War Pigs
by Black Sabbath
- 91
- BPM
- E minor
- Key
- 9A
- Camelot
- 34
- Danceability
- 23
- Acousticness
In 1969 Black Sabbath played several sets a night at the Beat-Club in the Hirschen hotel in Zurich, Switzerland, with little material to fill them. They stretched out in long jam sessions, and Tony Iommi has said "War Pigs" began in one of those. Drummer Bill Ward remembers it as the first time he played the song.
Bassist Geezer Butler wrote the lyrics, and the original title was "Walpurgis", after the Witches' Sabbath. "War was the big Satan," he said, and the generals gathered in masses like witches at black masses. The record company thought "Walpurgis" sounded too Satanic, so it became "War Pigs". The finished lyrics stayed. National service had ended in Britain in 1963, but with Vietnam still going, Butler dreaded being called up. Ozzy Osbourne said the band knew nothing about Vietnam and called it simply an anti-war song.
Before its release the band often changed the lyrics live, and an early version they recorded for BBC Radio 1 on April 26, 1970 appears on The Ozzman Cometh. On Paranoid, the 1970 album it opens, producer Rodger Bain and engineer Tom Allom added the air-raid siren and sped up the ending, without any input from the band, who were pleased with it.
War Pigs runs at 91 BPM, the tempo of hip-hop, R&B and reggaeton. In classical terms it sits in andante territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 2.64 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 659 ms. It is in E minor, Camelot 9A, which shares its notes with G major and mixes cleanly with A minor and B minor.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.