A long time ago, almost all the music I listened to was hard rock or heavy metal. That probably shifted around the time I took up the bass guitar. Learning to be a musician meant widening my musical horizons. In turn, that meant developing a palette across a much wider range of genres. I do like to listen back from time to time though and, every now and then, you discover a little more than you expected.

Yesterday, I stumbled across a video featuring the song War Pigs by Black Sabbath, widely regarded as pioneers of classic heavy metal. The particular attraction to this video was that each line of the lyrics was accompanied by an AI (or, at least, machine learning) generated illustration. So called AI projects in the creative sphere often rely a lot on the curation of people (good, old fashioned ‘wetware’) but even if the final selection is down to a human compositor, the images are vivid and powerful:

Aside from the pictures, I was also struck by the lyrics and music. The lyrics are dark but a mixture of the apocalyptic and political: “Politicians hide themselves away / They only started the war / Why should they go out to fight? / They leave that role to the poor…”. Occult and satanic things get various mentions but, despite the image of the band, the lyrics despise rather than glorify them: “Generals gathered in their masses / Just like witches at black masses / Evil minds that plot destruction / Sorcerer of death’s construction”. Rhyming “masses” with, er, “masses” is either a bold move or a bit of a weakness but the song creates a powerful and sadly contemporary picture despite being over 50 years old.

Along with music that owes as much to jazz fusion or at least prog rock as to the stereotype of heavy metal, I’m glad I went back to give that one a listen.