Classic Albums Black Sabbath: Paranoid (1997– ) watch online HD

Classic Albums: Black Sabbath - Paranoid (2010)

*** 1/2 (out of 4)

Original Black Sabbath members Ozzy Osbourne, Geezer Butler, Bill Ward and Tony Iommi are joined by Henry Rollins and various others as they discuss the making of the album "Paranoid" and the influence it had on all future metal albums. Sabbath fans should enjoy this look back at the making of the album and especially since everyone involved with it are here talking about it. We get a brief rundown of the band before this album and then everything else is pretty much devoted to Paranoid. We hear about the first few songs written and how the album began to take shape over time. The dark tone of the album is addressed as the band members talk about what they were going for and how they got it. The lyrics are also a bit topic as it's clear they wanted to do "protest" songs that at one time was being done by Bob Dylan. They talk about how they wanted the songs to have a message and how the album was originally going to be called "War Pigs" but record producers feared that title wouldn't go over too well in America. The song Paranoid also gets discussed as it was the last song done for the album and we hear why it was included and how the members came up with it in the matter of minutes. As is usual for the series, some of the highlights include us going into the mixing studio where we hear different aspects of the album including vocal only tracks or certain guitar tracks before they were put together.

BBC's "Classic Albums" series is infamous for getting it wrong, time and time again. And so it is again. "Paranoid" is certainly not the pinnacle of BS's existence. I wondered why they'd picked it over the more obvious choice: the innovative self-titled debut. After about 15 minutes I had my answer. I should have known.

"Paranoid" is chock-full of left-wing anti-war lyrics, which those Vietnam-war-obsessed aging Marxists at BBC eat up like flies eat dung. Any time the BBC can (mis)use an opportunity to spread its "latent" political dogma, they do. Instead of focusing predominantly on the music and the band's influence on future generations of metal bands, the documentary almost comes off as some kind of half-assed political propaganda piece, which I'm sure even the dim-witted lads of Sabbath couldn't have desired or expected. But they ARE such naïve pushovers, aren't they?

Geezer Butler, whose working-class roots protrude out of his every grammatically-challenged sentence, speaks about politics – and it's much like listening to a 5 year-old's take on the world. The word "stuff" basically replaces any noun that Geezer couldn't suck out of his brain's limited vocabulary. "We didn't like war and stuff", he says. Sounds like something Britney Spears would say, huh? Even Madonna sounds smarter when she tries to preach to her sleepy fans. Geezer: "We saw that there was many awful things going on in the world but no-one was saying anything about it." No-one? This must mean that hippies and the student riots are just a figment in all our collective imaginations. If Geezer thinks he had preceded the hippies (in the 70s), or that they never even existed, or that they were right-wing radicals, then he should review history books. (Alas, we don't know whether he can read.) Sabbath appeared AFTER the hippies.

Another doofus who makes an utter fool of himself in the media – yet again – is Henry Rollins, a Socialist punk whose tattooed legs never saw the inside of the Iron Curtain in his entire life. Nor had he ever read one book about USSR's gulags. Henry Rollins tells us rather stupidly "what an awful war (the Vietnam conflict) was", and how "these young men came home awfully twisted". Been watching many Tinseltown propaganda flicks, have we, Henry? Of course, steroid-pumping Henry had never even served in the military, much less participated in ANY war, and yet he considers himself the proper authority to point out the imagined differences between various wars. So WW2 was a pleasant war, was it? WW1: fun too? I bet the Napoleonic Wars were splendid for all involved.

It's just like those left-wing knuckleheads to glorify a war only when it's fought against the Right (hence their glorification of the Spanish Civil War, a so-called "noble conflict"). A war against the Extreme Left is supposedly always an "unpleasant" and unjust war. Henry, in his infinite punky non-wisdom, even suggests that the Vietnam War was the first war that resulted in many traumatized men. Every war has that effect on people, or is Henry perhaps suggesting that the psychology of men has drastically changed over a mere few years? It's only recently that people discovered these all PTSDs etc. 60+ years ago when young men were returning from WW2 they were merely told to "snap out of it" and get on with life. Henry even implies that drug-use "ran rampant with these guys", blissfully ignoring the hippie anti-culture and its open worship of mind-altering substances. Oh, Henry, you're such a brainwashed schmuck.

Another lackluster know-it-all featured is Deena Weinsteen, a Marxist professor of Sociology (they still call it a "science"!) who had already been over-featured by gullible/confused Sam Dunn in his wide-eyed "Metal Evolution" series. Trust her not to disappoint, she once again offers a gem: "Critics hated Sabbath because (critics) were mostly upper-middle class people, and being liberal they wanted lyrics of hope, not doom". Duh, Deena, when have liberals ever trashed music because it had left-wing lyrics? But this is what we have come to expect from the Deenas and other Sociologists of this world: theories awash with nonsense and wild guesswork. Anything to "prove" their left-wing point.

Surprising, give this tough competition in the malarkey department, it's Iommi who dishes out the dumbest statement: "We covered the side that nobody else was. It was all love and peace, all that hippie stuff, flower-power and what-not, and we were covering the Vietnam War, and all that stuff that no-one was mentioning". Just like Geezer, Iommi seems to be totally oblivious to the existence of the 60s/70s hippie culture. It's a phenomenon of legendary cluelessness that I cannot explain. I hope for Tony's sake that he was on something, because I'd rather believe that he is still a full-blown junkie than that he could be this daft.

Considering that a BBC Marxist produced this, and that Sabbath were a bunch of clueless working-class knobs who sided with hippies (whose existence, ironically, they weren't even aware of), it's a real wonder that "War Pigs" was given a generous time-slot, showing half the song with various archive footage of the White House, the Vietnam conflict, and bored, mostly affluent pot-smoking students marching around to the beat of their Marxist professors' drums.

What makes this small-screen joke doubly funny is the fact that these BBC Marxists are using the naive lyrics of a buffoon such as Ozzy to make their point. They couldn't have chosen a more flawed poster-boy if they had tried. The lyrics on "Paranoid" – and most metal albums – if anything should be something to be embarrassed about, not fawned over.

When all is said and done, popular music is to be listened, not excessively mused over, because the tiny minds behind this music are usually uneducated, cocaine-sniffing dopes who've never seen a book between the lot of them (unless promoted by Oprah).