“Wicked World” is Black Sabbath’s very first original composition after the still-unreleased “A Song for Jim.” Recorded on September 19, 1969, “Wicked World” is an anti-war song examining the effects of violence and corrupt government, and Sabbath’s initial foray into the protest music of the period, establishing one of the main conceptual ideas—along with the song “Black Sabbath”—from which the band would extrapolate. Upon the thematic bedrock of these two compositions, Sabbath went on to express a wide range of socially-conscious songs over the course of the decade, denouncing war, human injustice and deception in authority.

Musically, “Wicked World” is a moody bridging of the jazz/blues material the band had been playing in clubs since 1968 with the bottom-heavy signature sound that characterized the first three albums. The song wasn’t released in the United Kingdom until several years later[1], replaced instead by the Crow cover “Evil Woman.” It contains relatively few couplets, which works to the song’s advantage, as it lends urgency to the grim portrait of a deteriorating world scene.

“Wicked World” wears its swing roots on its sleeve, opening in full-on jazz mode, by way of Gene Krupa and Jo Jones.[2] Ward’s hi-hat takes us to a wild percussive that joins with Iommi’s jazzy guitar lead, played not on his Gibson SG, but rather a beloved Fender Stratocaster.[3] This alights upon a splenetic, blues-structured verse riff wherein an ancient-sounding, gravel-throated Osbourne throatily bellows the ultimate reality of the times in which we all live. Like a number of early Sabbath songs, “Wicked World” is musically an updated version of the types of jazzy blues numbers one would hear in the 1930s, and, if played on saxophone instead of guitar, would be more readily apparent. The guitar's darker tones coupled with Osbourne's haunting vocals go far in concealing its origins to an audience unfamiliar with that bygone era.

The world today is such a wicked place.

“I had supposed until that time that it was quite common for parents to love their children, but the war persuaded me that it is a rare exception. I had supposed that most people liked money better than almost anything else, but I discovered that they liked destruction even better. I had supposed that intellectuals frequently loved truth, but I found here again that not ten per cent of them prefer truth to popularity.”—Bertrand Russell

The opening line of “Wicked World” is an introduction as powerful and pregnant with meaning as “What is this that stands before me?” from the song “Black Sabbath.” Butler’s exposition on the global scene is simple and forthright, conjuring mental images and dark recollections from the pages of history and the evening news. The single verse well summarizes the countless years in which injustice, violence and cruelty held dominion across the globe. Interestingly, Sabbath’s first written line will parallel their very final stanza almost a decade later, on “Swinging the Chain,” which chillingly notes “the world’s still on fire.”

The opening line reveals the flame of Sabbath’s righteous indignation, which will burst into a five-alarm fire throughout the course of their career. Rock critic Lester Bangs wrote in 1972 about the “need for a new music, a music which deals with the breakdowns and psychic smog on another level and, hopefully, points toward some positive resolution…But there is only one band that has dealt with it honestly in terms meaningful to vast portions of the audience… grappling with it in a mythic structure that’s both personal and universal... That band is Black Sabbath.” (Creem magazine)

Fighting going on between the human race.

“No freedom, peace or happiness has ever come out of war.”— Anonymous 

It’s a simple and aptly conceived line, condemning the wide range and scope of violence in the world. As with Black Sabbath’s other incendiary protest songs, “War Pigs” and “Children of the Grave,” “Wicked World” is almost free from specifics. A listener in 1970 would have understood the context, but in resisting the lure of writing too topically, Butler accords the song a timelessness free from cultural and political boundaries. The tumult of the late ‘60s saw a surge of upheaval, with fighting going on between blacks and whites, between young and old, between countries and within them. Student uprisings featured not only at Berkley, but in Prague, Paris and Mexico City. Certainly, the fighting “going on between the human race” would refer to the conflict in Vietnam, as well as the race war within the United States, but the line applies with equal measure to virtually any conflict in the intervening years. It could even be seen as referring to the more personal, but no less tragic pandemic of domestic and criminal violence.

People go to work just to earn their bread,

While people just across the sea are countin’ the dead.

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”—Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.

Butler, Iommi, Osbourne and Ward understood the effects of abject poverty firsthand. “It was rather dreadful and everybody in my family worked in factories,” Osbourne recalled to Joel McIver. “Really mindless jobs that were physically exhausting… We only had three bedrooms… there was six kids…My mother and father had the front room, and we used to fucking pile into the back room… We had a bucket of piss at the bottom of the bed… We never had clean sheets; we used to have overcoats as fucking bedclothes. This is God’s honest truth.”[4]

“We were all destined to go to the factories,” Bill Ward confirmed. “I didn’t know if I was gonna kill myself, have a job, go to jail, or anything. None of us did.”

