BLACK SABBATH – End of the Beginning (Official Video)

Heavy metal elders return with purpose

“End of the Beginning” opens Black Sabbath’s 2013 album 13 with a statement of intent. It is the sound of the pioneering trio of Ozzy Osbourne, Tony Iommi and Geezer Butler stepping back into the void they helped define, renewing their language of dread and resolve with modern weight. Produced by Rick Rubin, the track revisits the band’s earliest grammar—down-tuned riffs, ominous space, stark dynamics—without feeling like imitation. Its official video, filmed on the set of the season finale of CSI, frames the song’s anxieties about technology and mortality inside the cool glow of forensic neon, a veteran metal band intersecting with mainstream television and finding common ground in unease.

Origins and context

13 marked the first full-length studio album featuring Osbourne, Iommi and Butler together since the late 1970s, a late-career alignment few expected to hear with such cohesion. In the studio, drums were handled by Brad Wilk, whose measured punch complements Butler’s low-end rumble and Iommi’s monolithic guitar. On screen, the reunited core appears with their touring drummer, performing to the studio recording. That dual reality—part archival heft, part present-tense urgency—suits “End of the Beginning,” a song about cycles, repetition and the unnerving sense that the future is already here.

Inside the song

The arrangement unfolds like a short ritual. It begins in a slow, tar-thick crawl, Iommi laying out a minor-key figure that leans on intervallic tension and open-string resonance. Butler shadows every move, widening the bottom end with his distinct, slightly overdriven tone. Osbourne enters with clear phrasing and a near-liturgical cadence, voicing dread and disorientation. The tempo then lifts into a mid-paced chug, all down-picked insistence and locked rhythm, before easing back into the original dirge and concluding with a long, singing guitar solo.

Structurally, the track pays conscious homage to early Sabbath epics. The shifts between funereal and forceful passages echo the band’s founding sense of drama, but each transition is cleanly argued. The chorus’s central question—“Is this the end of the beginning or the beginning of the end?”—becomes a hinge for the entire piece, a refrain that clarifies the band’s perspective instead of merely darkening the mood.

Themes of anxiety and resistance

Lyrically, “End of the Beginning” confronts the alienation of a technologized life. It imagines a body haunted by digital ghosts and outsourced agency, hinting at transhumanist fantasies gone cold. One of the song’s most quoted lines—“You don’t want to be a robot ghost, occupied inside a human host”—is both wry and chilling, a punky rhyme fitted to an ancient riff. Rather than sermonize, the words point to a simple choice: remain human and feel the cost of it, or become a smooth surface for other people’s systems. That tension gives the chorus its charge, casting the album’s return not as nostalgia but as a refusal to flatten experience.

Guitars, bass and drums: classic tools, sharpened edges

Iommi’s guitar tone is granite-thick and airless, the distortion dense but not smeared. He favors concise, singable ideas, and when he expands into lead work, it is melodic first and foremost, carved into the song rather than pasted on top. His bending and vibrato have the same authority they carried five decades ago, and the solo section unfurls with a patient, declarative arc.

Butler, long the band’s secret engine, plays with a conversational feel that digs into the pocket while constantly tugging against it. His lines often climb or fall in contrary motion to the guitar, creating a harmonic push-pull that lends the slow sections a seismic, shifting quality.

Wilk’s approach on the studio track is deliberate and unflashy, marked by heavy ride patterns, solid kick placement and a backbeat that breathes. He avoids crowding the riff, instead accenting key turns and tightening the groove during the accelerated middle section. The result is momentum without haste, heaviness that feels earned rather than inflated.

Production choices and the Rubin brief

Rick Rubin’s production aims to re-center the band around space, riff and human performance. The guitars are largely dry and forward. Drums are roomy enough to bloom, yet remain anchored, and the bass is given frequency room to speak. Osbourne’s vocal is mixed upfront, often subtly doubled to reinforce the lines without blurring them. The overall presentation nods to the austerity of the band’s earliest records while employing contemporary heft. The master is dense by modern standards, but the arrangement’s internal dynamics—slow to fast, hush to surge—still register clearly.

The CSI tie-in: forensic light on a doomy sermon

The official video intercuts performance footage from the CSI set with scenes from the episode. The palette is clinical and blue-tinged: lab benches, glass, shadow, and the bright focus of examination lamps. Against that backdrop, Sabbath’s silhouettes read like a counterargument to sterile certainty. The camera lingers on Iommi’s left hand and Butler’s right, panning to Osbourne as he delivers the refrain, the edits tightening as the song accelerates. It is an archetypal hard-rock video reframed by television procedural aesthetics, a collision that reinforces the song’s preoccupation with systems, bodies and evidence.

Why it works as an opener

As an album introduction, “End of the Beginning” accomplishes three things:

It reasserts the core Black Sabbath grammar—minor-key riffs, cavernous groove, and a chorus that feels like a tolling bell.
It articulates a present-tense anxiety, wiring the band’s apocalyptic streak to questions of digitization and identity.
It establishes a sonic blueprint for the album, setting expectations for weight, pace and clarity of purpose.

Standout moments

The opening riff’s measured descent, a textbook lesson in tension through restraint.
The first tempo lift, where Wilk’s kick locks to Butler’s line and the track finds its forward lean.
Osbourne’s chorus, clear and cutting, phrased with the unerring simplicity that made his early performances indelible.
Iommi’s closing solo, lyrical and unhurried, the guitar storytelling as much as shredding.

Legacy in motion

“End of the Beginning” does not pretend to reinvent Black Sabbath. It does something rarer for a late-period release: it trusts the band’s fundamentals and places them in a present filled with new unease. The CSI collaboration situates that sound inside a broader cultural grid, without softening its edges. As the first thing you hear on 13, it suggests that beginnings and endings in Sabbath’s world are less about time than about weight, atmosphere and the will to face both.