10 Songs That Saved Rock And Roll
3. Paranoid - Black Sabbath
Most of the rock and roll coming down the pipeline at the end of the '60s wasn't really about being happy anymore. Even though songs like Hey Jude may have been making their way across the airwaves, this was the point when Vietnam was kicking into high gear and things were about to start getting a lot more vicious sounding. So in Black Sabbath's case, they turned to a topic that everybody could latch onto...the darkness within.
Distilled into just over 2 minutes, Paranoid is everything that you could have asked for in a hard rock song at the time, with Tony Iommi delivering one of the most ripping tones to ever come out of an electric guitar. The lyrics were also a change of pace, trading in the war mongering themes for a song that dealt with personal feelings and how your depression leads you to become disassociated from the rest of the world. That's right...Black Sabbath was on the emo bandwagon before it was even a thing.
This wasn't melodramatic though...this was the start of something much more inventive. From this song forward, both Sabbath and the rock community at large began tinkering with just how dark rock and roll could become. The threshold had finally been broken. Metal was now just on the horizon.