Black Sabbath's Master of Reality

Description

Black Sabbath's Master of Reality has maintained remarkable historical status over several generations; it's a touchstone for the directionless, and common coin for young men and women who've felt excluded from the broader cultural economy. John Darnielle hears it through the ears of Roger Painter, a young adult locked in a southern California adolescent psychiatric center in 1985; deprived of his Walkman and hungry for comfort, he explains Black Sabbath as one might describe air to a fish, or love to an android, hoping to convince his captors to give him back his tapes.

John Darnielle is the singer and songwriter otherwise known as the Mountain Goats.

[T]he focus of Darnielle's fans has always been on his lyrics and the stories contained within them. Now he's stepped off the stage and sat down at is typewriter to deliver Master of Reality, his first novel and a stunning piece of rock criticism and appreciation. Readers are likely to come to Master of Reality from a variety of backgrounds. Some will come as Mountain Goats fans wanting to see Darnielle tackle a novel, others as Black Sabbath fans wanting to read about a favorite album. Some will simply be fans of the cult-popular 33 1/3 series, which has now grown to dozens of books, yet kept its level of quality very high. Hopefully, there will be others who will pick it up as novel first, because it truly is a first-rate story, full of moments that will pluck at your heartstrings as you're brought back to the moment you first fell in love with a piece of music, when an album provided not just the soundtrack to your life but also the meaning behind it. If, by some strange chance, none of this happens, well, you're probably going to at least dust off your old Sabbath vinyl, and there's nothing wrong with that either. * NewPages.com * [Darnielle] straightjackets the essence of Black Sabbath where 40 years of music musings and cultural damnation have failed. -- Raoul Hernandez * Austin Chronicle * Total affection for, and strong identification with, music is a cross-generational experience, and though the motivation behind the 33 1/3 series meshes nicely with a post-Generation X obsession with the minutiae of personal experience, it's also immediately accessible to anyone who's ever written favorite lyrics on her algebra notebook. While nostalgia runs thick in Darnielle's book (the nature of the series essentially demands this), there's a greater point about music and memory to be found in Roger's story. Indulgence in the memory of intense feelings can be strangely comforting, and perhaps even necessary. Or, as Roger puts it: 'It doesn't have to mean that to everybody, and it means more no matter what... -- Thea Brown * The L Magazine * Darnielle, singer and songwriter for the much-loved band The Mountain Goats, cuts right to the chase in his short novel, the blunt, direct tone of his adolescent protagonist Richard Painter perfectly encapsulating the enduring appeal of metal's great progenitors. It's all about the Mighty Riff when it comes to Sabbath; everything else is secondary, and while one could easily make a case for at least half a dozen albums that deserve the 33 1/3 treatment, the riffs that define this particular album are, to echo young Roger's sentiment, unfuckwithable. -- Adrien Begrand * Popmatters.com * Mountain Goat John Darnielle's off-stage literary proclivities are no secret, which makes us all the more excited for his first novel, a paean to Black Sabbath's Master of Reality. The book is the latest in Continuum's 33 1/3 series ultrasmart series of elegant, pocket-size appreciations of rock albums as diverse as the Beatles' Let it Be and My Bloody Valentine's Loveless. Darnielle unpacks the classic, riff-erific album as a scrabrous series of diary entries written by a teenager in a Southern California mental institution. Those curious to see the budding rock critic off-stage or who are simply bonkers for Sabbath are advised to check out this reading. -- Tayt Harlin * New York Magazine * Written keenly and with great generosity. * Idolator * Darnielle-- who worked as a nurse in a mental hospital and presumably met quite a few smart, lost kids like Roger-- speaks to the soul-damaging aspects of locking up problem teens and offers a piece of music criticism that illuminates the edifying qualities of heavy metal. * Pitchfork feature "Our 60 Favorite Music Books" * John Darnielle is the single constant behind the group the Mountain Goats and arguably the most rewarding lyricist working today. Taking into account his prolific wordsmithery ("Laugh lines on our faces / scale maps of the ocean floor") and affinity for horror both cinematic and literary ("Heretic Pride," the most recent Mountain Goats album, has song titles naming Fu Manchu creator Sax Rohmer and H.P. Lovecraft), it shouldn't come as a surprise that he'd contribute to Continuum's "33 1/3" series of short books pegged to iconic albums. But "Master of Reality" departs brilliantly from the typical "33 1/3" format, not just by choosing fiction over criticism or recording history, but in its structural gambits and unwavering sense of purpose. -- Ed Parks * Los Angeles Times * I'd like to give a special shout-out to John Darnielle's book about Black Sabbath's Master of Reality, published as part of Continuum's 33 1/3 series of album-themed books...If you like the band, you'll like this book. If you like intense young-adult takes like The Perks of Being a Wallflower, you'll like this book. No