This is a digitized version of a collection of scrolls which I had once purchased off an ancient wizard. He gave few details as to their sources save that they were looted from the mausoleums of valiant knights, devoted monks, and voyagers of the weird and strange whose various existences share but one common thread: they left this mortal coil in a blaze of glory, surrounded by hewn foes and voluptuous tavern-wenches. I traveled the treacherous journey to the Himalayas and spent endless nights poring over their contents, protected from the howling wind and crushing ice by only the skin of a slain snowleopard. Upon returning from my journey, I held the snowleopard's pelt in my arms and walked with the sunset until someone asked me "Hey man, do they make that in a medium?". It was at this point I set to work learning the ins and outs of computers, with the XPress goal of sharing these scrolls with the world. Here before you, blessed reader and jacked natural of tomorrow, are the fruits of my cold nights in the Himalayas and my neon-lit forays into Cyberlandia.
Imagine a bluish marble, dappled with green and brown, floating untethered in bleak nothingness. Now imagine an unfathomable quantity of other marbles scattered across this void. The nature of these other marbles isn't relevant for this exercise - some are very hot, some are very cold, some are spinning around other marbles, and others still are hurtling off into even more emptiness. We want to focus on the first marble for now, though. It's not a very big marble - bigger than some, to be sure, but it's dwarfed by most of the marbles around it. What makes this marble unique is it's ability to sustain life, and, boy, what a brilliant menagerie it has plodding around on it. Creatures smaller than a fruit fly's fingertip swim about in the ether eternal, playing out their microscopic comedies and tragedies in the blink of an eye which doesn't see them at all. Enormous hotblooded leviathans swim in the iciest depths, devouring entire civilizations worth of these microbes in seconds. A three-horned hunter, oscillating with various pigments, creeps across the verdant surface of a gnarled, ever-growing structure, his telescope eyes and prehensile tongue zeroed in on a small, fuzzy drone, whose position is revealed by its red disco-ball eyes and jerky movements. The drone does eventually fall prey to the hunter - such resolutions are sadly typical. Anyways, it'd have been of little consequence had he gotten away. The octambuloid weaver and the flying songstress had both had an eye on him as well. Death is as common as life on this marble, but the ouroborus of this strange place is more resilient than that. Where death creeps in on our creatures, life lurks quickly behind it, in the form of slimy snakelike beasts and a mysterious third life (neither plant nor animal) lurking in subterranean chambers, ready to consume and repackage every atom of our once-living friend. One of the snakebeasts slips up, however, and a songstress snatches him up to feed her babies. Such is life on the marble.
Anyways, these aren't the creatures we're focusing on for the moment. We want to zoom in on one in particular. This creature looks a little strange: he's got soft, bare skin (save for a few scattered patches of fur), two gangly arms with a bunch of wriggling probosces on the ends, and two long legs propped up by flattish, ovoid feet. She's frankly pretty unassuming (I lied about her looking strange (at least relative to other creatures) - she's got a ton of cousins who look pretty similar to her, when you consider things like the microbes and snakebeasts). What makes this creature really unique is his connection to the Creator - the Creator, seeing her in the primordial garden, developed a fondness for His creation. Because of this, He gave these weird, gangly little creatures a gift: a spark of divinity, an extra step up Jacob's ladder. This gift has made these creatures into something really special. They've learned to split the atom (putting them back together eludes them for a little while yet). They've learned to break the lifeblood out of the rocks and explode it at just the perfect force to power a weedwhacker. Speaking of rocks, they've taken certain of these rocks and sculpted them into alabaster homunculi indistinguishable from the human form save by hue and surface temperature. They've written songs about one of their number beating the devil, their Ur-foe, in a fiddling competition. They've built cathedrals so beautiful that many weep upon walking inside them. They domesticated prowling stalkerbeasts and packhunters, making predators into their best friends in a 20,000 year partnership, so deeply entrenched in their culture that they now jokingly pick a side in an imaginary conflict between the two. They took the unstoppable inferno, one of their greatest primal fears, and dominated it totally. Nowadays, they take out a small piece of fire on demand in order to set aflame a piece of beeswax scented to remind them of home. Darkness, another of their earliest fears, has been defeated on all but the most isolated corners of the marble. No longer bound by the rising and setting of the sun, these creatures simply light up a miniature sun (likely one of several they keep in their homes) and continue on with their work or play. The really beautiful thing is that, theoretically, any one of these creatures is capable of any one of these feats. At any moment, one of these creatures is carrying in his or her skull a pound or two of fatty flesh lit up by billions of cathodes and anodes which gives them the ability to write a song, compose a poem, weave a tapestry, build a cathedral, split the atom, construct an entire language, or simply become really good at Madden NFL 17. This is the thing which sets these creatures apart. That spark of divinity, gifted them by God, that gives them the ability to truly create, not just instinctually pile twigs together for the sake of food or sex (though, in fairness, these are pretty major concerns to these creatures as well).
