Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [106]
So let the “downer-rock” slander stand, because at this point it's hard to imagine anything that could really drag Black Sabbath down. They have a pretty good idea where they stand in the mythic arena behind the public eye, and take the drug culture and the staples connecting them with it the only way they can, with equanimity: “We get knocked by a thousand people saying it's downer rock,” observes Ozzy “If we weren’t here, they’d still be taking the downers. People are gonna take dope whether they go see James Taylor or Englebert Humper-dinck. I really can’t see that we’ve enticed it at all. I mean, since you’ve heard our music, you haven’t started taking dope….”
“Not since.”
“If you take dope,” he continues, ignoring the preeningly hip wisecrack, “you take dope because you like to get high. You don’t take it because four guys are making loads of money saying ‘You must take dope.’ If they want to use us as an excuse, go ahead.”
The trouble with that position, though it's perfectly correct, is that people pick up on things in the ghastliest, most uncalled-for ways. Black Sabbath has a drug song called “Hand of Doom” that, aside from having an arrangement with incredible dynamics including upwards of half a dozen breaks, is one of the strongest, starkest statements yet on the chemical plague to come out of pop music. It's almost as good as Lou Reed's “Heroin,” and positively demolishes such false sentiments as Neil Young's “The Needle and the Damage Done” or John Prine's “Sam Stone,” because it doesn’t romanticize too much (the element is inescapable) and doesn’t turn the subject into grist for a soap opera. Instead, in grim, straightforward language, it describes a person dying slowly by their own hand, and points out the insanity of it firmly
But there are people who will come along and take a song like this and automatically pick out some of the harshest lines with peculiar logic, taking them as an affirmation of that self-destructive cycle. They think Ozzy is saying, “Take the acid! Stick the needle in! Don’t stop to think about the consequences, because we could all be minute specks of radioactive excreta in just four seconds now. Among other good reasons.” I must admit that, having lived that syndrome to some small degree myself, I sort of get that out of it, perceiving it as tangible thrill to hear a rock star backed up by a driving rhythm section spit out the most nihilistic, amoral injunctions possible; I often felt this way listening to the early Velvet Underground, and Mick Jagger communicates the same sensation in some of his more decadent moments. That's exactly what it is, a sensation, like the feeling you get at the movies when you see a shotgun blast somebody's guts through their back in slow motion, a rusty kick turned to when schticks more moral have begun to pass your jaded palate with scarcely a glint of recognition, and you just want to come as close as you can to the blood-lust orgies, death, or utter degradation without actually having to experience them firsthand. It's the last honorable form of vicarious entertainment, not to mention being the essence of cowardice. But that's the way it seems to be today.
Ozzy expects such reactions, and manages to be philosophical about them: “The weird thing about audiences is that they’ll get a song and fuck it around to the way they want to think. The lyrics to ‘Hand of Doom’ are the goriest, most filthy lyrics you could find for drug addicts…. It's like, when I was a kid I’d see a Western film and say, ‘Wow, the Range Rider just shot Dick West in the ‘ead, and it's really ridiculous seeing this guy do this dramatic death.’ But now it's gotten more realistic, where you can see them shoot somebody and it actually just blows them to pieces. And that's the way