The Rolling Stone Album Guide was not impressed, however: "Stoned-out, dumb, clumsy, soulless, overamplified and ugly: surely rock was sinking to an all-time low with this Satanic claptrap." The self-appointed dean of American rock critics, Robert Christgau, was equally dismissive: “The band’s “Christian/satanist/liberal murk… is a dim-witted, amoral exploitation.” On the first song of the first Black Sabbath album 45 years ago, thunder rolls, a funeral bell tolls and Osbourne shudders: “What is this that stands before me/Figure in black that points at me.” The band’s first four albums, which included classic tracks such as Iron Man, Paranoid and Supernaut, built the foundation of heavy metal. It was a new sound - heavy, bleak and scorched with horror-film lyrics. “To get out of there was a luxury.”īlack Sabbath mirrored that dead-end world in dark, ominous music that buried the flower-power era beneath mountainous guitar riffs and cinder-block drum beats. “It was very depressing, the end of the earth for us,” Iommi once told me in an interview. Iommi tried to fight his way out by training to become a boxer. Osbourne suffered from attention deficit disorder and dyslexia, and so was never a good enough student to push past the strict borders of the English working class. ![]() The dreary industrial city offered few options for underprivileged boys other than working in a factory or running with a gang. Rock 'n' roll was a lifeline for the four founding members from Birmingham, England.
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