Into the Void by Barney Hoskyns

Author:Barney Hoskyns [Hoskyns, Barney]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-85712-106-6
Publisher: Music Sales Limited
Published: 2004-03-18T05:00:00+00:00

Black Sabbath: The Complete ‘70s Replica CD Collection 1970–78

Simon Reynolds, Uncut, December 2001

THE MYSTERY OF THE RIFF – so crucial to rock, so oddly neglected by critics.

Or perhaps not so oddly neglected, given that they’re almost impossible to write about: just try explaining why one monster-riff slays you where another fails to ignite.

A killer riff is by definition simplistic – which is why rock, as it gets more sophisticated, tends to dispense with them in favour of wispy subtleties.

Whereas riffs just seem to bypass the aesthetic faculty of “appreciation” and go straight to the gut. Riff-based music seems lowly, literally “mindless” because it connects with the lower “reptilian” part of the cerebral cortex which governs fight-or-flight responses and the primitive emotions of appetite, aversion, aggression.

Talking of reptiles, Black Sabbath – perhaps rock’s all-time greatest riff factory – irresistibly invite metaphors involving dinosaurs. For a group that wielded such brontosauran bulk, though, Sabbath were surprisingly nimble on their feet. Listening to this box-set, which comprises all eight albums of the classic Ozzy-fronted era, it’s surprising how fast many of their songs were, given the Sabs’ reputation as torpid dirgemeisters for the downered-and-out.

Even in manic mode, though, Sabbath always sound depressed. Rhythmically as much as lyrically, Sabbath songs dramatise scenarios of ordeal, entrapment, affliction, perseverance in the face of long odds and insuperable obstacles. Tony Iommi’s down-tuned guitar, in tandem with the awesome rhythm section of Bill Ward and Geezer Butler, creates sensations of impedance and drag, like you’re struggling through hostile, viscous terrain. But let’s not discount Ozzy’s role: his piteous wail is one-dimensional, sure, but it sounds utterly righteous in this Sabbath context of trial and burden. He’s even genuinely moving on forlornly pretty ballads like ‘Changes’.

With a few exceptions (Lester Bangs, notably) the first rock-crit generation abhorred Sabbath. Criticism always lags behind new art forms, appraising it using terminology and techniques appropriate to earlier genres. So the first rock critics (typically postgraduates in literature, philosophy, or politics) treated songs as mini-novels, as poems or protest tracts with tasteful guitar accompaniment. Expecting rock to get ever more refined, they were hardly gonna embrace Sabbath’s crude putsch on Cream, which stripped away all the blues-bore scholarship and grossly amplified the heavy dynamics. Riff-centred rock – Zep, Mountain, ZZ Top, Aerosmith – was received with incomprehension and condescension.

But while Seventies critical faves like Little Feat and Jackson Browne have sired no legacy, over the long haul Sabbath’s originality and fertility have been vindicated. Sabbath are literally seminal, their chromosones popping up in US hardcore (Black Flag/Rollins were massively indebted), grunge (Nirvana = Beatles + Sabbath x Pixies), and virtually every major HM phase from Metallica to sludge-metallers Kyuss/Queens Of The Stone Age to Korn-style nu-metal.

Sabbath dressed like hippies: check the kaftans and loon pants in the inner sleeve photos of these CDs (which are miniature simulacra of the original gatefold elpees). And they clearly hoped to contribute to the post-Sgt Pepper’s progressive tendency: hence pseudo-pastoral interludes like the flute-draped ‘Solitude’, an idyll amidst Master Of Reality’s sturmund drang.

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