Indie Rocker vs. Classic Rocker
Black Sabbath’s Black Sabbath and Sigur Ros’s Agaetis Byrjun
Classic Rocker
I might as well start this off by admitting that I came to Black Sabbath fairly late in life. In fact, it wasn’t until around late December of last year that I seriously got into their records. Yes, it’s embarrassing, particularly for someone who is the titular Classic Rocker of this column, to have to come clean on this. How can the Classic Rocker not have rocked mightily to the Sabs, head-banging and air guitar-ing his way through puberty and teenagerdom, the sign of the beast brightly brocaded in deep red sharpie across notebooks, denim jackets and even his very heart? Let me try to explain.
I am a second-generation Classic Rocker, although I suppose my father only knew it simply, purely as Rock since his was the (admittedly tiresome) generation that invented it. When you grow up in a household filled with heavy records pumping out of that room down the hall that had been set aside for my father and his records, giant stacks of speakers, empty beer cans, hazy snapshots scattered about from when the old man would sneak off in the middle of concerts and pretend to be part of the press corps grabbing shots of Neil Young at the Stanley or one of Springsteen’s surprise shows at The Decade, Guess Who and Deep Purple banners strewn across the wall…well, you tend to take the tunes for granted. Prog and New Wave were my bag. Rock has always been billed as a rebel’s game. In my house my rebellion took the form of digging on Tales from Topographic Oceans, Zenyatta Mondatta, and Hemispheres, records overwrought with cerebrality, albums recorded by guys with none-to-secret dreams of serious musicianship, guys who couldn’t make it in Jazz so they had to invent Jazz-Rock. The New Wave bands, too, while not high on the musicianship quotient still wore their brains on their sleeves. And that was very appealing to skinny young geek like me.
However, I was very aware of Black Sabbath. I spent my grade school years in a relatively small Catholic school, spending most of my time with a group of guys devoted more to Metal than to The Cross. These were the sort of young dudes who would get into thrashing blood-filled fist fights over Ozzy versus Dio or whether the new Iron Maiden record sounded like some kind of pussy sell-out. From memory and out of dreary history class boredom they could sketch each and every iteration of Eddie across their brown paperbag text book covers, and while math class could be a frustrating mystery they could tease deep Masonic meanings from Led Zep album covers. While many of them struggled through school everyday, unhappy and given to understand by the teachers that they would never be anything more than a life long loser, in their private smoke and beer filled evenings hanging down in The Hollow they were each a genius of Heavy Metal.
Maybe it’s because my own frustrations and fears didn’t stem from institutional aggression or abusive parents and siblings, or an impossible-to-shake core belief that I would never achieve anything greater than being a drunken deadbeat hanging around the intersection outside the neighborhood bar, that I didn’t gravitate to the harsh realm of Metal. I guess I just wasn’t lost or angry enough for the music to connect.
Eventually, though, I believe we all reach points of despair and rage when the heavier, darker tunes are the only things that sound good pumping out of speakers. There comes a moment in everyone’s life when Black Sabbath makes sense, when their records (definitely the first four) sound like the greatest rock’n roll ever committed to wax. This isn’t to say that I felt particularly lost late last year, neither profoundly adrift nor emotionally astray. I had just been kicked in the head enough by then to be more receptive. I was doing some last minute shopping on Christmas Eve when I stumbled across a used copy of the Ozzy years boxset, and I thought, “Why the fuck not?”. This was a giant gap in my rock’n roll education and here was a chance to fill it. Listening to this first Sabbath record on my way home, trudging through the winter evening, safely ensconced from all the cloying X-mas tunes, the volume way up, for 43 minutes this was the greatest fuckin’ record I had ever heard.
Indie-Rocker
A role reversal, indeed. While I never envisioned this as the issue where we tear off our masks and switch allegiances, a la pro wrestling, I’ll see your Randy “Macho Man” Savage and raise you Andre the Giant.
My kinship with Black Sabbath began back in the 80’s as a frustrated and severely disinterested middle school student. In fact, it wouldn’t be too far off the mark to suggest that I, your humble scribe, despite not owning a Metallica t-shirt or possessing a penchant for muscle cars, was one of those smelly little hessians with an active imagination dedicated not in the least bit to complicated algorithms. At the time, school desktops were for elaborate pencil sketches, not boring assignments dictated by indifferent teachers whose sole existence was to crush my desire for all things education-related. Besides, if scrawling a few caricatures of my German teacher to entertain fellow students somehow led to an awkward yet exhilarating feel-up session with a willing young lass in 6th period study hall, well, then why wouldn’t Sabbath, the benchmark for teenage insubordination, be the blokes to follow?
But you bring up a good point, Kris: Black Sabbath represented that demographic of ne’er-do-wells that never really fit in anywhere. Most of these kids, whether it was a learning disability or just plain laziness, weren’t blessed with the inner belief that they could set the world on fire, and whatever remaining sense of self worth they had was probably knocked out of them by a negligent parent or overburdened teacher in some form or another -- and that was the difference between them and myself. It is unfortunate, but Black Sabbath, as you were alluding to, became the (mis)representation of failure. My dabbling with the dark side led to some pretty interesting and eye-opening experiences; lessons learned that no brick and mortar schooling could possibly provide, and seeing the results of those actions – namely, friends who got caught up in the hysteria of drugs and violence – made me reevaluate my own choices. As a result, Sabbath, like the talented but criminally marginalized heavy metal kid, was given the short shrift. My over-inflated sense of self worth would ultimately move on to more painfully self-conscious and over-indulgent works. Basically I discovered Pearl Jam.
However, to suggest that Black Sabbath were merely one of the numerous bands that served as the soundtrack to my misspent youth would be a disservice to the boys from Birmingham. In retrospect, the band could be a textbook example (no pun intended) of taking a dismal upbringing and channeling that negative energy into a type of creativity that perplexes the often suffocating groupthink of academia. Think about it: four working-class sods with seemingly very little institutionalized intelligence between them combine to make truly original and thoughtful music that doesn’t sound remotely as dated as the majority of noise made from that era -- the irony being that such ground-breaking music went largely unnoticed during its time. Never mind that some highly-regarded critics found themselves too preoccupied with who Lou Reed was sucking off to make a respectable assessment regarding the mighty Sabbath in their hey-day (I’m looking at you, Lester Bangs). And that’s fine considering that critics spent most of that era having to wade through faux-idealistic hippie bullshit. But it is a shame that Ozzy, Tony, Geezer and Bill have only recently been recognized for the musical meritocracy that they represented.