Black Sabbath's eponymous debut opens with the sound of pouring rain and a bell tolling in the distance, heralding the listener's trip into dimly lit ebony halls, places where the blackened sun can no longer reach. Horrors are illuminated before us by the flickering candlelight. Dark shapes writhe and twist under the load of the iron shrieks emanating from Iommi's guitar. Ozzy Osbourne takes the stage, playing the part of a doomed soul looking upon Charon, the devil, or some other being. The being's name is irrelevant; it's business is clear: the being beckons forth both the character and the listener into a dark world where "everywhere is misery and woe". Periodically throughout the song Osbourne screams the scream of the damned, begging for a second chance at life. He is only answered by silence as the figure drags him away to greater torment. The rest of the album is filled with similar themes, but, though the imagery is often bleak, the ending is not always so: in the next song, a silent sorceror does battle with demons and dark forces for the good of mankind, prevailing and scaring away evil to the sounds of powerful, grinding guitar and pounding drums.
These are the scenes which the music of Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath provide to the listener: dark, horribly vivid images of death and decay, but none without their kernel of hope (or, at least, justice). A lone spaceship hurtles into the black void of space, leaving behind a world turned to Satan and the service of evil, the ragtag band of straggler freemen determined to escape and found a new world which chooses love and peace (Into the Void). Young men are sent wave after wave into the ever-grinding castiron cogs which make up the conflict-for-profit meatgrinding machine which eventually turns on its masters, sending them squealing into the blackest pits of Hell as punishment for their crimes against man (War Pigs). A man travels through time in order to defend humanity from some future threat, though his voyage transforms him into a steel abomination, cursed and abused by the very people he sought to save. However, in a twist of poetic justice, he turns on the scornful humans and becomes the agent of their prophesied future doom (Iron Man). The evils of mankind bring about the destruction of all life in nuclear holocaust, however, at the last moment, God swoops in and rescues those who have not turned to evil, leaving the artificers of the apocalypse to their fates (Electric Funeral). Even in the bleakest moments, there is always a shot at redemption while one draws breath.
This is what I love about the music of Black Sabbath. They paint seemingly hopeless pictures stained black with blood, yet there is almost always something more: a chance at salvation or, at the very least, justice. Both lyrically and sonically, their music places you in the shoes of the characters of deeply human stories of hope. In my opinion, the linchpin of these stories was Ozzy Osbourne. He played the part of madcap tour guide perfectly, guiding us through misty black farlands, his narration punctuated by the occasional banshee scream or maniacal laugh. Black Sabbath seemed to understand the importance of telling tales of darkness in order to make us appreciate the light, but they also knew that these stories must, like Pandora's Box, contain hope amidst suffering. It is my understanding that Geezer Butler and Tony Iommi wrote most of the songs, and they certainly deserve credit in spades, but with today's loss of a music legend in mind, I want to specifically highlight Ozzy Osbourne's contributions as a phenomenal teller of these stories.
Rest in Peace, Ozzy!