". The instrumentation, and the actual things the instruments play, begin in straightforward, nearly overly simplistic fashion, mimicking the form of the music, its undulation, the curved pulse, a slowly motioning wave of forward thought, aiming what appears to be nothing, (or perhaps this all sounds like it aims at nothing) -- fretless electric bass, drums, electric piano, soprano saxophone -- the song (usually instrumental pieces are called "tunes", but this track crosses over into "song" territory, capturing the flag of genre overseen by the guardians of musical categorization, there is nothing to "tune" here, only a singing to be sung through the frozen object of petrified time) barely moves, it's a drone, a repetition of each moment (which is sort of what every object is, isn't it, a thing that appears and reappears only as what it always only is), an ostinato, things that appear and disappear and reappear and elongate and contract and that are altered over time but whose basic shape and scope and intent remain as they always were.

Intent in music is a curious object -- not on the level of the "player", but on the level of the musical "idea" or "phrase". Where does this phrase mean to go based on the form it has taken? How is the form the expression of its own direction?

The song is hushed and appears fragile, it crawls slowly across some perilous surface -- a feeling of floating, or drifting, as though the thing this song is, in its fragility, is terrified to be seen, to be destroyed, it is only to exist under glass. The movement is more water than air, since it doesn't seem that at any point in time all movement would cease if the object moving suddenly accelerated and hurtled through space and crashed into a surface...

It doesn't seem that the disappearance of what holds it up will change the velocity of the world, what separates it from where it currently is and where it may be if everything beneath it ceased to have ever existed.

At the beginning of the piece, behind the ever-repetitive bass pattern and Rhodes chords cloaked in dusk air, there's a sound of a synthesizer, but it's not recognized as a sound that is "produced" through an artifice, a form of sound meant to represent the source of yet another sound. You think of an alien animal at the bottom of a quarry or bog that has, for the moment, awoken into the world, to walk the black earth in the black night. As though it wasn't in the world when it was sleeping, that was simply the image of space that had dreamed it, just then. I think of the giant sand worms that emerge in David Lynch's Dune -- the worms are made of the same substance of the planet in which they bury themselves, and they exist to consume everything that lives on the planet in order that these things become part of the planet.

The synth in "Sand-Glass" hides behind the other music in the song, its mutilated motif that of a melody sleeping, but that of a melody that has awoken the sleeping giant beneath the earth. The synth reappears at the end of the Rhodes solo, which has the feel of something close at hand, something imminent, to elongate a new distance between the sound of an amplified piano (one world) and the sound of a slithering depth that slips past us and pulls us away from ourselves (a subterranean future).

At a certain point in the song (you can see where if you watch the time go by, but the time seems to stay exactly where you are when you are listenining), the horn sound changes from that of a soprano saxophone to either a shenai or a nagaswaram. What you hear when this change occurs is an increase in melodic intensity, although what happens is not a "melody". The horn until this part in the music has hovered above everything else that is hovering, committed to nothing, lilting and treading even more lightly than that. But the change in timbre is like the change from surface to face, from what lies underneath to what is buried at the bottom of the world.

Everything has passed into an immediacy that can't be tracked through thought, just then (and then, then, too). It is a cry of the buried thing unburied, the hidden world unburdened, repression freed from the unconscious, the night made into the night it has always been.

Of course, the song continues, so there's time allowed to track things, to think them, to trace your thinking amongst them. Fifteen minutes for a song is quite a while, but in life, it's hardly anything. A drive across town, a walk to the grocery store, ten pages of a book, a paragraph of written words, a phone call to tell her or him how you feel. In the 70's progressive rock and jazz fusion records were generally filled with 15 minute, 16 minute, 20 minute tracks. It was a way for a band to say something longer than a song, more than simply make a song that you could simply come to know in the time it took to listen to it. Parts dissipated and dissolved, motifs established themselves and recapitulated after 12 minutes of departure....in pseudo-70's fashion, "Sand-Glass" develops, but I'm not sure it has parts -- or even departures, for that matter -- similar to its instrumentation and overall sound, which are of its time, but which seem to be from no time, or a time that knows itself and that is also unknown to itself. Like the sand worms from Dune, who can't know themselves, who can't know anything but themselves, it's a large structure made up of completely identical structures. It rises and falls, eventually, like the creatures who burst through the surface of the earth to announce themselves in space and time, but it's reason to be is simply that it is and that it won't disappear.

After the foreign horn fades, there's a Rhodes/bass/drums swollen sea interlude, only to be followed by a return to the beginning of the song...except with a double-tracked staccato horn melody that indicates some dramatic developments are taking place, at the level of structure, at the level of what the structure contains. And then what might be a "solo", although it's hard to tell if the fretless bass or the Rhodes is doing more of the soloing. But everything is controlled, is inside the container of the song, even when the drummer accelerates and is crashing a massive cymbal (his missive from beyond?) and the synthesizer draws down the moon, and you are too soon staring into the mute face of the moon, reflected in the dark, idle pool before you.

And then there is only the moon, strange as it is above us, as if it, too, is behind glass, perfectly framed, inanimately white, made of nothing but bleached sand, filled with the anticipation of an even clearer, darker, night -- one in which nothing can be seen, and everything is to be heard.