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Black Sabbath's 'Master of Reality' turns 40

Top to bottom: Brazil, Korea, Singapore editions

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I’ll confess to taking Master of Reality for granted. Of the classic first six Sabbath records, it’s the shortest, and it has the blandest cover. I’m shallow like that. But album covers are inextricable parts of Sabbath’s mystique, and each of their first six moves me in some way (S/T: dooooom, Paranoid: hoo boy, Vol. 4: strong design, Sabbath Bloody Sabbath: fuck yes, Sabotage: hoo boy), except for Master of Reality. It’s just kind of there. Versions released in Brazil, Korea, and Singapore jazz up the design – but if you don’t get it right in your major markets, you get it wrong.

Musically, we have five unfuckwithable bangers, two bullshit instrumentals (“Embryo”, “Orchid”), and “Planet Caravan Pt. 2” (“Solitude”). (Warner Bros. even put out a cheeky 12″ compiling “Planet Caravan” with “Solitude”, catalog # PRO-D-666.) I don’t listen to the radio, but I’ve probably constructively FM-ed the bangers into my consciousness to the point of numbness. That is, until I wake up and realize that what I’m listening to is 40 years old. (Master of Reality came out on July 21, 1971.)

That’s a long time, especially in a context that calls metal “old-school” if it’s 20 years old. If you meet an old man, and he can still knock you on your ass, you pay respect.

What is this old man like? I admit, in my youth I just listened to him. His riffs were bitchin’. And, as I’ve said, he wasn’t much to look at. But armed with guidance from Morbid Angel in better days –

Eyes to see… what the others see not
Ears to hear… the voice of the elders guides

– my senses are more open now.

What does Master of Reality really say?

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Actually reading the lyrics this time around makes me conclude that this is one of the most Christian albums ever written. “After Forever”, of course, is rather fervent:

Could it be you’re afraid of what your friends might say
If they knew you believe in God above?
They should realize before they criticize
That God is the only way to love

“Into the Void” envisions settlement of other worlds, leaving Earth “to Satan and his slaves”. “Lord of This World” is more ambiguous, with grammatical confusion as to who that lord is (“He’s your confessor now” vs. “The soul I took from you”). However, it also says, “Your world was made for you by someone above / But you choose evil ways instead of love”.

So Master is preachy. Except for “Solitude”‘s mopefest, it tells the listener what to do: ditch those who aren’t with the program (“straight people”, “the pack wherever they run”, “brainwashed minds”), get with love (which is God and sometimes marijuana), or else suffer the consequences (“misery and woe”, become “children of the grave”).

I don’t like being preached to, but I can get with this. It’s not exactly a 10-point program for effecting change, but at least it’s not, on the one hand, Rage Against the Machine, and on the other, the whole lot of nothing that most of metal is about. Somewhere between radicalism and nihilism is love, so saith the Sabbath.

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Helmet – “Lord of This World”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcBGWasNDH4

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It’s instructive to read Lester Bangs’ review of this album for Rolling Stone 40 years ago. He mostly reins in his purple prose (though “La Brea sinks of lugubrious bass blasts” is a gas) and offers some of the sharpest insight by anybody on Sabbath – and he’s writing without the benefit of hindsight.

“Black Sabbath is only slightly more monotonous than James Taylor or Joni Mitchell”: that’s perhaps what today we call “trolling”, though Robert Christgau – who admittedly gets metal as wrong as one can get metal wrong – also called this record “dull and decadent”. Was the contemporary perception of Sabbath really one of monotony? Bangs cites Sabbath’s “thick, plodding, almost arrhythmic steel wool curtains of sound”, which is amusing now that Sabbath sounds like carnival music next to things like funeral doom.

But for how uninteresting Bangs finds Sabbath’s music, he still finds it good, sort of: “The thing is that, like all the best rock & rollers since the Pleistocene era, Black Sabbath (and Grand Funk) have a vision that informs their music with unity and direction and makes their simple structures more than they might seem”. That’s backhanded praise, but then he observes: “Black Sabbath’s [vision], until Master of Reality anyway, has concentrated relentlessly on the self-immolating underside of all the beatific Let’s Get Together platitudes of the counter culture”.

Such insight requires someone who was there at the time. Sure, now we have markers like Altamont and Easy Rider to teach us that all wasn’t well in the Summer of Love. But, again, Bangs doesn’t have that hindsight, and he’s calling things as he sees them. To him, Sabbath are monotonous, but they have a vision, and that vision’s axis is hippie counterculture. Until Master of Reality, the focus has been stygian. Now “the group seems to have taken its popularity and position seriously enough to begin offering some answers to the dark cul-de-sacs of Paranoid“.

In fact, he takes Sabbath to task for religious zealotry and “Christian folderol”. Yet he comes to the same conclusion as many heavy metal fans: despite “obvious and juvenile” lyrics (Bangs clearly had not heard pornogrind), “the only criterion is excitement, and Black Sabbath’s got it”. It’s a long way to get to “well, it just rocks”. But Bangs doesn’t even like Sabbath that much, and he’s dishing out wisdom that Sabbath acolytes fail to acquire. He’s an outsider to Sabbath – everyone was then – but an insider to the times, and damned if his trip doesn’t mostly still hold true. These truths called Sabbath that we hold to be self-evident are more than meets the eye – and ear.

— Cosmo Lee

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