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By Root 513 0

that, “God… is the only one who can save you now from all this sin and hate” and even includes a line that goes, “Would you like to see the Pope on the end of a rope—do you think he's a fool?” Well, yes, and yes, as a matter of fact, because the Pope is a War Pig if ever there was one, or at least an evil angel. Maybe I’m making a fool of myself but I see this band making an attempt to provide direction for a generation busy immolating itself as quickly as possible. Since nobody else around that I can see seems to have any better advice for them than Black Sabbath, it pains me perhaps unduly to see them suggesting the hoariest copout conceived in 2,000 years. I mean, what's the difference between a vegetable babbling about how much crank he can hold and stay alive, and one locked into repeating a zealot litany with mindless persistence to every stranger coming down the street?

But then, I suppose I shouldn’t expect Black Sabbath's answers to be sophisticated. Master of Reality has more than one alternative to suggest anyway. “Into the Void” is a fantasy of escape from the dire mess in this orbit via “Rocket engines burning fuel so fast/Up into the night sky they blast…” al la the reedy Starship recently promoted by the Marin County Cocaine Casualty Musical Auxiliary. This version of the fantasy at least has the advantage of some solid, pulverizing music behind it.

A much more interesting solution is drawn in “Children of the Grave,” a deep, gutty, driving piece that's one of the highlights of their current live show. It couches the expectable hints of looming catastrophe (“Must the world live in the shadow of atomic fear?”) in a romanticized picture of the children born in a megaton shadow standing their ground, insistent on the salvation of the planet, with an uncharacteristic happy ending: “They’ll fight the world/Until they’ve won/And love comes flowing through.”

Which is fine with me. The song's cloudy romanticism removes it from the limitations of any one faction's Utopia, even if it does bear about as much dialectical meat as Grand Funk singing “People Let's Stop the War.”

Part Two: Black Sabbath and the Straight Dope on Blood-Lust Orgies

When it comes to politics rock ‘n’ roll bands usually have more to say in or more that can be read into (which amounts to the same thing) their music than when they actually talk about it. Ozzy Osbourne is basically about as politicized as your average musician, and while he responded to a comment from the other end of the room to the effect that Nixon should be shot with a wave of the hand—“They’re all bad as fucking one another, politicians”—he saw the songs themselves in quite literal terms as graphic depictions of the state of things today: “The day of writing bullshit songs is over, as far as I’m concerned. I like to think that if people listen to the words they’ll get the truth of the song, like the lyrics to ‘Children of the Grave.’ It's about the kids of today. In America the revolution that's in people's minds is ridiculous, because if they believe in it strongly enough and it's for good and they wanna get something out of it, then by all means revolt. You’re gonna hurt something on both sides whether you let it stay the way it is and just ride it out or do something different. You couldn’t get it into a worse state than it is now, and you could get something much better.”

He is at least sincere, and if his positions seem a little naive, they still can be taken not only with a grain of salt but with the music itself as indication of a genuine concern, leading even to the conclusion that for all the ugliness and hatred in their music, for all the specters of wicked enemies crawling on their knees through brimstone toward the base of a white-hot mushroom cloud, the ultimate thrust of what Black Sabbath is saying or trying to say is an uncommonly humanist impulse. And because they do care, and because they hit the nerve square-on as often as they do, and because even their phantasmagorias of malediction and punishment are so vivid, and because they are better at