#40, “Supernaut,” Black Sabbath (1972)

150 Favorite Songs: #40, “Supernaut,” Black Sabbath (1972)

A game I like to play sometimes is “what artist came out the gate with a perfect album and then continued the streak of not making a bad album the longest?” There are a lot of acts you’d think would be on that list who don’t come anywhere close. The Beatles’ first two UK releases are uneven—there are flashes of brilliance mixed with mediocre bar-band covers. Bob Dylan had some incredible runs in his career, but his debut is middling folk at best. Taylor Swift didn’t become who she would go on to be until her second album, either; same thing with Madonna. It took Prince until Dirty Mind. Starting fully-formed, and then continuing that run over a series of consecutive albums isn’t a terribly important metric for gauging the brilliance of an artist, but it’s an interesting thing to consider, and it’s pretty rare for an artist to reach four straight with no drop-off. Ice Cube and Leonard Cohen did it (though they both fell off hard on album five). Erykah Badu is at five and counting, though it’s been fifteen years and she has yet to take a swing at album six. Kanye got to five, stepped down a notch with Yeezus, and fell off even harder than Cube after that. R.E.M. didn’t quite fall off after album number five, but Green is certainly a step down from Document.

That’s all music nerd fantasy shit, hardly important, but I think about it a lot when thinking about Black Sabbath, because they’re my go-to answer for the artist that sstarted off firing on all cylinders, and then sustained a run of brilliance the longest. And it gets even more impressive when you consider the condensed timeframe in which they did it. The band’s self-titled debut was released in February 1970; Paranoid followed up just seven months later, and less than a year after that, they dropped Master of Reality. It took just two and a half years for Sabbath to go from debut album to Vol. 4—the album on which “Supernaut” appears—and then they kept things rolling the following year with Sabbath Bloody Sabbath and, after its longest break (which was still less than two years), capping things with Sabotage. (Albums seven and eight, Technical Ecstasy and Never Say Die!, can safely be left out of the conversation about this run of unyielding greatness.)

I say all of this to lay the groundwork for what you’re listening to when you click play on “Supernaut,” which is a band at the absolute height of its powers, delivering on everything that made it great. The song contains one of the all-time great rock riffs, a jaunty, jangly thing that’s metal as hell simply because of how Tony Iommi plays it. The bassline bounces around behind it, while the drums cheerfully stomp away, cymbals spraying crash from the very first moments of the track, growing in intensity until they spill into an honest-to-gosh drum solo. Like many of Sabbath’s best songs, there’s no chorus, just a series of verses—with lyrics that draw from nursery rhymes, that suggest a world beyond our own, that self-aggrandize in the most thrilling ways (“i’ve lived a thousand years and it never bothered me”—do tell, Ozzy!).

If I were a baseball player, or a pro wrestler, or a candidate for office, and I needed walk-up music, it would not even be a question what song I would pick: I would pick “Supernaut.” It does so much of what Sabbath always did well, pummeling you with riffs that are perfectly complemented by whatever vibe Ozzy channels in lyrics that can’t possibly be parsed literally, but does it with a vibrancy and a swagger that I simply adore. It’s every bit as intense as “Iron Man” or “Children of the Grave” or “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath,” but it isn’t just about highlighting beauty by showing you what exists in its absence—it’s rock and roll, baby.

And why wouldn’t it be? When Black Sabbath recorded “Supernaut,” they were in the midst of a peak they’d somehow reached the very first time they went in a recording studio together, that had taken them from shithole bars in Birmingham, England to the top of the music world, that they wouldn’t break from for another two years. “Supernaut” is the ultimate victory lap, built around a riff so undeniable that everyone from Neil Young and Frank Zappa to Beck and Trent Reznor has acknowledged as among the greatest ever recorded. When I listen to it, I think about how to be worthy of using it as my theme song, to cross the oceans and turn every bend, to have no religion and need no friends, to see the future and leave it behind. It is a song that, if it’s about anything, is about destroying everything in your path. I’ll listen to it forever.