“What Is This That Stands Before Me?”

By Scott

It was the late 1990s. I was in 7th grade, spending a Saturday afternoon at a friend’s house, listening to—that’s right—Korn. I didn’t own a CD player, so my friend made me a tape. It was their self-titled, debut album. 

My dad picked me up, and I put on the Korn tape. We listened on the ride home. Neither one of us spoke. Then my dad said, “Have you ever heard Black Sabbath?” 

When we got home, he sat me down in the living room, dug around in a cabinet, and pulled out an LP. I watched as he walked over to the rarely used turntable. This felt significant: the last time he’d opened up the turntable was to play “Wipeout” when I’d started learning the drums. Now, he put on the Black Sabbath record, another self-titled, debut album, and handed me the sleeve. I stared into that scene for a while: the dark and dripping woods, the decaying building, the figure in black. 

Then, through his old stereo speakers: the scratch of the needle, rainfall, a church bell, thunder. A church bell? 

You know what it sounds like after that. Today, years later, I think of Louis Althusser’s remark about previously unknown continents of human thought: the Greeks discovering the continent of math; Galileo, of physics; Marx, of history; and possibly Freud, of the unconscious. Those first moments of music in the song “Black Sabbath” sure sound to me like the discovery of another new continent: the continent of heavy metal. 

I thought none of this at the time, of course. The song merely blew my fucking mind. 

“What is this?” My mom had been lurking around the house, listening. 

“Black Sabbath. Ozzy Osbourne’s band,” my dad said. She grimaced and walked away. I listened to the whole side, and then the other. Then another LP: Paranoid. That night, I taped them both, scurried off with my cassettes, and listened to virtually nothing else for six months.

I still have those tapes. They’ll go into my grave.

Almost thirty years have passed since that afternoon. The other day, I put on the live stream of Black Sabbath’s farewell concert from Birmingham. There were many bands performing that day who I’d first heard, and loved, after passing through the Sabbath gateway: denizens of the heavy metal continent. 

I have a three-year-old, and she watched some of the concert while it played throughout the day. I didn’t push it. But the next morning, I showed her the clips of Ozzy, taking the stage for his final show, and then the rest of Black Sabbath. She raised her little hand and formed the sign of the devil horns and said in her little voice, “We want Ozzy! We want Ozzy! We want Ozzy!” 

Yeah, she was coached. Fuck it. In this day and age, certain family values must be preserved.