>>REVIEW
RAT SALAD – BLACK SABBATH: THE CLASSIC YEARS, 1969-1975
Paul Wilkinson
Pimlico/Random House, 240 pp.
Y'ever just sit around and read Shakespeare? If your schooling was anything like mine, the thought of reading the Bard for fun seems as foreign as eating maggots just because you never tried them before. Every pupil has it drilled into their heads that ol' Will is the be-all, end-all of written English – the best there was, the best there is and the best there will ever be, to quote Bret Hart, our city's own master of the witty epigram.
It's no wonder that very few young people can work up any enthusiasm for the Swan of Avon – when someone waxes enthusiastic in a scholarly and pedantic tone about iambic pentameter, or the way Shakespeare derided puns while simultaneously sprinkling them through his work like croutons, or the repeated, cleverly-coded allusions to the politics of the time, it's hard to dissociate the man's works from the sort of slack-jawed, drooling boredom emanating from the pedagogue presenting them.
Paul Wilkinson must be given points for avoiding yet another Behind The Music-style tome full of grandiose, half-remembered touring anecdotes and rock star self-mythologizing, instead making it his mission to turn the infernal roar that is the first six Ozzy-era Sabbath albums into legitimate culture.
To this end, he devotes the bulk of the book to a song-by-song breakdown of each album, Black Sabbath through Sabotage, throwing terms like "agitato" and "divertimento" around like devil horns at a reunion tour. This specialist terminology, in liberal use throughout the book (a glossary is handily provided), seems at odds with the capsule histories of the times the albums were made in and Wilkinson's own (it must be said) out-of-place reminiscences about the albums' place in his own biography. The frequent reader asides don't help either. While occasionally very funny, Wilkinson's notes along the lines of "if you're paying attention, dear reader, you'll remember X," come across like a teacher trying to hold the attention of students who are slumped over on their desks, staring mournfully at the clock.
This isn't to say that Rat Salad is all bad. Wilkinson is at his best when writing colourful passages about Sabbath classics like "Children of the Grave," anthropomorphizing songs into the harbingers of doom they are. His enthusiasm for the subject matter is palpable, coming off on your fingers like newsprint ink, but it is ultimately his too-scholarly tone that makes Rat Salad a bit of a snooze.
The problem inherent in taking something as visceral and immediate as a Black Sabbath album, something oozing evil tension and fist-pumping machismo and savage destruction, and trying to legitimize it for the cultural elite, is that it effectively neuters it. Just in the same way that the Shakespeare scholars of the school system make him boring by skipping over all the rowdiness, brashness and wanton lust in his plays (people, he gave us "the two-backed beast"), Rat Salad's focus on musical technique and flowery terminology sucks out a lot of what made Sabbath records so great – the sheer heaviness, a sense of vicarious rebellion and, well, fun. |
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