From the beginning, heavy metal was about avoiding the safe and stupid in favor of the unsafe and exciting, pursuing adventure over security, kind of like the wanderers in Tolkien stories or heroes of classic epics. It proudly continues that tradition today.
The band began as Polka Tulk Blues Band, and was also known as Earth before adopting Black Sabbath after bassist Geezer Butler titled one of his songs that way, inspired by a 1963 movie of the same name. The band progressed from blues rock to heavy metal to progressive as it evolved over the years. They are usually mentioned along with Led Zeppelin as pioneers of the heavy metal genre.
At a time when other bands were heavily into peace, love and flower power, Sabbath set itself apart with music about drugs, the occult, and anger at The Establishment. They were also unique in their incorporation of gothic and folk music elements.
You can see easily how this comes into conflict with what "most people" want from life, which seems to be a comfy couch, a warm pizza, a wide-screen TV and mail-order prostitutes:
Examiner.com: What frustrates you most about modern society?
Ivar Bjornson: The way achievement and hard work is looked down upon, while everybody feels they "deserve" all kinds of things. I'm not rich, but I do not hate the rich for it. I have achieved a lot and deserved, because I have made it myself and worked for it. Religion is just a mystical cartoonish version of this way of thinking: How to get everything while doing nothing?
And then the academics weigh in:
Applying Bakhtin's multifaceted conceptualization of the carnival-grotesque, the author explains how grotesque realism in metal music and performances constitutes a proto-utopian liminal alternative to the impersonal, conformist, superficial, unequal, and numbing realities of commercialism and, more abstractly, a resistance to a society of spectacle and nothingness.
Heavy Metal Carnival and Dis-alienation: The Politics of Grotesque Realism
Whatever the hell that whaargarrbl meant, it's clear that metal is far from talking about the safe topics: how everyone is OK, how we're all the same, how we all want to like each other, how everything will be all right, how death is not real, how God/the government/Capitalism is taking care of us, and so on.
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