Black Sabbath… legends… cult. Iconic band… fathers of heavy metal… a lot of things can be attributed to one of the greatest rock bands ever. I was a huge fan of Sabbath in my teenage days, even today I respect them to the bone. But for truth’s sake, Sabbath’s charisma lasted for about five albums. After “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath” the group's creativity kind of vanished. It came back when Ronnie James Dio took over the vocal duties, but it lasted shortly. The second album with Dio, “Mob Rules,” is already a level down than its predecessor. Tony Iommi struggled to keep the group alive in the subsequent decades, but nothing could come close to the first impact that the band made in the early seventies. And then, around forty years later Ozzy reunited with his old buddies (except for drummer Bill Ward), they entered the studio and recorded “13”, the nineteenth and final studio album by Black Sabbath. No one knows how, but there it was again - the sound, the melodies, the feeling of Sabbath. And above all, one song with a daring title, “God is Dead?”, takes us back in time to the chilling atmosphere of Sabbath’s anti-establishment apocalyptic visions. It is the first single from the album and the first with Ozzy Osbourne since 1998's "Psycho Man" and "Selling My Soul" from Reunion. Both the song title and figure on the single's cover, by Heather Cassils, are a reference to Friedrich Nietzsche, a German philosopher who is famous for saying that "God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?"
The song won the Grammy Award for Best Metal Performance on January 26, 2014. The music video you’re watching in the background was directed by Peter Joseph, known for the Zeitgeist film series, and was released on 10 June 2013. It captures perfectly the macabre atmosphere of the song and it’s a piece of art by itself. Enjoy!