The numbers of those living with a minimal of the basic needs (which include nutritious food, safe and adequate shelter, sufficient clothing, access to education, health care and political representation) of daily living, or without them, due to lack of sufficient income is inestimable. 

The causes for poverty are varied, but are often indicative of a weak or callous governance, war, the foreign policies of nations, imperialism, colonialism, lack of access to birth control, lack of education, white- and blue-collar crimes, discrimination, inadequate nutrition, disease, mental illness, substance abuse and emigration, as well as geographic and even environmental factors, such as erosion, deforestation, desertification and overgrazing.

“Across the sea,” war and genocide raged in places like Vietnam, which saw more than 58,000 American soldiers killed and upwards of four million Vietnamese civilians counted as dead. A decade later, Cambodia saw around three million of its own people slaughtered (either from starvation, combat or disease) during the totalitarian Khmer Rouge regime. And the atrocities that occurred in those two countries were far from isolated or uncommon events in human history. Estimated totals of the genocide against Native Americans by Europeans range from the wildly conservative 15 million to upwards of 100 million, which left a mere 2.5% of the population alive by 1891, and a record of one of the greatest human massacres in history. The First World War saw 20 million casualties. The Second World War (and the Sino-Japanese War that merged with it) left a death-toll between 50 and 72 million people. Upwards of 11 million were killed during the Holocaust, including around 6 million Jews, 1.5 million Romani (Gypsies), two to three million Soviet POWs, 2 million ethnic Poles, 200,000 handicapped, 15,000 homosexuals and 5,000 Jehovah’s Witnesses. The Holomodor saw between three and 10 million Ukrainians starved to death by Stalin. The Great Calamity saw Turkey’s genocidal massacre against 2 million Armenians during and after the first World War. Bangladesh, Rwanda and numerous others, meanwhile, have carved out alarming numbers in the years since, altogether presenting an unspeakable record of human history that reveals an out-of-control species plagued by self-destruction and madness, with no end in sight.

            War, poverty and gross neglect, and all within the first stanza! After a short bridge, the riff builds again with Butler elaborating on one of the roots of global suffering.

A politician’s job they say is very high,

For he has to choose whose gotta go and die;

“It doesn’t matter who you vote for. It’s still the same billionaires that run the world.”—Geezer Butler

By virtue of their so-called “high” positions, politicians are often exempt from the very conflicts they escalate, often for self-aggrandizing, egregious gains. Bob Dylan’s 1963 “Masters of War” centers on this very same notion:

“You fasten all the triggers

For the others to fire
Then you set back and watch
While the death count gets higher
You hide in your mansion
While the young people’s blood
Flows out of their bodies and is buried in the mud”

In referring to “politicians” in general terms, Butler follows Dylan’s lead in refraining from specificity. “Wicked World” takes a gargoyle’s-eye-view of the world that transcends time and place, allowing it to be applied by later generations and cultures. But at this time in history, the draconian threat of Nixon, his administration, and the escalating global and domestic conflicts were on the minds of many.

Such a position enabled Black Sabbath to avoid being charged with taking sides in an ever-widening political divide in the United States—at least directly. Being British citizens, however, allowed Sabbath to approach the material from a different perspective than those within the American counterculture, and kept the band from becoming too politicized. After all, Butler isn’t indicting Republicans or Democrats, but any and all political leaders who advance the cause of war and suffering (an important distinction that’s made as well in “War Pigs”). Sabbath’s protest songs prove less political than they are humanistic. “Unfortunately, wars are always with us,” Butler told Popoff. “You vote for a person who promises one thing and then turns around and does another. I think politicians are just puppets to the handful of people who rule the world anyway.”[5]

They could put a man on the moon quite easy,

While people here are on earth are dying of all diseases.

“The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that’s the essence of inhumanity.” —George Bernard Shaw

