Hands of Doom: The Apocalyptic Imagination of Black Sabbath, by Jack Holloway
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Jack Holloway's Hands of Doom: The Apocalyptic Imagination of Black Sabbath (HoD) argues that a host of theological themes and issues marshal the musical output of the influential American rock group Black Sabbath (BS).Holloway, more specifically, interpretates their lyrics via a fundamentally prophetic hermeneutic: their music is a call for justice and social transformation.A central thesis of HoD is that BS's music gestures towards what Holloway calls a "negative hope" (8).Here, BS is understood as advancing a "critical idealism, which points to the brokenness of the status quo, and beyond to the heights of justice and love" (8).To that end, Holloway's text aims at unpacking both the theological suppositions of BS's work, as well as the "social, political, and philosophical issues that" heavy metal culture in general raises.In short, HoD is a retrospective analysis that looks back at BS and the themes and issues that motivated their music, in order to gain a better understanding of how to move forward theologically, socially, and ethically.Seeing his analysis as largely exploratory in focus, Holloway's principal objective, then, is to "mine Sabbath's music, lyrics, and context and present it as a theological vision in its own right" (10).HoD is divided into eight short chapters.In the first chapter, Holloway explores the political and social context that helped give shape to BS's rise.Seeing their music as standing against the pollyannish "flower power" songs of the 1960s, BS forged its own sound in the hope of making obvious the horrors of the real world.Sabbath's music then, Holloway notes, "does not provide escape from a woeful world, but rather takes us deeper into the reality of
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.016 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".