Nothing surrounding the creation of Black Sabbath’s ‘Dehumanizer’ album looked like it was going well. However, the song that opens that album, ‘Computer God’, remains 34 years after its recording one of the most dystopian and terrifying lyrics about how technology replaces the human. A topic that resonates especially disturbingly in these times.
A tortuous process. The first sessions of ‘Dehumanizer’ were done in Birmingham with Cozy Powell on drums, but an accident forced him to be replaced by Vinny Appice, who had not played with the legendary band since 1981. In the process, it was even considered to replace Dio himself, who had been occupying the place of Ozzy Osbourne as a vocalist since 1979. Finally, ‘Dehumanizer’ was produced by Reinhold Mack, famous for his work with Queen.
A twist in Dio’s work. Until the arrival of this album, all of Ronnie James Dio’s lyrics in his other band Rainbow, in the first albums with Sabbath or in those he signed as Dio deal with warriors, wizards and Tolkienian references, which made him one of the classic emblems of the most epic and hairy heavy metal. However, with ‘Computer God’ he took a turn to talk about topics more linked to reality.
This is how he describes it Dio himself: “Technology has eliminated the humanity of the human being. And when the day comes when we are completely exhausted as a race, God will be a computer. Great writers like Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke inspired this song.” It was the first time that Dio cited two fathers of the hardest and most classic science fiction as a direct source of inspiration for his lyrics.
What ‘Computer God’ is talking about. The opening verse of the song sends us to a present of dark future: “Waiting for the revolution / New clear vision, genocide”, “new clear” being a phonetic play on “nuclear”). And he continues: “Computerize God, it’s the new religion / Program the brain, not the heartbeat”, talking about how the logic of computers occupies a space that other things previously occupied.
The verse that Dio identified as the most important on the album is “Man’s a mistake, so we’ll fix it.” Dio spoke of this verse stating that “the computer thinks humanity is a mistake, so it corrects it. Let’s hope we’re not there when they want to correct us.” A process that had already received its name in 1992 (transhumanism) and that some critics confirm as the central theme of the album.
The most disturbing thing. The lyrics are not at all obvious, because they do not describe catastrophes in the style of a classic science fiction film, but instead describe erosion. When he says “Digital dreams and you’re the next correction,” he’s not talking about robots replacing humans, but about something more gradual: systems that treat people as variables that need optimization. In 1992 that was an abstraction, but it is becoming less and less so.
1992, what a year. The album did not do well commercially, because the world was looking in another direction: ‘Nevermind’ by Nirvana and ‘Ten’ by Pearl Jam had come out in September 1991, and had transformed rock into introspective and somewhat abstract music. However, over time, this song from a group that was already considered an old glory at the time has a more consistent basis in reality than many of the things with which Seattle revolutionized alternative music that year. On July 18, 1992, the first image would be uploaded to the World Wide Web. And from there, every man for himself.
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