Even casual Dio fans should be able to complete these lines from Holy Diver: “Between the velvet lies there’s a truth as hard as steel. This is not the only example of Dio’s acknowledgment of his purposeful use of metaphor to communicate very real things. “If there isn’t light where no one sees, then how can I know what you might believe? A story told that can’t be real somehow must reflect the truth we feel.” In that light, consider Dio’s lyrics in the introduction to the Black Sabbath song, The Sign of the Southern Cross they are almost a rewording of Campbell’s statement.
It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth - penultimate because the ultimate truth cannot be put into words. Joseph Campbell, the great professor of comparative religions said, “Mythology is not a lie, mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical. It was his lexicon and his means of communication in song. Over the long course of the human trajectory we have turned these little exaggerations into elaborate stories stories that are meant to communicate our experience to others. You’ll end up saying something like, “I felt like I was in an elevator that suddenly dropped at high speed from the 100th floor.” This is metaphor and myth in its simplest form. You can try to explain to someone how you felt when a loved one died, or when you fell in love, or when you were more scared than any other time in your life, but you will probably come up short. Myths and epics from our past are not just stories for the sake of entertainment, they are attempts to express something about the human experience that it is otherwise impossible to convey.
#ROAD TO NOWHERE OZZY SONG MEANING FULL#
His dragons had teeth and his wizards were full of magic. And more often than not, he was actually talking about something meaningful. He mixed his metaphors and he pulled from multiple mythologies, sometimes even in the same verse of a single song. With Dio, the devil was always in the details. They’ll get the general idea whenever they look at the pictures, but they’re skipping all the details. It’s equivalent to your friends saving images of Hawaii from Google Earth to commemorate a trip they took to the islands. But ending the description of him there is also dismissive. The tagline isn’t meant to be a put down because Dio certainly did sing about dragons and wizards. He was, after all, “the guy who sang about dragons and wizards.” That’s how many people, including his fans, often describe him. It’s not hard to imagine that Dio is still on that mythical bridge, gazing at the galactic horizon. Now, nearly 10 years later I’m still upset that it didn’t happen that way that we didn’t all suddenly find ourselves on the rainbow bridge, standing behind Ronnie as he pointed to some indistinguishable spot in the cosmic distance. Increasingly it became clear he wouldn’t be around much longer.ĭio died on May 16, 2010.
There were occasional, mostly negative reports on Dio's health leading up to the day as well. I remember hearing that Heaven and Hell, the reformed and renamed Dio-fronted version of Black Sabbath, cancelled all their upcoming tour dates a few weeks earlier. I posted that statement on my Facebook page a few days before Ronnie James Dio passed away. " If there isn’t light when no one sees, how can I know what you might believe? A story told that can’t be real somehow must reflect the truth we feel.” – Sign of the Southern Cross, from the 1981 Black Sabbath album, Mob Rules.
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