a minor sabbath

to accompany episode 38 of Mix Feelings, part of Firefly Frequencies. For Ozzy.

Has he lost his mind? Can he see, or is he blind?


That’s how it begins. A stutter, a stumble, a cracked open mouth from which language falls, no longer words but war cries, half-formed prophecies, fragments of distortion. What happens when the major language gets warped by the noise of the oppressed, the damned, the refuse? What happens when a solo tears through grammar like a chainsaw through doctrine? This is a minor sabbath where in the thick haze of minor literature, a minor mix, is detuned and fed through a blown amp.

The minor is not a genre. It is not a theme. It is an operation. Robot minds of robot slaves / Lead them to atomic rage. It is the scream of the subjugated ripping through the correct usage of the master’s tongue. The minor begins when a minority hacks the major language – not to mimic it, but to melt it down, like iron into a new riff. In Sabbath’s lyrical apocalypse, English is not England’s. It is scorched earth. Generals gathered in their masses / Just like witches at black masses – the language folds in on itself, haunted by its own militarized history, its own imperial rituals. Here, deterritorialization means that language slips its leash. The tongue no longer serves as a conveyor of sense but becomes a site of rupture, of intensity. Think of Iommi’s fingers – literally mutilated, deterritorialized – developing a new guitar technique out of injury. This is the mouth, the tongue, the teeth, breaking away from their primitive territoriality in food, and howling instead in distorted chords. This is language gone minor.

Death and hatred to mankind / Poisoning their brainwashed minds – there is no private lament in minor literature. Every scream is collective. Every whimper is political. Just as Sabbath sang of war machines and radiation nightmares, the minor channels the urgency of the collective condition.  The language bears the heat of the street, the sweat of the field, the static of the riot.

Language in the minor mode is a collective assemblage of enunciation. It doesn’t speak for the people – it speaks as the people. It doesn’t just describe frustration – it is frustration. All day long I think of things / But nothing seems to satisfy. Here, the voice breaks not into clarity, but into feedback. The individual becomes a node in a wider current, channelling the systemic howl. In America, black vernacular English offers the most resonant example. Everything in it is political. Its syntax is sabotage. Its poetry is pressure. It bends the rules until the rules crack. It transforms a colonizer’s code into a site of insurgent expression. This is the blues becoming metal, the field chant becoming battle cry. How far is the black sabbath from the black Atlantic? Closer than you might think.

The minor artist doesn’t just use language. They abuse it – lovingly. They crank it through a fuzz pedal. They slow it down until it groans. They make it tremble, squeal, loop back on itself. This is not bad writing. This is affect as structure. Sabbath’s lyrics don’t always parse in representational sense. They pulse. They disorient. They conjure affective landscapes – sunshine is far away, clouds linger on – not meanings but temperatures. The minor mode is not informational but intensive. It’s not about what a word says but about how hard it hits. Like a Sabbath riff, it’s the force of the utterance that matters, not its referent. You’ve seen right through distorted eyes, you know you had to learn. Not learn what, but how: how to see, how to speak, how to rage in minor.

And the minor does not aim to become major. It resists that reterritorialization. It keeps moving underground, in basements, in zines, in demos, in dialects. Even when it surfaces – say, in platinum albums or academic journals – it leaves feedback trails, escape lines, scars. There is nothing revolutionary in the major. The major reproduces. The minor mutates.

Never talking / Just keeps walking / Causing his magic. The minor writer is a figure like the Iron Man – not a superhero, but a damaged prophet, limping through scorched linguistic landscapes, broadcasting broken messages. Is it the end, my friend? Satan’s coming ‘round the bend. What we find here is not nihilism, but the scorched birth of another tongue, another world. The minor doesn’t wait for permission to speak. It speaks from the wound, from the void, from the distortion pedal.

The minor artist hears voices – not in madness, but in multiplicity. Not one language, but many. Not fluency, but interference. This is the polylingualism of the self, of the street, of the global south entangled in the imperial tongue. To make use of the polylingualism of one’s own language… to find points of nonculture or underdevelopment, linguistic Third World zones by which a language can escape – yes, that’s the practice. Sabbath didn’t have to represent Birmingham’s industrial decay; their sound was the factory imploding. That’s how language becomes music, and music becomes theory.

My name it means nothing, my fortune is less / My future is shrouded in dark wilderness. That is not defeat. That is the clearing before becoming. In the minor mode, names melt, identity crumbles, but something else takes shape – an assemblage. A mouthful of metal. A syntax made of smoke and distortion. A politics that howls and riffs.

In the end, this is not about who wrote what or who played what. It’s about what a sentence, a scream, a riff can do. It’s about going through changes. It’s about refusing to clean up your tongue so it can be understood by the master. It’s about letting the amp hiss and the grammar bleed. Because to make a minor literature is to set fire to the language of the state. To plug the tongue into feedback. To let the solo escape, to ride the doom, to speak in crackle and groove.

And so, as the burning globe of obscene fire turns,
The minor mouth opens – and speaks in Sabbath.