#43, “Paranoid,” Black Sabbath (1970)

150 Favorite Songs: #43, “Paranoid,” Black Sabbath (1970)

It’s funny; “Paranoid” is one of the most famous songs ever recorded, a true classic rock staple, something instantly recognizable from a single note, and yet it’s impossible to imagine a song like this being a hit today. It’s from an era that hasn’t existed in a very long time, when a guitar player could be the most important part of a band and a singer could be a sideman to him. This is what Jason Lee was complaining about in Almost Famous when he saw the t-shirts!

Black Sabbath wouldn’t stay that kind of band forever—Ozzy is the icon, Tony Iommi is the guitar player with mystique—but listen to “Paranoid” and you can hear it. The song is just five couplets and a one-line bridge (two if you count “ohhh yeah,” which maybe you should since it’s very important to the vibe), with no chorus. Instead of a chorus, we get those thunderous power chords and that spotless guitar hook that brightens up the pummeling riff that otherwise defines the song. There was a time you could replace the chorus of a pop song with a simple instrumental hook, and it would not just work, it would go on to become one of the most important songs anyone ever recorded.

I don’t listen to metal for the lyrics. That’s what I listen to Leonard Cohen or Kendrick Lamar for. With metal, I want to feel something from the way guitars sound when they’re being pushed to their heaviest extremes, the way a bassline can carry me along like I’m floating down a river, from a drummer who stomps their way through a song like they’re punishing something, for a singer who can ride those things and maintain and accentuate the vibe that the band is creating without getting in the way. I don’t really care if the song is about cars or depression or minotaurs. I want to feel something. I don’t really want to think about it.

That’s never come easily to me. I learned at some point pretty early on how to think my feelings, which is more comfortable for me than actually feeling them. But you need to feel your feelings! They’ll come out one way or the other if you simply try to rationalize them away. Our brains aren’t built to do that forever.

I discovered Black Sabbath when I was eighteen, which was the age I was when I really first started to pour myself into a mold the shape of who I would be for the next several decades. I don’t think at the time I understood that the way what Tony Iommi and Geezer Butler and Bill Ward and Ozzy Osbourne created together gave me an alternative to trying to constantly analyze the world around me, that I could just put “Paranoid” on and scrawl O-Z-Z-Y on my knuckles and raise my first while wearing a towel around my neck like a cloak and that doing so was the closest thing to meditation that I was capable of at that point in my life. All I knew was that when I would listen to “Paranoid,” it was so loud that it could drown out the noise inside my head. It was like downshifting the gears in my brain until it was in neutral. The fact that it’s a little bit evil probably helps. But those five-couplets-plus-one-bridge lyrics Ozzy sang provided an anchor, and then the riff and the bassline and those simple drums—not the greatest Bill Ward performance of all time, but one of the most important—could let me go, my head bowed, my hands twisted into the metal horns and raised to the sky, for two minutes and fifty-four seconds. I just did it again now.

The bridge to “Paranoid” is Ozzy singing “can you help me occupy my brain” and it’s funny, because that’s exactly what the song did for me. It’s a song about paranoia and depression that quiets those things in me for reasons that have nothing to do with the words to the song. I doubt the band knew that what they made could do that for someone, but I’m very grateful that they did.