matter what, by the end, you'll be racing to purchase Master of Reality, which is a beautiful thing. * USA Today, PopCandy * Forget the other 33 1/3s, this belongs next to The Catcher in the Rye. * Decibel Magazine * Darnielle's novella is not only a touchstone in the series, it is a powerful and potent book in its own right. Utterly compelling. -- David Hemingway * Community Care, UK * This is a masterly look at the corrosive emotion of youth, and the invaluable solace that music gives. Read it, even if you'd rather stick knitting needles in your ears than listen to the album in question. Because its about you. -- James Mann * The Big Takeover magazine * This is not the first time Darnielle explores these dark waters. In fact the text is a retelling, if not an extension of " The Best Ever Death Metal Band Out of Denton," the first track on the Mountain Goats' 2002 album, All Hail West Texas. As both the text and the song are meditations on the redemptive aspects of heavy metal, the depravity of institutional authority and the refusal to forgive, the reader who is familiar with either Darnielle's musical work or Black Sabbath will find the text particularly rewarding. -- Christian * enoughcowbell.com * With his short stories masquerading as songs, John Darnielle-founding member of the Mountain Goats-has crafted a wide range of off-kilter characters. He continues this tradition with Roger, a fifteen-year-old patient in a psychiatric hospital and the protagonist of Darnielle's first book, a loving diary-style exploration of Black Sabbath's Master of Reality, part of Continuum's 33 1/3 series...Inspired by his real-life experiences as a psychiatric nurse (and love of all things metal), Darnielle's literary debut is a fast, addictive read that also tugs on the heartstrings of sensitive Ozzy fans. * Exclaim magazine * The Mountain Goats' John Darnielle Is Good At Writing! People love The Mountain Goats because all their songs contain SAT vocab words and are like little stories. So it's unsurprising that John Darnielle can also work up some music-free compositions, like his contribution to Continuum's 33 1/3 series of books inspired by classic albums, a novel about Black Sabbath's 'Master of Reality.' He also recently wrapped up a stint of guest blogging at Powell's excellent blog, which is worth revisiting if you're curious about his feelings about heavy metal (he likes it! and is very knowledgable about it!). And if you live in New York, you can come to a reading of the Black Sabbath book next Saturday at Housing Works and witness his non-singing talents in person. * MediaBistro's Galleycat * Just like Black Sabbath throws big rocks at subtlety and Roger's manifesto-journal channels anger towards the mental health establishment, Darnielle's book obliterates the sterility of music criticism. I imagine him reading reviews of his work and building up all of this disdain, deciding finally that he's going to do it better. Ultimately, Master of Reality critiques criticism itself, an institution that encourages us to thrash apart the art of others - without offering any blood of our own. * Tiny Mix Tapes * 'Master of Reality' is no straightforward critical assessment of Black Sabbath's album, a sludgy doom-rock classic. It's fiction that peels thrillingly off into music writing. The book is written from the point of view of a teenage boy in a mental hospital who explains why Black Sabbath and its lead singer, Ozzy Osbourne, meant so much to isolated kids like himself. It's about how rock music can express not only liberating joy but, conversely and perhaps more importantly, also speak to bottomless misery and pain. The book is funny, too. Its narrator observes that you never feel that you might hang out with Robert Plant, the Led Zeppelin singer, at a video arcade. But Mr. Osbourne, "he sounds like the guy who changes your quarters". * The New York Times * Darnielle wrote his entry in the 33 1/3 series (slim, hip flask-sized volumes of criticism focused on individual albums) on Black Sabbath's Masters of Reality as a novella, an impassioned riff on identifying with art from the perspective of an institutionalised teenager. -- Caitlin Welsh * Junkee * Darnielle spent his early teens feverishly typing 'awful' short stories and collecting rejection slips from sci-fi magazines before turning to poetry and then songwriting. His interest in prose only revived years later when he began writing music criticism and considered submitting a proposal for Continuum's 33 1/3 series about classic albums. Master of Reality, his 2008 novella named after Black Sabbath's 1971 album, takes the form of diary entries written by an institutionalised teenage heavy metal fan, who finds solace in extolling the virtues of Sabbath ... the novella form allowed Darnielle to play with timeframes and expand on what the songs only implied. -- Dorian Lynskey * The Guardian * There are several 33 1/3 titles that mix fiction and criticism, with varying degrees of success. Of them, John Darnielle's novella about Master of Reality may be the best. Drawing on his experience as a psychiatric nurse before he found a steady day job with the Mountain Goats, Darnielle approaches the album through a fictional character-a patient who is keeping a journal of his therapy sessions. What could have been a gimmick instead proves both critically engaging and emotionally harrowing, as the lively, angry, intelligent narrator voices his rage and confusion through his love for Ozzy. -- Stephen M. Deusner * Pitchfork *