The world today is such a wicked place.

“Now the earth was corrupt in the sight of God, and the earth was filled with violence.” ~Genesis 6:11 (NASB)

“Wicked World” wears its swing roots proudly on its sleeve, opening jazzily with Ward’s hi-hats leading to Iommi’s tempestuous primary riff,[3] which alights upon a splenetic, blues-structured verse riff wherein an ancient-sounding, gravel-throated Osbourne bellows the ultimate reality of the times in which we live and the countless years in which injustice, violence and cruelty held dominion. Near upon a decade later, their final stanza in their final song “Swinging the Chain” will chillingly echo it, reminding listeners that “the world’s still on fire.”

“The world today is such a wicked place” is an introduction as powerful and pregnant with meaning as “What is this that stands before me?” from “Black Sabbath,” and the earliest spark of the band’s righteous indignation, which burst into a five-alarm fire with this and other anti-war polemics which continued the thread of protest music from the decade that had just passed. The opening verse sets up the basic premise; each of the following verses exemplify it, demonstrating a different reason the world is “wicked”:

1.      violence

2.      poverty/social inequality

3.      heartlessness

4.      elitism

5.      political oppression

6.      unequal distribution of wealth

7.      untreated pandemics

The final stanza looks microcosmically at a single-parent family, and continues the thread of the earlier stanzas to list reasons the world is wicked:

8.      daily drudgery

9.      economic oppression

10.   the suffering of the innocent

11.   loss of a parent

Butler’s exposition on the global scene is forthright, conjuring mental images and dark recollections from the pages of history and the evening news, but in a way that isn’t portrayed dryly or journalistically, but poetically, even religiously. His use of the word “wicked” to describe the world brings to mind biblical imagery, and although Butler doesn’t begin to explicitly employ religious language until “War Pigs,” “Wicked World,” like “Behind the Wall of Sleep” conjures implicit notions of religious themes. The song-title itself may be borrowed from the Catholic Douay-Rheims translation of Galatians 1:4, which in speaking of Jesus Christ states that he “gave himself for our sins, that he might deliver us from this present wicked world.” This very event is depicted at the climax of “War Pigs” and “Electric Funeral.”

British anti-war poets Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves were among the first to compose controversial poetry on the horrors of WWI, and to speak out against a political military elite who they felt were waving patriotic flags, whilst deliberately prolonging a war that the wealthy industrialists were profiting from.[4] “Wicked World” bears some resemblance to Sassoon’s grim verse; containing relatively few stanzas, its brevity and brutal honesty lend urgency to the foreboding portrait of a world dominated by cruel and corrupt men.

Fighting going on between the human race.

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

This simple and aptly conceived line condemns the wide range and scope of violence in the world. As with Black Sabbath’s later incendiary songs, “Wicked World” is mostly 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 university in California, 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 pertains with equal measure to virtually any conflict in the intervening years. It could even apply 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.

“A struggle is going on in all nations of the civilized world between the oppressors and the oppressed of all countries, a struggle between the capitalist and the laborer...” ~American Federation of Labor Constitution, 1886

Butler links the struggle of the social lower classes who work just to put food on the table, with the grief of those in a warzone burying their friends and family to underscore a somber point about the world’s social inequality, and the way it affects the poor in different countries. 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. “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.”[5]

“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 daily living needs (which comprises nutritious food, safe and adequate shelter, sufficient clothing, access to education, health care and political representation), or without them, due to lack of sufficient income is inestimable, and the causes for poverty are multifaceted. Sociological assessments generally point toward 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.[6] “Besides hunger and fear, lack of health care, decent education and housing shortages, which make living hard, the poor live with brash opulence in their faces,” notes Greed author, Julian Edney. “People in decaying buildings daily watch glittering television scenes of shining cars, ocean yachts, and overflowing parties of the rich and famous. Owned by these images, a poor person cannot but feel the differences, and year by year these images add a sedimented frustration, resentment, sense of failure and inferiority which they cannot avoid. Poverty is also punitive. The poverty-struck family is not just paying the price of its own failure: it is also paying the price of others’ success. Still, many regard these problems as if they were no more than the economy’s stubble, moles, and split ends… Great social inequality creates an unstable equilibrium. The swelling numbers of the poor and resentful come to rival the power of the rich. As grievances and restlessness grow, government worsens, becoming tyrannical. Eventually a critical point arrives. Wealth will be redistributed, either by politics, or by revolution.”[7] Black Sabbath later depict this “critical point” on later albums, addressing the issues of revolution and the fate of tyrannical governments.

