Released: 1970
“Paranoid” by Black Sabbath is a heart-wrenching ballad of mental tumult, loneliness, and existential dread. Through biting, brazen lyrics, Black Sabbath explores the paranoia and detachment that often accompany mental health struggles.
The opening lines, ‘Finished with my woman ’cause she couldn’t help me with my mind’, kick-starts the narrative on a note of desperation. Ozzy isn’t just mouthing tired clichés here about a ‘love gone wrong’. Instead, he’s loading his cannon with a dual critique of relationships’ inadequacy in the face of mental health struggles and society’s counter-productive tendency to personify these battles.
‘All day long, I think of things / But nothing seems to satisfy’ and ‘Can you help me / Occupy my brain?’ speaks to the relentless mental fatigue of individuals battling mental health troubles. The common misconception – that happiness is within arm’s length and all you need is to stretch a bit – finds a damning critique in the line ‘I need someone to show me / The things in life that I can’t find’.
Unsurprisingly, the ‘long-faced, unhappy rocker’ stereotype is also addressed. In ‘People think I’m insane / Because I am frowning all the time,’ Sabbath lambasts the stigma of displaying outward signs of suffering. In fact, the lyrics implore us to see this frown as a cry for help rather than a mark of instability.
‘Make a joke and I will sigh / And you will laugh and I will cry’ encapsulates how feelings of alienation and incomprehension can be bred within the individual. Understood emotionally, it’s the plight of utter alienation. Understood politically, it’s a scathing critique of society’s indifference toward those suffering.
The closing verse ‘And so, as you hear these words / Telling you, now, of my state / I tell you to enjoy life / I wish I could, but it’s too late’, is a stern reminder. It tells us that a person’s mental health should never be trivialized, and the time to enjoy life is now. The brutal honesty of this closing couplet is a rock ‘n’ roll gut-punch, underlining the raw, uncompromising glare into the abyss of mental suffering that is “Paranoid”.
