Sinister

The gong smash in "Cornucopia" is sinister.

So, too, are the Dixie Youth Pirates, dressed in full black attire as they take the field. Preschoolers unwittingly intimidating other preschoolers by sheer visual presence.

The baseball uniforms. The piercing smash of the gong. Both assaulting the psyche with an instinctual, preeminent, blacked-out aura of aggressive abandon.

Little is so ominous, so assertively defiant, so ... sinister ... as Black Sabbath. As the sinister poet Henry Rollins would say, something as destructive as El Nino shouldn't be called El Nino. It should be called the first four Black Sabbath albums.

Black Sabbath, even today, is feared by those mindless masses who cry blasphemy at the mere thought of comparing 5-year-old children to "devil music."

But look beyond the moody dropped tuning, the screeching voice reverb, the forboding refrains.

The essence of it is clear.

We all must embrace what is sinister inside us.

Sinister is not evil. It's not hopeless. It is braving darkness and marching blindly onward in a frightening pursuit of the unknown.

Black Sabbath spoke bluntly and artfully on subjects that require such a journey of uncomfortable depth: the cold politics of war, emotional isolation, religious hypocrisy, the vices of greed and materialism.

Despite their contrived and overwrought allusions to the occult -- done for effect, the band readily admits, to create a noticeable identity -- they believed in the idea of something beyond the mortal coil.

Along the way as they obssessed over what else might be, they sermonized to a generation (and themselves) the dangers of excess, self-absorption and apathy.

Believing in something -- anything -- is far moless unsettling than the impressionable mind believing in a belief in nothing.

Black Sabbath faced, with chest bowed, whatever darkness inside us we must trudge awkardly through to be complete.

Idealistic.

Hopeful.

Intimidating.

Sinister.




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"Is your mind so small/
that you have to fall/
In with the pack/
wherever they run?

Will you still sneer/
when death is near/
And say that you might as well/
worship the sun?"

- "After Forever"

_____


"Too much in the truth/
they say/
Keep it till/
another day

Let them have/
their little game/
Illusion helps/
to keep them sane"

- "Cornucopia"

_____

"Now from darkness/
there springs light/
Wall of sleep/
is cold and bright/

Wall of sleep/
is lying broken/
Sun shines in/
you are awoken"

- "Behind The Wall Of Sleep"

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