           For the “people across the sea,” revolution, 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 dead. Cambodia would later count three million of its own people slaughtered during the totalitarian Khmer Rouge regime. Such atrocities, far from isolated or uncommon events, are ubiquitous in the record of human history. Going back over a century, estimated totals of the genocide against Native Americans by Europeans range from the highly conservative 15 million to upwards of 100 million, which left a mere 2.5% of the population alive by 1891 (which would make it one of the greatest human massacres in recorded 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.[8] The Holodomor 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, Afghanistan, Iraq and numerous others, meanwhile, have carved out alarming numbers in the years since, altogether presenting an unspeakable account of a race plagued by a lust for violence and propensity towards self-destruction.

           War, poverty and the gross abuse of power (and all within the first stanza!) leads to the target of “Wicked World’s” object of acrimony, the world’s political leaders who perpetuate the disparity between an affluent, hierarchical elitist system that lives, parasitically, off the blood, sweat and tears of the lower social classes. “The United States has the greatest disparity of wealth in the entire industrialized world,” wrote Professor and columnist for The Statesman, Huck Gutman. “That fact is a national disgrace, though it is largely invisible both in the media, and in the endless accolades about the wonders of capitalism. While America seems to be enjoying a banquet of unbelievable richness, most Americans do not get a full plate, and a remarkable number go hungry.”[9]

A politician’s job they say is very high,

For he has to choose whose gotta go and die;

“In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful.” ~Leo Tolstoy

After a short bridge, the riff builds again with Butler elaborating on one of the primary causes of global suffering. The sarcasm inherent in this line demonstrates Black Sabbath’s disgust with an elite class where, by virtue of their so-called “high” positions, not only are they exempt from the very conflicts they create, but, like true tyrants, they choose who will fight and die so they can vanquish rivals and acquire greater resources. Butler’s perspective was echoed years earlier by Albert Schweitzer who identified in political leaders a gross lack of compassion. “Today there is an absence of thinking which is characterized by a contempt for life. We waged war for questions which, through reason, might have been solved. No one won. The war killed millions of men, and brought suffering and death to millions of innocent animals. Why? Because we did not possess the highest rationality of reverence for life.”

The folk movement was rife with songs that decried the contempt for life exhibited by politicians. Bob Dylan’s 1963 “Masters of War,” for example, discusses how they build weapons of destruction, and then hide away while the young people they’d sent to war are slaughtered. Phil Ochs dedicated an entire catalogue of songs to the deception and abuse of power by corrupt political and corporate leaders who profited from violence. In his most famous work, “I Ain’t Marchin’ Anymore,” he rails, “It’s always the old that leads us to the war, always the young to fall. Now look at all we’ve done with a saber and a gun. Tell me, is it worth it all?”

In “The Passing of My Life,”[10] he mourns all the violence and destruction he’s seen, and wonders if such tragedies will always be:

“I've seen rockets all ablaze,
I've seen dark and deadly days;
I've seen cities bombed and butchered to the ground.
I've seen battles by the score,
I've seen ten too many wars,
And it's all with the passing of my life.

And as I see the fury of the fire and the flame
I wonder if my children will have to see the same.”

That such songs maintain applicability to different generations and cultures is due to the fact that their authors refrained from setting them in a specific time or place, thereby making a general comment on human greed, lust for power and mankind’s failure to learn from its violent past. In “Wicked World,” Butler follows suit, taking a gargoyle’s-eye-view of the world that transcends time and place, avoiding any then-topical mentions of the draconian threat of Nixon and his administration, for example, or the escalating global and domestic conflicts that were on the minds of many.

