“Paranoid” - Black Sabbath
(Words/music: Geezer Butler, Tony Iommi, Ozzy Osbourne, Bill Ward, available on Paranoid, Warner Brothers 1971)

Back when I was a practicing drummer, I played on and off with a couple bands in high school.  By “played on and off with a couple of bands,” I mean that I occasionally played with other musicians in someone’s basement or garage and never any gigs.  One of which was with two guys who played together a lot and wrote maybe a dozen songs together.  I played with them a couple times and each time they would have new songs, some of them being slow heavy dirges, some of them upbeat punk songs.  The only thing that these songs had in common was that the two of them knew them in their entirely – chord changes, when the bridge came in, etc – and they would play them and expect me to follow along.  I would do my best and they were just happy to have a drummer playing with them, so it was always a good time.  One time, they started playing the riff to “Paranoid” and I beamed with joy – finally, a song that I knew!  I gleefully played through the song to my best memory, which was enough to impress my friends into inviting me back.  Then again, I was really the only available drummer they knew…

While other longer songs in the Black Sabbath / Ozzy Osbourne catalog get more attention, “Paranoid” deserves its share of praise.  Built around that signature riff, “Paranoid” chugs along for three minutes, using power chords, brief blasts of guitar solo, and Ozzy’s stream of consciousness.  Its brevity is a virtue; “Paranoid” is simple enough to rely on adrenaline for three minutes (or two minutes and fifty three seconds to be specific) but would collapse from exhaustion if it were any longer.  Instead, it’s an exercise in simplicity when many of its fellow songs expand to epic proportions. It’s understandable why we’re drawn to the overblown theatrics in “Iron Man” and the wall of guitars in “War Pigs” - they are monolithic works that inspired countless metal bands and deserve their lionization.  However, “Paranoid” deserves more than a passing nod and the wave of faceless punk bands that thanklessly made careers out of “Paranoid” clones.

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