Creativity Quote by Greg Ginn

Greg Ginn is poking a hole in metal’s self-mythology: the idea that heaviness arrived fully formed, detached from anything as “rootsy” as the blues. By calling Black Sabbath’s debut a “bludgeoning of blues,” he frames metal not as a genre break, but as a genre act of violence - a deliberate roughing-up of familiar DNA until it becomes something new. “Bludgeoning” does double duty: it flatters the band’s brute force while reminding you that the underlying movement still swings, still bends notes, still lives in the body. That’s a musician’s tell, not a historian’s.

The intent is corrective and a little contrarian. Ginn, coming out of punk and hardcore where purity tests can be a sport, is arguing for lineage over cosplay. If the best metal has a blues feel, then what makes it “best” isn’t maximal distortion or speed; it’s phrasing, groove, and tension-release - the stuff that predates the pedalboard.

The Deep Purple aside matters because it collapses the fake border between “serious” metal and the allegedly softer past. Early Purple and Sabbath didn’t invent heaviness out of nowhere; they amplified and darkened what blues already offered: power in repetition, dread in the riff, pleasure in the bend. Subtext: stop pretending metal is an orphan genre. It has parents, and one of them is the blues - not as trivia, but as the engine.