Covering Covers # 7

So, there's Ozzy, flashing the peace signs on the cover of an album that is a somewhat conceptual song cycle about love gone wrong, isolation, changes, death, cocaine, religions both pagan and organized, and if that sounds kinda heady, keep in mind that Ozzy's lyrics were never much more complicated than what you might find in a 15 year old's secret notebook, especially when they concerned love gone wrong...

But his words don't matter so much when the riffs are so fucking heavy...

On the other hand, Volume 4 has the echo noodlings of "FX", the gentle faux flamenco and synthetic strings of "Laguna Sunrise", and the stately electric piano of "Changes"...

But to get to my point, Black Sabbath got wrongly tagged as some sort of Satan-Worshipping motherfuckers from the very start, when the message Ozzy was mostly peddling is that the world's a cruel cruel place, women aren't much better, God ain't gonna help you (and neither is Satan, chump!), drugs are fun until they're not, and eventually they aren't, and in the end there's death for you and me and all our friends...

The thing is, if you've watched only one episode of The Osbournes, you know that Ozzy is a genuinely good and smart man who found a woman who can be cruel to everybody in the world except Ozzy, a woman who ran his business and took care of his money and helped him sober up and built a small empire outta her man, and built a brand...OZZFEST! THE PREVIOUSLY MENTIONED TELEVISION SHOW!! And now these...

Sharon Osbourne, in cooperation with Converse Shoes, gave her man and the rest of us these "massive kicks" as the kids and one of the dudes on our Tech Support team likes to say...

When I saw the full-page ad for these shoes in the most recent issue of Alternative Press the wad of cinnamon chiclets fell outta my mouth. After the initial shock wore off, I thought, well, if there's gotta be a Sabbath shoe, I suppose this has gotta be it...

Paranoid might be their most popular album, but it's a picture of a goofy pink swordsman, and only fairies would wear boots like these, as Ozzy all but said himself on "Faries Wear Boots"...

Sabbath Bloody Sabbath wouldn't work because it's too busy, and it's a soul-rape scene...

Sabotage is one of the ugliest album covers in rock history because it features a mirrored-image of one of the ugliest bands in rock history...

No, this image from Volume 4 is the best, and only Sabbath cover that (almost) works on the side of a cheaply made tennis shoe...

The question is - is it a truly iconic image? Ancillary question - An image actually worthy of a shoe?

Not really. Sabbath's most iconic cover is probably that goofy pink swordsman on the cover of Paranoid, but only cuz it's so damn goofy, and it is Black Sabbath's most popular longplayer...

If this Volume 4 image is iconic, it's because of its high-contrast simplicity and nothing more...

I mean, the idea of Ozzy flashing the peace sign on the cover of an album full of woefully bleak shit is an indication that this image is meaningless...Maybe it's got something to do with Vietnam, but in the end, it has as much poignancy as Miley Cyrus and her own peace sign waving...

Finally, if this image is accurate, then they flipped the image backwards on the shoe, and as a fetishist of album covers and whatnot, this is a shame, whether it was intentional or not.

But hey, we're living in a post-album culture, so what does it matter?

Hotcha! Hank