Black Sabbath's Master of Reality. 33 1/3 :: Education by Design Store

Customer Reviews

From out the murk

2008-05-05
produced by Tony Iommi's plectrum, 15-year-old Roger constructs an inner sanatorium as he rides out his time in a psych ward. In a series of diary entries addressed to his counselor Gary, Roger tries to defend Black Sabbath's _Master of Reality_. They took Roger's tapes, you see. It's 1985. Heavy metal will turn you into a Lovecraft refugee who sacrifices his mom to Satan for the chance to burn a little brighter. But as Roger says, "Some of the hardest things in the world are also very simple like for example a sword or even a very big rock." This sentence tells you more about what metal means to Roger - to Darnielle, who worked in a psychiatric hospital in the eighties - than a hundred Adorno-starred pages by some wannabe Greil Marcus ever could. Yes, John Darnielle is the Mountain Goats, but even if you've never heard his music - even if you believe Black Sabbath records should always & everywhere be confiscated, that young people might listen to commissar-approved bands like Gang of Four - you should read this book. You can read it in a minute, which is a good thing, because that's about how long it takes for a riff to change your life, when you're fifteen & you haven't yet figured out you're not the only person the world wants to extinguish.

A++ would read again

2008-04-22
this sweet, sad little riff of a book succeeds--like the best of the 33 1/3 series--on so many levels at once I'm itching to pick it up and read it through again. whether you are a fan of Black Sabbath (I haven't listened in years), interested in unexpected forms music criticism (the fictional narrator here makes no appologies for being a superfan), or just looking for a compelling story (a proverbial page-turner from the heartbreaking dedication to the last page), this book will not dissapoint. if you've heard Darnielle's music (like, um, Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton) you know the man can tell a story, and Roger's story--too real to be non-fiction and too passionate to be grouped with standard criticism--resonates through all the frustrations and humiliations I've ever experienced. if only I'd had Ozzy to guide me through it... I think I'll pick up Master of Realitiy and give it a listen while I re-read this.

Falls flat

2008-06-30
While John Darnielle's rigid personal enforcement of guileless-ness elevates many of his 3-minute songs to a state of genius, that same straight-shooting methodology just doesn't work in the context of a short novel. As a reader, I felt compassion for the unjustly incarcerated teenage narrator Roger Painter (and his mid-twenties incarnation as a restaurant manager), but the connection between his story and Sabbath's "Master of Reality" seemed tenuous at best -- I mean, the same story could have been spun around "Blizzard of Ozz" or the first Whitesnake album or the Misfits' "Walk Among Us" or any of the (many, many) other likely candidates. In the end, as a book, it fell flat for me -- but I bet it would have made a great Mountain Goats song.

A gem

2008-06-15
A lovely gem of a book. An incredible meditation on fandom and teenage pain, and a truly Foucauldian take, in simple and biting language, on the mental institution as one of this culture's most misbegotten engines of conformity and punishment, which stands in here for everything rock, at its best, rebels against.

A Bleak Tale with an Epic Soundtrack

2008-05-20
John Darnielle has been a writer i have enjoyed for some time now. Between his monthly editorials in Decibel magazine and his long running web zine (last plane to jakarta) I have read a good deal of his work. So I was excited to hear he has not only written a book, but a book about Sabbath. Metal is my absolute favorite and Darnielle's approach to metal from the point of view as a music fan, rather then singularly a metalhead, coupled with his deep insight of the obscure has been the drawing point for me to read his material. In this book he tackles one of the great albums from the first heavy metal band.

For those familiar with Sabbath, you know one could easily be engulfed by the amount of quality music they have released over their long history. The most popular release has always been they're sophomore release, Paranoid. With hits like the title track, "War Pigs", and "Iron Man", Paranoid was an album that made Black Sabbath a world name. Yet, Darnielle choose to write about Sabbath's less lauded third release. Master of Reality is an album full of Sabbath greats such as "Sweet Leaf", "Children of the Grave" and "Into The Void", but as Darnielle describes in the book, you'll never hear any of these songs waiting in line at the grocery store.

Choosing the path less traveled is a passion for Darnielle in his music exploration. In all of his writings he makes a connection with music that you will not find reiterated in the endless blogsphere. This can come from him writing about something different or him skillfully putting cognitive reality to word. In this book though, Darnielle writes a fictional tale of a boy institutionalized, and his cruddy life is explained through his eyes. Darnielle, for a large portion of his lifted, worked in youth mental health facilities such as the scene of this book. He recalls the troubled lives within the padded walls and sterile hell to write a description of Master of Reality as they would see it. The songs often are given multiple meanings as the character's experience changes. All of which are fresh and exciting to understand. This book deals with rage, teen age love, fear, religion, and the struggle to live on past tragedy. I strongly reccomend it to fans of the 33 1/3 series, fans John, fans of Sabbath, and to fans of music.

Excellent!

2008-05-17
Amazing book! Go out and buy it today. You don't even have to like Black Sabbath to enjoy the great writing in the book.

Well done!

2008-05-06
Darnielle has a real gift for making simple words (mad, sad, bad) ring true and hit hard when coming from the pen of his 15 year old narrator. This book is not to be missed. I hope he continues to write books as well as music in the future, because obviously his talents run deep.