Noisecreep

Jan 3, 2022

Noisecreep: It’s no secret that you guys drank a lot and experimented with all sorts of drugs. Did that contribute to the creative vibe on Paranoid? Butler: No, because we really weren’t doing anything back then besides sharing the occasional joint. We couldn’t afford it. We couldn’t even afford booze, so none of us were drinking yet. The music we were making was more a reflection of what we were thinking and experiencing at the time. We weren’t into flower power and good vibes. That was crap to us, because from where we were, everything was bleak and dark. […] We were four working class people in the most industrial part of England, and all we had to look forward to was dead-end jobs in factories. And we thought at any second we’d be called up to drop in to the Vietnam War, because it looked like Britain was going to get involved in it as well. So there wasn’t much future in anything for us. Butler goes on to explain the anti-war protest behind this particular song. The song was written as ‘Walpurgis,’ which sounds a little like ‘War Pigs.’ But ‘Walpurgis’ is sort of like Christmas for Satanists. And to me, war was the big Satan. It wasn’t about politics or government or anything. It was evil. So I was saying “generals gathered in the masses/just like witches at black masses” to make an analogy. But when we brought it to the record company, they thought ‘Walpurgis’ sounded too Satanic. And that’s when we turned it into ‘War Pigs.’ But we didn’t change the lyrics, because they were already finished. At this point I have to mention how the latest research on WWI suggests that British troops sometimes regarded being sent to the outdoor killing fields as an improvement over being sent into the slow death from working in factories. Butler wrote the lyrics so you have to take his word for it (pun not intended) when he explains motives, and in a SPIN interview from 2013 you can even read why the word “masses” was repeated at the start. SPIN: For some reason in “War Pigs,” it always bothered me that you rhymed “generals in their masses” with “just like witches at black masses.” Why use “masses” twice? Did you try to think of a different word? Butler: I just couldn’t think of anything else to rhyme with it. And a lot of the old Victorian poets used to do stuff like that — rhyming the same word together. It didn’t really bother me. It wasn’t a lesson in poetry or anything. Ice-T perhaps then very ironically sampled War Pigs to create his poetic 1987 revision “Rhyme Pays”. *** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from flyingpenguin authored by Davi Ottenheimer . Read the original post at: https://www.flyingpenguin.com/?p=37390 Email*