When it comes to politics rock ‘n’ roll bands usually have more to say in or more that can be read into (which amounts to the same thing) their music than when they actually talk about it. Ozzy Osbourne is basically about as politicised as the average musician, and while he responded to a comment from the other end of the room to the effect that Nixon should be shot with a wave of the hand — “They’re all as bad as fucking one another, politicians” — he saw the songs themselves in quite literal terms as graphic depictions of the state of things today: “The day of writing bullshit songs is over, as far as I’m concerned. Why breed people to believe, like, fight because America loves you or England loves you, that’s all bullshit propaganda. The last guy who was a heavy dude with that was Hitler, and look what he did for the world. Why not just give people truth for a change, instead of just hyping 'em to believe what you want ‘em to believe? I like to think that if people listen to the words they’ll get the truth of the song, like the lyrics to ‘Children of the Grave.’ It’s about the kids of today and what we see. In America the revolution that’s in peoples’ minds is ridiculous, because if they believe in it strongly enough and it’s for good and they wanna get something out of it, then by all means revolt. You’re gonna hurt something on both sides, whether you let it stay the way it is and just ride it out or do something different. You couldn’t get it into a worse state than it is now, and you could get something much better. I don’t personally think that there will be a revolution where everybody will start freaking, because everybody’s gotta get old someday, and we’ll be complaining about something else.”

His words reveal him to be at least as sincere as Mark Famer, and it both positions seem a little naive, they still can be taken not only with a grain of salt but with the music itself as indications of a genuine concern, leading even to the conclusion that for all the ugliness and hatred in their music, for all the spectres of wicked enemies crawling on their Knees through brimstone toward the base of a white-hot mushroom cloud, the ultimate thrust of what Black Sabbath are saying or trying to say is an uncommonly humanist impulse. And because they do care, and because they hit the nerve square-on as often as they do, and because even their phantasmagorias of malediction and punishment are so vivid, and because they are better at all of this (musically and thematically) than Grand Funk and just about any other working Third Generation band with the possible exception of Alice Cooper, and because Alice Cooper doesn’t really mean it and Black Sabbath does, it’s mighty difficult to overstate how much we’ve needed them and still do.