I fail to see why my thread attempting to discuss the musical and artistic merits of Black Sabbath was locked after only receiving one reply. My criticisms were genuine but I feel the mods think that there can be no genuine criticisms of the "forefathers of metal" as it would be blasphemous and that I was making an attempt to "troll".

I didn't lock the thread, but it was really inflammatory for the sake of destroying an idol and didn't have a lot of place to discuss the matter.

"Black Sabbath had no artistic ambitions" come on, dude, that's literally historical revisionism and totally false.

It has nothing to do with who you are discussing. You describe them as confusingly influential, yet mention one of the reasons they are influential, then list broad, unexplained, unspecific thoughts about the band having few technical gifts, imagination, or artistic ambition. If you'd like to discuss something, you need to explain your thoughts rather than listing off opinions.

2 Years before Black Sabbath decided to play the music of Cream with down-tuned guitars Heavy Psych bands like Blue Cheer were playing music far more varied and interesting that nearly puts them at the beginning of the shift from Hard Rock to proto-metal. I'm not trying to be a historical revisionist, I'm trying to destroy a myth. Black Sabbath by no means invented a sound. They merely turned it into a genre.

Technical skill and artistic merit are not subjective principles. Though your enjoyment of the group may be.

As an opening of a thread, your reeks of trolling, to be honest. You make huge, sweeping, and extremeley subjective generalizations on a very important artist, without virtually any backing for your opinions that, essentially, do amount to revisionism.

I've seen enough of that in the reviews queue to know what you're talking about, and I've also seen enough of it on the board to know where the thread would have ended up. I didn't lock it, but I would have, had I noticed it. Too little reasoning and content for such a huge claim.

Step 1: Make obviously inflammatory troll thread under the guise of "genuine criticism".
Step 2: Get thread locked.
Step 3: Make other thread about locked thread.
Step 4: ???
Step 5: Profit! Get other thread locked too.