Black Sabbath (song)

"Black Sabbath"
"Black Sabbath"
Song

"Black Sabbath" is a song by the heavy metal pioneers of the same name. It was written in 1969 and released on the band's debut album Black Sabbath. At concerts, Ozzy often tells the story of how the band changed its name. In the VH1 documentary Heavy: The Story of Metal, he says, "Before we were Black Sabbath we were a band called Earth, when one day Geezer noted how people pay money to see scary movies so we should try writing scary music. So we changed our band name to Black Sabbath." (There was another contemporary band called Earth, playing a different type of music, and Black Sabbath is a 1963 movie featuring Boris Karloff).

As the first song by "the first metal band", Black Sabbath is often considered a pioneer of heavy metal. The song appears to be about the protagonist facing Satan during the Apocalypse. The protagonist is Satan's "chosen one", and seems paralyzed with fear. Along with "N.I.B.", this song added to the perception of the general public that the band members were devil worshippers (which the band has always denied).

According to the band, the song was inspired by an experience that Geezer Butler related to Ozzy Osbourne. In the days of Earth, Geezer painted his apartment matte black and placed several inverted crucifixes on the walls. Then, one day, Ozzy brought round a book about witchcraft, which Geezer became extremely fascinated by. One night, he read the book and fell asleep. He recalls waking up and seeing a black figure and, as he put it, "crapped myself". He then told Ozzy, who wrote the lyrics to what would become Black Sabbath: "What is this that stands before me? Figure in black which points at me".

The main riff is constructed with a harmonic progression including an interval of tritone, that is to say the augmented fourth. That interval was banned from medieval ecclesiastical singing because of its dissonant quality, which led monks to call it diabolus in musica—"the devil in music." ^[1]Because of that original symbolic association, it came to be heard in Western cultural convention as “evil”. Today the interval continues to suggest an "oppressive", "scary", or "evil" sound. Heavy metal has made extensive use of diabolus in musica because of these connotative qualities; And this riff is one of the most famous example of its use in heavy metal. The Black Sabbath song was one of the earliest examples in heavy metal to make use of that interval.

File:Black sabbath- transcription by Frederick Duhautpas.jpg

the main riff of "Black Sabbath" is one of the most famous example of harmonic progressions with the tritone G-C#

This part of the song was sampled on Ice T Midnight on the Original Gangster LP.

Black Sabbath is used as the opening track on both of the band's greatest hits (We Sold Our Soul for Rock 'n' Roll and Symptom of the Universe: The Original Black Sabbath 1970-1978 and is a regular installment of their live shows. A video for it exists and can be found on the Black Box DVD.

Along with the songs Bad Company, Electric Wizard, Bo Diddley, Iced Earth and Iron Maiden, this is one of the few popular songs where the album, artist and song all have the same name.

An extended version of this song exists on the Ozzy Osbourne compilation album The Ozzman Cometh. The song has an extra verse with additional vocals from Ozzy, right before the bridge into the fast part of the song.

References

^ The first explicit prohibition of that interval seems to occur with "the development of Guido of Arezzo's Hexacordal system which made B flat a diatonic note, namely as the 4th degree of the hexachordal on F. From then until the end of Renaissance the tritone, nicknamed the "diabolus in musica" was regarded as an unstable interval and rejected as a consonance". (Sadie, Stanley (1980). "Tritone" in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1st ed.). MacMillan, pp.154-155 ISBN 0-333-23111-2) "It seems first to have been designated as a 'dangerous' interval when Guido of Arezzo developed his system of hexachords and with the introduction of B flat as a diatonic note, at much the same time acquiring its nickname of 'Diabolus in Musica' ('the devil in music')." (Arnold, Denis (1983) «Tritone» in The New Oxford Companion to Music, Volume 1: A-J. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-311316-3). But later in history with the rise of the Baroque and Classical music era, that interval came to be perfectly accepted, but yet was used in a specific controlled way. It's only in the Romantism and modern classical music that composers started to use it freely and to exploit the evil connotations which are culturally associated to it

[1] The first explicit prohibition of that interval seems to occur with "the development of Guido of Arezzo's Hexacordal system which made B flat a diatonic note, namely as the 4th degree of the hexachordal on F. From then until the end of Renaissance the tritone, nicknamed the "diabolus in musica" was regarded as an unstable interval and rejected as a consonance". (Sadie, Stanley (1980). "Tritone" in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1st ed.). MacMillan, pp.154-155 ISBN 0-333-23111-2) "It seems first to have been designated as a 'dangerous' interval when Guido of Arezzo developed his system of hexachords and with the introduction of B flat as a diatonic note, at much the same time acquiring its nickname of 'Diabolus in Musica' ('the devil in music')." (Arnold, Denis (1983) «Tritone» in The New Oxford Companion to Music, Volume 1: A-J. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-311316-3). But later in history with the rise of the Baroque and Classical music era, that interval came to be perfectly accepted, but yet was used in a specific controlled way. It's only in the Romantism and modern classical music that composers started to use it freely and to exploit the evil connotations which are culturally associated to it

[1]