Black Sabbath: Paranoid : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

A young girl's voice. She is dressed in a nun's habit. The boy turns and faces her. She proffers a chalice of cervical exudate and he drinks from it. She gets down on her knees and elbows, como peros, and tosses the nun's hem above her posterior. On each naked buttock is the scrawled sign of Ashirikas; "Fuck me, Rolf." The boy whips out a 10" personal vibrator, adorned in waterproof acrylics with the image of the Nazarene. He intones the words "nuk Khensu tenten nebu" and approaches her intendant fundament...impletion...across the room the fresh corpse of an illegitimate hippie baby is dis-impaled from the ceremonial sword of Baph-omet. The myrrh is extinguished with the collected saliva of priests listening to tales of carnal abuse in warm, dark confessionals. The Shadaic numinae are chalked over with the mirrored sign of Ariael, the eleven rubies returned to the vessel of Dione. A dark, handsome youth with the physique of a Dionysos–eyes, though, glazed and cold–grasps the two-foot stem of an imported El-Douhab hookah by its hilt and shoves its tip, sans mouthpiece, into the dry, collapsed rectum of the dead hippie baby, pushes until thin rivulets of blood ooze from the nostrils and lips of the infant. The hookah's stem-tip surfaces and the suck-piece is restored. Those in the room gather about. One youth wears a mosaic-inlaid Aztec skull mask, ornamented with the symbols of Gnostic adoration. He fills the hookah bowl with black opium tars and a dash of Asthmador powders...in the corner of the room, clutching a smuggled police photo of Sharon Tate with her hacked-off tit crammed up her snatch, a lone boy masturbates slowly, moaning "tempora mutantur et nos muta-mur in illis."

No "flower children" they, the sinister emanation of a generation who only yesterday, it seems, were set on changing a world in the shadow of nuclear holocaust and overpopulation into a utopia of peace and love. They drop the knee of fealty before the Antichrist. They shoot "M" and they engage in group sex. No act is too depraved, no thought too bizarre as they plunge deeper and deeper into the realm of perversion, into the ultimate "trip" of their own self-fashioned Hell. Orgies, incest, drugs, homosexuality, necrophilia, public nose-picking, Satanism, even living sacrifice.

And this is their music. Although you may not enjoy its "message," although you may not enjoy a lead singer (Kip Treavor), who sounds like Keith Relf whining about the tampons stuck up his nostrils, you owe it to yourself as a person concerned with contemporary society or merely with the artistic underground of the youth movement in general to be aware of the "heavy" sounds of bubble-gum Satanism and if you see them live sometimes they undress a hippie girl.