The Black Sabbath lyrics too shocking to sing
As heavy metal began, Black Sabbath represented everything evil about the genre. After playing in various blues outfits throughout their career, Tony Iommi had the idea of creating music meant to frighten people, culminating in the band’s landmark debut album. Although the band may have scared the living daylights out of everyone within earshot, their label brought the hammer down on one of their first mainstream hits.
Then again, Sabbath was never the band to have monster hits. Before they had even gotten a record deal, the band were known to make songs that were the opposite of mainstream, crafting melodies that were meant to be stretched out for elongated blues jams.
When the band started to put together original tracks like ‘Wicked World’, though, they assumed a darker edge than most of their contemporaries. Using the sound of the tritone interval, Iommi would end up using his guitar to make glorious hymns of doom, with lyrics having to do with the underworld courtesy of Geezer Butler on songs like ‘NIB’.
While the band may have been delighted to see their debut album storming the charts, they couldn’t focus on their success for too long. Shortly after conquering the rock world, the band sauntered into the studio to make Paranoid, putting together some of the most celebrated songs in rock history like ‘Iron Man’ and ‘Fairies Wear Boots’.
Despite the title track becoming a mainstay in the Sabbath catalogue and a fixture on rock radio, the album kicks off with one of their most scathing indictments of war. Written in response to the warmongers sending soldiers off to be killed, ‘War Pigs’ showed Sabbath tapping into their political side, imagining a world that gives way to darkness and the war-mongering politicians being charged for their crimes.
Even though the lyrics are already dark, the initial idea was for the song to be called ‘Warpurgis’ until the band’s label put its foot down. As Butler would recall years later to Classic Albums, “It was meant to be called ‘Warpurgis’, which is the Satanic version of Christmas. We had showed, and they went, ‘Nope, can’t do that, too Satanic’. So we turned it into ‘War Pigs’”.
Despite the hefty change in the lyrical department, the band faced even more trouble when assembling the album artwork. Initially using ‘War Pigs’ as the title track, the cover was meant to depict an action shot of a soldier violently wielding a sword, playing into the idea of a man being an actual “war pig”.
Since the American market was still in the midst of war, though, the label insisted on changing the album title to Paranoid to avoid any controversy. Though the band may have bitten their tongue, anything went when they took to the stage later that year.
During their initial crisscrossing of America, Ozzy Osbourne was known to occasionally flip the script, singing the initial lyrics to the song and treating the crowd to the actual version of the track. ‘Warpurgis’ would also see a release when Osbourne took to the road during his solo career, with the band tearing through the song on the compilation album The Ozzman Cometh, taken from a John Peel session the band performed in 1970. Sabbath may have never partaken in any witchcraft, but ‘Warpurgis’ was the closest the classic lineup ever came to something truly demonic.
