HW: Who's Gonna Win The War (Was Re: OFF: Black Sabbath???)

[Dave Berry]

At 06:38 08/10/99 , Sen. Volstead wrote:
>Horse Whisperer wrote:
>> but I'd be very interested to know how "commercialized"
>> applies here, whether to the music, the packaging or the words.\
>
>I acknowledge Hawkwind's overwhelming superiority! "Who's Gonna Win the War"
>carries the deep, deep message that WAR IS BAD so much more eloquently than
>"War Pigs".

"Who's Gonna Win the War" is much more than a message song.  It evokes an image which combines both the soldier's experience (much of wartime is spent waiting) and the tension in Europe in the early 80's, when cruise missiles and short-ranged ballistic missiles were being deployed with nuclear warheads.  That deployment engendered wide-ranging protests, and sharply divided the political landscape.  Everybody agreed that "WAR IS BAD", but some people thought that these missiles were protecting the peace, while some people thought they were bringing us to the edge of nuclear war.

Musically, "Who's Gonna Win the War" is much better than "War Pigs".  Even when I liked more Sabbath than I do now, I still regarded "War Pigs" as lumbering metal at it's worst.

In any case, what has this to do with "commercialisation"?  Sabbath did what they did because it made money.  They started off as an R&B band, then added some of their own songs to their set.  When the audiences liked them, they did more of them.  They built a reputation, and a record company signed them up.

>And I just love what they're doing now with adapting trendy ALIEN
>gimmickry into their cover art and set design!

So on the one hand we have Black Sabbath, who read some Dennis Wheatley, thought it cool, and wrote some songs about it.  And on the other hand we have Hawkwind, who watched the X-Files, thought it cool, and wrote some songs about it.  And you want us to believe that Sabbath were showing deep integrity, while Hawkwind were selling out?  Disregarding that Alien 4 was their best studio album for years -- probably since the Hawklords, in my opinion.

I really don't think that songs like "Phetamine Street", "Hippy", and "Wheels", are calculated to storm the top ten.  They're not exactly Steps or B*Witched, are they?

Dave.