Cities Made of Song, 1970

Cities Made of Song, 1970 - War Pigs by Black Sabbath​

Speaking of abrupt changes in the pop culture landscape in 1970, hey, what about heavy metal?

It would be a fallacy to say that heavy metal popped into being from the aether when Black Sabbath arrived on the scene; after all, bands like Vanilla Fudge, Blue Cheer, and Grand Funk had already spent the latter part of the Sixties pioneering the brand of heavy, fuzzy psychedelic rock that would eventually spawn that genre. But still, it would be an equal fallacy to say that the rock landscape would look remotely the same today had Black Sabbath never came to be.

Rather like Spearhead from Space, Black Sabbath's eponymous debut album, also from early 1970, recognizably descends from the work of the previous decade. Yet it still feels massively new and fresh. The doomladen atmosphere of "Black Sabbath" would set the tone for decades of metal to come, and move the rock genre generally into a darker direction.

It's easy to imagine that the four lads from Birmingham might have been pleasantly surprised by the success of their first record. Although savaged in the critical press of the time, they pushed a lot of LPs, and were soon in the studio for their second album of 1970, "Paranoid".

"Paranoid" is a fair bit less doom metal than "Black Sabbath", with the exception of the awesome Electric Funeral and Hand of Doom. The A-side is pure radio bait, showing either a canny attempt by the band to shoot for more airtime with commercial-friendly hits, or just a predisposition to polish up and record some of the songs they were already playing at venues as early as 1968. One of these tunes is War Pigs, which is, in my humble estimation, the best on the record.

Originally the charmingly titled Walpurgis, this song was renamed after anxious executives worried about scaring paying customers away with satanic themes. It's telling that they didn't actually changing the lyrics at all, and that seems to have done the job. Far from extolling satanic forces, however, War Pigs decries the very real Satanism that is warfare, bloodshed, and the ambitions of generals. It was far from the only anti-war song to arise during the war in Vietnam, but it is certainly one of the most enduring. Even though Ozzy Osbourne has admitted in the years since that the members of Sabbath basically knew nothing about the facts of the war, there is still a righteous anger to the song that I find quite pleasing.

It also helps, of course, that it's quite pulse-pounding and heavy for a song that was released at this early date. And the cool thing is, this is really only the beginnings of a genre that would grow, expand, and ultimately diversify over the ensuing couple of decades. It's likely that I'll post up a few more metal songs over the years, but for now we'll move on to our first literary diversion of the Seventies, The Scales of Injustice.

(Modified from the original posted at Gallifrey Base on 25 March 2021.)