“ALL BEAR MY SEAL”: IN PRAISE OF BLACK SABBATH (2 of 3)

(First part here)

”Has he thoughts within his head?”

’Iron Man’, on Sabbath’s second album released later in 1970, was another song built around a riff that represented a figure. Famously, on first hearing the riff Osborne commented it sounded “like a big iron bloke walking about”. (And legend has it ’Iron Bloke’ very nearly became the title.) So this time the music comes to convey his ponderous pace, crushing all before him. (“Heavy boots of lead/ Fills his victims full of dread.”) The vocals so closely match the guitar it sounds almost double-tracked. Solitary figures tend to stalk Sabbath songs, but perhaps never more than here. 

Butler was later to explain:

“It was about a guy who had gone into space and had seen the future of the world. He came back to warn everyone about what was going to happen to the world, and he got caught up in a magnetic storm when he was entering the Earth’s atmosphere and got turned into iron – but his brain was still working. he’s trying to warn everyone about the future of the world, but he can’t speak so everyone is taking the mickey out of him all the time.”

…and there’s one thing we can be sure of here. That’s not got anything to do with what ’Iron Man’ is about. The third verse kind of takes a vague stab at it, but it’s still not something you could glean from listening to the song alone. This feels like the foot being changed to fit the shoe, a story made up around the song.

Let’s try a more literary quote. In Mary Shelley’s ’Frankenstein’, the Creature rages:

“I have love in me the like of which you can scarcely imagine. A rage the like of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one I would indulge the other.”

So the mocking misunderstanding words of the humans around him (“has he lost his mind?/ can he see or is he blind?) is the words of parents and teachers magnified. Iron Man’s destructive rage at being shunned by humanity (“Nobody wants him/ He just stares at the world/Planning his vengeance/That will soon unfurl”) equates to the more familiar “then they’ll be sorry.”

After all, rock and roll is rooted in the articulation of adolescence, in the understanding that electricity and amplifiers were invented solely to magnify your strop, when slamming doors no longer seemed enough. You don’t just get what’s in your head out into the world, but the way you feel it - turned up to eleven. Volume is one method to convey that. Grandiose metaphors is another.

So by the same token Hawkwind’s ’Orgone Accumulator’ was a science-fictional, Reichian means of describing the not entirely prepossessing subject of hippies getting stoned. (“It’s no social integrator/ It’s a one-man isolator/ It’s a back-brain stimulator/ It’s a cerebral vibrator.”) Genesis’ ’The Musical Box’ is a surrealist fairy tale about a boy murdered by a girl, whose amorous spirit then resides in a musical box, while ageing rapidly. But at root it’s a boy-loses-girl number.

…which may come across as a belittling of the track, pricking its pomposity. But it’s the opposite. Sometimes hyperbole works just by relabelling itself as metaphor. Art is not about what happened, we have the news for that. Art is about how it felt. And art less often shows us something new, and more often reframes the familiar so it appears to us anew.

”Some people say my love cannot be true…” 

...which makes ’NIB’ a sort of sequel song, even if it was written first. (Time travel, right?) Ostensibly, it might seem about the Devil getting himself another disciple. Well, selective quotation can prove most things. This time let's listen to the guy who wrote it, who said "the song was about the devil falling in love and totally changing.”

And yes, far from being some black mass hymn, this is Sabbath’s one love song. (The next nearest contender, 'Sweet Leaf', is after all sung not to a person but a joint.) In fact, it may be the consummate love song. In the greatest triumph of hippie values possible, Satan himself is redeemed by the overwhelming power of love, and becomes one of the good guys. He’s portrayed as master of creation (“the sun, the moon, the stars/ All bear my seal”) yet until now held outside of it, as if stuck in solitary.

In short its ‘Black Sabbath’ the other way up. She does not become like him, he becomes like her. The payoff line “my name is Lucifer” line is, I suspect, the Devil hanging up his title and reverting to his Christian name. (And while Satan was the Antagonist, Lucifer was a fallen angel so remained at some level redeemable.)

And there is something both glorious and endearing about this reading. Nevertheless, I think it is only the surface reading – it’s not what’s really going on. Instead imagine the crazy Iron Man trampling the whole world underfoot, then spotting one pretty young face in the crowd and pausing…

The Devil can be used to represent the point where the infantile ego runs into more adult drives, where sentences still normally start with “I want…” but no longer necessarily end with a toy being named. And so Satanism can appeal to the young because it seems a philosophical justification for playing your music as loud as you want to. As Rationalwiki have correctly commented “LaVeyan Satanism... is essentially Ayn Rand in a goat mask.”

’NIB’ presupposes this (if mostly likely instinctively), and smartly moves the story on a step. The adolescent boy’s first crush, when everything stops being about his establishing his difference to his parents and becomes about making a connection to someone else, that sudden burst of unfamiliar feelings, at the time it feels monumental. Of course it’s not “what if the devil fell in love?” That sounds more like a theology paper. It’s “what if I fell in love?” That’s what makes it such a classic song.

The line “you are the first to have this love of mine” sounds suspiciously virginal, while “some people say my love cannot be true” conjures up disapproving in-laws more than orthodox Churchmen. But it’s the extended, repeated “I’m going to feel”, throwing that feeling business into the future tense, which really gives the game away. The imagery is about the old world being over, and the bonding of the new world being love. (“Leaving the life you led before we met.”) Now, suddenly, it’s all about the sharing.

Final part of our unholy trinity coming soon...