“The world today is such a wicked place,” Black Sabbath declared in 1969, when they recorded their debut album, set against a backdrop of war, assassinations, social unrest, and disillusionment. Cries for justice from the Civil Rights Movement, and for peace and love from the culture of “flower power,” had been met with violent backlash from the ruling class. It was on this stage that Black Sabbath entered—the heaviest rock band the world had yet known. This band was shaped by a working class upbringing in Birmingham, England, where actual metal defined the small town existence of factories, bombed-out buildings, and little else. With their music, Sabbath captured the dread and the burgeoning pessimism that was haunting the minds of young people in the sixties and seventies. Today, we are in a similar age of crisis: climate disaster, extreme inequality, police brutality, mass incarceration, and now, pandemic. Black Sabbath speaks to our time in ways few other bands can. They deploy apocalyptic imagery to capture the destruction of the planet by despotic superpowers, and they pronounce a prophetic indictment on agents of injustice. In this book, theologian and cultural critic Jack Holloway explores Black Sabbath’s music and lyrics, and what they had to say to their historical context. From this analysis, Holloway outlines a Black Sabbath theology which carries significant import for modern life, reminding us of our deep responsibility to transform a broken world.
May and Jack first met on the London Underground; both were students travelling to King's College from their homes in Forest Gate at the very east end of London. Their friendship grew as they discovered their many common interests; "poetry, social conditions, human motives and the many topics that have concerned students over the centuries," as May put it. They began writing letters to each other as well as meeting regularly, and soon realized they had fallen in love. However this was 1914, and Europe was on the brink of war. Jack joined the Territorial Army and by the time war was declared he was already training to become a 2nd Lieutenant, a subaltern. He continued to write to May during his training, and from the trenches of war-torn France, where he was injured by a sniper, until he received fatal injuries while scouting in no-man's-land. This book tells the story of this doomed love affair through excerpts from May's memoirs, Jack's writings and sketches and above all through Jack's letters to May.
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