The Wages Of Sin…

The Wages Of Sin…

Posted on November 13th, 2008 by Shawn Macomber

…may be death and everlasting torment, but mangling a song by one of Satan’s best known minions at karaoke carries its own price, as two Wiscon-Sin men learned the hard way recently. Two additional, tangentially related thoughts: First, I love that one of these guys was named Cyrus. It reminds me of the lyrics to a classic Mountain Goats song about the eventual triumph of heavy metal-infused darkness (which I also reference in this column on the Middle East metal uprising). Second, it gives me the opportunity to say that, although I own selections from both, I have always found Dio’s Black Sabbath years much more satisfying than his solo work. Hipsters seem to love the latter for the opportunity it gives them to make exaggerated cock-rock faces, thereby scrubbing whatever traces of subtlety have somehow remained embedded in their studiously manufactured air of ironic detachment. The former, meanwhile, is largely and paradoxically overlooked precisely because an album such as Heaven and Hell does not to lend itself to such treatment. At least not entirely.

I realize I’m in the minority on this and many other issues of varying importance. Then again, as Dio himself once noted, “If you listen to fools…The mob rules!”