In the ever-widening political divide in the United States and abroad, Black Sabbath remained apolitical, neither advocating nor indicting one nation above another or one political party above another, but condemning any and all political leaders who advanced the cause of war and suffering. This perspective strengthens the band’s message, as it underscores a level of fidelity and lack of bias; Black Sabbath’s protest songs were never political, but humanistic, concerned with the fate of the common man and the betterment of the world.

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

It’s not entirely insignificant that the first song written by Black Sabbath while named Earth utilized the word “earth” in its lyric (along with a depiction of its mismanagement). In the context in which it’s placed, it’s clear that Butler wasn’t entirely immune to the temptation of commenting on current events, and these verses are 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. By the time most of the nation viewed Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Buzz Aldrin’s lunar landing, it was hailed as one of mankind’s all-time great achievements, a symbol of what humans can accomplish when they put their minds to it. Prior to its success, however, controversy existed as to whether the government should be allocating astronomical taxpayer funds to space when there were so many problems on earth that needed attention. Though Butler favors the latter perspective, he himself was hardly immune to the lure of the stars, and the moon landing became a source of inspiration for him, providing a literal and metaphoric framework for escape from a world engulfed in war and chaos (c.f., “Planet Caravan” and “Into the Void”). In the political framework, however, he places the high expenditure of the moon mission (with an estimated cost of approximately $30 billion in 1968) against the desperate need of funding for the sick, money that might instead have been used to fund research for cures to the countless ailments and pandemics spread across the planet.[11] In such a context, the governments (specifically, the American and Soviet governments) are shown to be grossly insensitive. Whether one agrees with the perspective or not, it’s a valid one, and Black Sabbath weren’t the only musicians looking askew at the space race. Phil Ochs’ 1963 “Spaceman”[12] 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” perspective of the space race may have been viewed as more egregious as it was seen by some as less about national prestige or scientific discovery than power via espionage and militarization. Former U.S. President Johnson stated, “Control of space means control of the world. From space, the masters of infinity would have the power to control the earth’s weather, to cause drought and flood, to change the tides and raise the levels of the sea, to divert the gulf stream and change temperate climates to frigid.”[13] The fear (and/or desire) that motivated Johnson, and likely Russian leader, Khrushchev, to win the space race informs Black Sabbath’s “Into the Void,” which depicts freedom fighters escaping a war-torn planet via rockets, the very same rockets that were developed because of the space race between the U.S. and U.S.S.R.

“Wicked World’s” phantasmagoric bridge continues in the gothic overtones that permeates the album, a haunting and evocative oeuvre, like an eerie echo of The Shadows, serving as a prelude to the strange, twisty passages that unearth 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.

At this juncture, the original, uncut version (and live performances) of “Wicked World” include a tempo-shift, with an upbeat swing section and additional lyrics:

“I don’t know whether it is worth all,

So I air the trouble I got on my mind:

Everybody’s runnin’ round in circles,

Runnin’ ‘round everyday as if they’re blind.”

The stanza in this cut section[14] critiques the way people spend their lives running around in circles as if blind, repeating the same cyclical behavior again and again. Though it doesn’t state it specifically, one can surmise that the blind circles includes blind allegiance to authority figures and institutions (c.f., “Cornucopia”). There are two other remarkable aspects of this section; one is that the song’s reproach is directed, not only on the political leaders, as with the main thrust of the lyric, but “everybody,” mankind in general. Societal criticism is present in “Black Sabbath,” as well, but is considerably more oblique, and won’t find explicit expression until “War Pigs.” The other remarkable feature here is the interjection of the voice of the narrator, who wonders aloud if it’s even worth airing the trouble he’s got on his mind. Butler won’t utilize the technique of interpolating the narrator’s voice again until Master of Reality’s “Lord of this World.”

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

She just goes to work just to earn her pay.