Butler couldn’t entirely resist the urge to comment on current events, and this line is the most specifically topical on the album, referring directly to the July 20, 1969, moon landing (less than seven months before this album’s release) that an estimated 500 million people watched on television. It’s interestingly out of step with many of even the more liberal-minded viewpoints, who along with the rest of the nation viewed Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Buzz Aldrin’s lunar landing as one of mankind’s all-time great achievements, a symbol of what humans can do when they put their minds to the stars. Butler himself holds a tremendous interest in outer space; in this framework, however, the high expenditure of the moon mission (with an estimated cost of approximately $30 billion in 1968) is placed against the desperate need of funding for the sick and dying, money that might instead have been used to fund research for cures to the countless ailments and pandemics spread across the planet, such as the ‘68-’69 Hong Kong Flu pandemic that swept through the globe beginning in Hong Kong and spreading to Vietnam and Singapore, India, the Philippines, northern Australia, Europe and the United States. It reached Japan, Africa and South America in 1969, causing 700,000 deaths worldwide. While horrific, it’s a number that is considerably lower in comparison to the earlier Asian flu (from which the Hong Kong Flu may have been related) of 1957, which saw a death toll worldwide of around 2 million. And yet, even these numbers pale to the death toll caused by cancer. In such a context, the government (specifically, in this case, the American government) is shown to be grossly insensitive. Whether one agrees with the perspective or not, it’s a valid one, and Butler wasn’t quite alone in looking askew at the space race and its exorbitant costs. Protest singer/songwriter Phil Ochs’ 1963 “Spaceman” (from The Broadside Tapes I) asks similar moral questions:

“Way high, so high, travellin’ fast and free.

Spaceman, look down, tell me what you see.

Can you see the hunger there, strike without a sound?

Can you see the food you burn as you circle round?

Way high, so high, all the world will cheer.

Spaceman, look down, tell me what you hear.

Can you hear a child cry, body filled with pain?

Deadly sores when cures are there. How much fuel remains?

Way high, so high. Spaceman made of steel.

Spaceman, look down, tell me what you feel.

Can you feel the money gone, as you sail through space?

Can you feel how many die when you win the race?”

“Wicked World’s” phantasmagoric bridge continues in the gothic overtones favored on the debut album, a haunting and evocative oeuvre, like a dark echo of Hank Marvin and The Shadows (if The Shadows played to graveyards populated with ghouls and specters), serving as a prelude to the strange, twisty passages that will emerge in the album’s closer “Warning.” Silence erupts for a second before Iommi’s lead breaks in, almost violently, seeming to indicate a cataclysmic end to all that’s come before, but then Ward’s drums build and the riff starts again, as if indicating a continuing cycle of destruction.[6]

A woman goes to work ev’ry day after day;

She just goes to work just to earn her pay.

“When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace.” Jimi Hendrix

The final stanza may be an Osbourne contribution, as it has a more homespun, earthy quality than Butler’s. Ward and Butler have noted that Ozzy often interjected bits and pieces to songs, and was adept at intrinsically understanding Butler’s concepts, which put him in good stead to emote the lyrics with heartfelt sincerity. Ozzy’s early verses are rarely florid and often rudimentary (such as in “Black Sabbath”), but they lend a primal rawness to the mix, an interesting accompaniment to the bassist’s more poetic “Irish bard” approach. 

Eschewing the macrocosmic overview of the first two stanzas, the elements of this third and final stanza are not a non-sequitur, focusing on the effects of war and poverty on a single family. The situation appears to picture the life of a woman after her husband has been killed at war, leaving her forced to take on full-time work—which, at the time, would comprise long days, longer weeks and little pay—to support herself and her children.  Women and children are always the first and hardest hit during times of increased militarization and economic downturns, subject to impoverishment, brutalization, domestic violence and rape.

Child sitting cryin’ findin' life much harder.

He doesn’t even know who is his father.

“We need to decide that we will not go to war, whatever reason is conjured up by the politicians or the media, because war in our time is always indiscriminate, a war against innocents, a war against children”—Howard Zinn

The tragic quality of the final verse brings the song to a head, showing the ultimate casualty in political games, an innocent child bereft of a father and a future. This is the reality of how war and poverty play out on civilians, wrecking havoc and bringing to birth unbearable conditions. Without the financial support of her husband, and with women at that time earning considerably less then men, this family has been placed in a painfully desperate situation. There will likely not be enough money for food and rent. At or already below the poverty line, this mother and her child (or children), are left at the doorstep of homelessness, victimization, malnutrition, disease and death. It’s no wonder that Osbourne’s voice is especially disconsolate.

The opening jazz riff returns in full-swing, as if to begin the cycle anew, but this time, the guitar takes over in an appropriately morose tone, bringing the song to its desolate conclusion.

If it all sounds rather depressing, it should be remembered that songs of this nature were not written as mere entertainment, but as reflections of truth, warnings, particularly to a younger generation perceived as still malleable enough to be woken up to help bring about the realization of a better world. Butler would wrestle with this hopeful idealism and a more cynical view throughout the entirety of his writing career in Black Sabbath.

“Wicked World” remains as timely now as it was 40 years ago, and is still brilliant and enjoyable despite its grim subject matter. From its swing-jazz opening to its sludgy pentatonic riff and gothic-toned guitar passages, “Wicked World” is inspired and creative, and its message continues to ring out in the hopes that its listeners will take it to heart.