Is Black Sabbath’s ‘Paranoid’ the best throwaway song of all time?
While common sense deters me from ever using streaming figures as a genuine and credible metric, you can’t help but notice Black Sabbath‘s ‘Paranoid’ sitting pretty over the one billion mark on Spotify.
A truly mammoth number, that dwarfs anything else on the rest of the record and further confirms that ‘Paranoid’ might just represent the definitive Black Sabbath track. It feels like something of a self-fulfilling prophecy, given that the track is not only the title of the record that many critics regard as Sabbath’s finest moment, but also the song Ozzy Osbourne considers his “personal anthem”.
Ultimately, though, this song showcases the very best of Sabbath… the energetic and raw guitar riff from Tony Iommi gave way to an unrelenting bass part from Geezer Butler, and that’s failing to mention the vocal take from Ozzy Osbourne, which was haunting and melodic all at the same time. It felt like the blueprint from this new age of heavy metal that Sabbath were pioneering, and the track that this entire world-changing record would be built around.
But bizarrely, that wasn’t the case. Rather than the title track being the gateway through which this world-beating album was made, it was nothing more than album filler, designed to fill out the remaining parts of the record in order to appease the label.
“The very last thing we did in the studio was ‘Paranoid’ – we had three minutes to fill for it to be a legal album,” Butler remembered. The band had seven songs to their name at that point, and were looking to hit the magic number of at least 18 minutes a side. The story goes that the band, minus Iommi, descended to the pub to ruminate on whatever remaining ideas they had. When they returned, Iommi unveiled the riff that would become their most beloved.
“The producer said we needed to come up with a short song,” Iommi added. “We were only short by a few minutes, so it needed to be uptempo. If I’d done a slow one, we’d have filled the time before it got to the vocal! I just had the riff, and then we jammed it.”
Adding, “We had it down. Ozzy mumbled something before he had the lyrics, and then he and Geezer worked on it. It’s one of the simplest songs we’d ever done. It fell into place very quickly. Like with the first album, it had to be done quick: time was money. It was like doing a gig, we played, and that was it.”
Perhaps that explains the relentless energy that exists in this killer rock track. It’s fundamentally live in its composition and feels as though it’s being played in the murky depths of a small live venue. Had it been padded out with the bells and whistles of a studio afforded to a more established band, the unpolished essence of this track would have been drowned out.
It’s the sound of a band living on the absolute edge, playing like they had nothing to lose and everything to gain.