“As usual, single mothers are having the hardest time of all. More than 40 percent of women who head families are now living in poverty. With more than half of poor children living in female-headed families in 2010, the child poverty rate jumped to 22 percent… And as usual, most of the powers that be aren’t paying attention.” ~Leslie Bennetts

The macrocosmic overview of the first two stanzas leads directly to the intimate, microcosmic look at how war and poverty affect individuals.[15] “Johnny Blade” builds on this idea as well, looking at the effects of poverty and violence on a young man. The situation described in “Wicked World” depicts the life of a single mother, possibly after losing her husband in combat, leaving her forced to take on full-time work. That “she just goes to work just to earn her pay” indicates the extreme degree of her poverty, and employment that’s menial and low-paying, with barely enough to support herself and her children. Studies consistently show that women and children are the first and hardest hit during times of war, militarization and economic downturn, subject to impoverishment, brutalization, domestic violence and rape.[16]

“Wicked World’s” final stanza touches briefly on this issue of social and economic inequality, compelling listeners to take a hard look at what poverty entails through the situation of an anonymous woman and her child, prompting condemnation for the causes of economic injustice in a western culture that celebrates affluence. “Inequality is more tolerated now then ever before in modern history,” wrote Assistant Professor of Political Science, Michael J. Thompson. “The culture of everyday life has become infested with a culture of inequality, a culture of hierarchy.”[17] It’s against this very injustice, and the acceptance of it as normal, that Black Sabbath, through songs like “Wicked World” and “War Pigs,” rail. In exposing and condemning the wealthy political elite, and the effect their policies have, Black Sabbath aren’t alone. While their songs focus on cause and effect, others, such as Professor Gutman, look at the ways in which the ruling elite get away with social and economic injustice. “Let me repeat: the wealthiest one per cent of the population owns more than the bottom 95 per cent. There are three causes for this monstrous maldistribution of wealth: capitalism, government, and pay. The first is obvious. Capitalism depends on capital, and some members of society have a lot more of it than others. So the in-built tendency of capitalism is to reward those who have capital, which in less technical terms means that those with money tend to see their wealth grow much faster than those who have no money. The rich get richer is a fundamental corollary of capitalist dynamics… and in America tax policies have been skewed to take from the working people and give to the wealthy… Redistribution two ways, in a country where the disparity of wealth is already so great that in the world's richest nation, over sixteen per cent of children live in poverty… The third cause of the huge wealth gap between the rich and the great mass of ordinary Americans, is pay. In the United States today… the CEOs of large corporations earn, in salary and other compensation, five hundred times what their average workers make. Put in less arithmetical terms, they earn in slightly over half a day what their workers earn in an entire year.”[18] While Black Sabbath doesn’t get into any kind of systematic discussion of the issues of social and economic injustice, or its corrections, something no popular music could (or would even want to) achieve, Butler does spend considerable effort serving a similar purpose, seeking to “open” his listeners’ “eyes” to “the lies” (see “Killing Yourself to Live”) that the world’s rulers put forth to maintain power and wealth (c.f., “Cornucopia”).

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 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. Osbourne’s voice is especially disconsolate in this stanza, as the tragic quality of the final lines point to the ultimate casualty in the political machinations of the rich and powerful: an innocent child bereft of a father and, potentially, a future. Aside from the emotional toll of losing a parent—depicted by the child’s crying—there is the danger of privation. Without the financial support of the primary wage-earner, this family is placed in a precarious situation of not being able to earn enough to get by. At or already below the poverty line, this mother and her child (or children) have been abandoned at the doorstep of homelessness, victimization, crime, malnutrition, disease and death.

If it all sounds rather depressing, it should be remembered that songs of this nature weren’t intended as mere entertainment. Musically, it’s certainly entertaining, but Black Sabbath are notable for being concerned with reflecting truth in their lyrics, which included exposing the political forces that govern millions. Songs like “Wicked World” serve as admonitions, particularly to a younger generation still malleable enough to be woken up to help bring about the realization of a better world. “[Black Sabbath’s] ideas had always been influenced by the 1960s counter-culture the band’s members had lived through and been associated with, as well as its accompanying ideas about spirituality, love as a force for change, and peace as an objective.”[19]

From its swing opening to its sludgy pentatonic riff and gothic-toned guitar passages, “Wicked World” remains as timely now as it was 40 years ago, its grim subject matter still ringing out its warning to all who’ll listen.