Black Sabbath
Paranoid

Link between the psychedelia of the sixties (particularly Cream and Iron Butterfly), the hard progressive (early Uriah Heep), and the blues in its most radical forms, Black Sabbath infused their music with a probably unconscious revolution (and here lies the greatness of the band, in not creating anything premeditated) that would alter the roots of the hard sound and reflect in all future heavy metal. Something extremely innovative, the heavy equivalent of the dark-indie of the Velvet Underground from New York.

Even today, Paranoid is an authentic masterpiece, an album that makes Toni Iommi's complex and intricate experiments (surely the best living guitarist even today) a true cornerstone. It's not so much for the unforgettable riffs he creates (extraordinary is the lesson of the heavy-jazz of "Wicked World" in the previous, unrepeatable self-titled debut) but for the surprising ability to elevate sound forms that would create something even decades later. Isn't "Planet Caravan" (someone try to deny it) perhaps the first doom song in the history of rock music? My Dying Bride and Candlemass already resided here, even though no one could have known. Well, everyone knows "Paranoid," bass and drums are still lethal, even if today it has a strange effect, because it's a track that has been talked about too much... Rumore talks about a political album in the latest issue, and I think they are partly right: indeed the lyrics of "War Pigs" "generals gathered in their masses just like witches at black masses" inspired - it's said - by the Vietnam war leaves no room for doubt. Rather, doubts should return to those who have unjustly associated Ozzy & Co: with grand guignol and a taste for the macabre.

If the personal vicissitudes of Ozzy or Bill Ward have not highlighted identities too clear from a rational perspective, that's their business: utmost respect even for their emotional breakdowns, they were (and are) great artists. But the Black Sabbath lyrics actually combined the baroque-decadent fascination for English and non-English dark literature (from Lord Byron to Poe passing through Stevenson) with the threatening sense of "malevolent" everyday life of the present. They were, and are, lyrics of rare beauty, capable of unleashing all the pain and anguish of a world that can never (neither then nor now) fully express the best of itself. I also like to think that if Black Sabbath were taboo in the system, nowadays the themes of death have become practically a current affair, a reality that doesn't even evoke fear. But in the heavy-dark dimension of this album, we still find various surprises: like the vocoder voice of "Iron Man" or the splendid "Electric Funeral," but above all, it is like a litanic prophecy for a humanity that perhaps does not fear for its individual fate but the end of its entire civilization, the unconfessable fear of not being able to save anything. Something that goes far beyond the music and the cover, with that temporal ecstasy of a weapon that wickedly redeems the vocation of man of every era: a "Black Sabbath" that acts inside and outside of us...