RIP OZZY

Starting in 1970, Black Sabbath released a string of albums so popular that they made Ozzy Osbourne not just a rock star but a cultural antihero. He became known as the Prince of Darkness and, relatedly, the godfather of heavy metal, which spawned sub-subgenres and sub-sub-subgenres through the decades. “As a boy in the 1980s,” Kelefa Sanneh writes, “I remember hearing that Osbourne was some kind of maniac, and that he had bitten the head off of a dove, or maybe it was a bat.” (The answer was both: the dove in a record-company meeting, because he wanted to cause a scene, and the bat during a concert, because he thought it was fake.) He always made it clear that, for him, raising hell was a pastime rather than a theological interest. He liked to say, “The only evil spirits I’m interested in are called whisky, vodka, and gin.”

In time he emerged from the shadows to become a beloved father figure. He was the guiding spirit of Ozzfest, the travelling metal festival launched by his wife and manager, Sharon Osbourne, in 1996. And he was the lovable, bumbling dad on “The Osbournes,” an MTV reality show that had its première in 2002. Unlike most aging rockers, he remained prominent in pop culture; the first intentionally “evil” rock star became a guy that everyone loved. “There is a difference, as Osbourne showed us, between dabbling in ‘evil’ imagery and being an evil person—although, as he also showed us, none of us is purely anything,” Sanneh writes. Read his full remembrance: https://newyorkermag.visitlink.me/XgGMFO

onemorshow said:

The Gods of Rock'n Roll.....