I was never into metal for approximately the same reasons I was never into wrestling, two early teenage passtimes for boys in the 80s and 90s. With wrestling it was clear enough that the kayfabe and the pageantry were part of the appeal, and if you just don't care about who hates whom and find the year-round scheduling aspect daunting, it will remain perpetually closed off. With metal, even at the height of satanic panic and the wild rumors we'd hear about Ozzy Ozbourne in particular, there was a doubt always in the back of my mind about how real any of it was meant to be. (Say what you want about Perry Farrell, it seems clear that he really did believe Jane's Addiction posed a threat to America's youth. Ozzy just wanted to sing, and it eventually became clear that it didn't matter with whom.) And in any event, the side opposing Ozzy was Tipper Gore and the PMRC, so I was fine to side with the metalheads on the condition that I never had to listen to any of their music. The intro to "Crazy Train" still goes, though.
(Grad school, where the best minds of my generation made nice with actual-factual fascists, was given over to a lot of people talking about Black Metal and related genres, a sort of gatekeeping and one-ups-man-ship that I found very unappealing, to say nothing of the music involved)
Anyway, various factors of the cultural environment had me reconsidering my stance towards Black Sabbath, at the very least, and then Ozzy dies. So I set aside some time to listen with fresh-ish ears, and here's what I've got:
It's fine? I at the very least get it now: the riffs tend to be very good, and none of them overstay their welcome because a lot of the songs seem to be through-composed so that elements don't repeat. The vocals and lyrics are fine so long as you don't expect a lot of depth (I never expect depth in any songs), and you could build a perfectly fine reputation out of "Paranoid", "War Pigs" and the first few songs on Master of Reality. There are bands that have lasted longer that have contributed less.
More critically: the through-composition of songs makes a lot of them feel much longer than they are, and there are some real swings in intensity across their albums. "Orchid" is a perfectly fine English-folk style instrumental, but strikes an odd tonal note given what comes before and after. "Going to California", on Led Zeppelin IV, does better because there is a common musical structure across all the songs--the blues--and they're merely shifting from one accepted mode to another.
In general, Black Sabbath feels very English-from-the-mists-of-Albion, and like other bands of whom this has sometimes been true (Fairport Convention, The Libertines) there's a sort of wishcasting a history of England and music that somehow excludes all the non-white people. (I've never really thought about it, but it's quite something that Fairport Convention hits it really big while the background of England is race riots and the rise of the National Front; one can't even really compare it to the American folk music revival in the 60s because there is no American folk music without black people, full stop.) I am aware that this is a perpetual complaint about metal as a place that more-or-less intentionally excludes women and nonwhite people, I suppose this is yet more fuel for the fire. In this music, I can imagine a world in which you don't even exist so that I don't have to go through the trouble of erasing you. Who wouldn't want to live there?
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