And the Award For Best Black Sabbath Cover Goes to ...T-Pain?!

Black Sabbath’s ‘War Pigs’ is undoubtedly one of the greatest metal songs of all time. Hell, I’d go even further, and remove that genre qualifier, to say that it counts as one of the best songs of all time, period. The opening track on 1970’s ‘Paranoid’ album—a record that itself is a very strong contender for the greatest heavy album ever made, and one about which I could probably spend the rest of the day writing—the 8-minute-long ‘War Pigs’ stands out even in Sabbath’s catalogue of genre-defining, untouchable brilliance. The band never shied away from dealing with challenging subject matter, and ‘War Pigs’ was bassist and lyricist Geezer Butler’s reckoning with the evils of war, excoriating its senseless brutality and classist ramifications. Butler’s lyrics are matched by some of Tony Iommi’s finest riff work, Ozzy’s impassioned vocals, and Bill Ward’s incredible, funk-adjacent work on the drums—Sabbath groove so damn hard on ‘War Pigs’, it’s one of the things that makes metal from that era special, as the boys from ‘Lost in Vegas’ dive into so well here:

That wonderful cross-genre pollination of the early Seventies is what I was reminded of when Claude alerted me to the existence of one of the most impressive and joyful covers I’ve heard in some time. Taken from his recent record, ‘On Top of the Covers’, devoted—as the name implies—entirely to cover versions, this is T-Pain absolutely nailing the spirit of ‘War Pigs’ while infusing it with so much other inspiration that the lads from Sabbath would surely applaud: