Ozzy Osbourne – Cultural Icon?

The death last week of heavy metal rock pioneer Ozzy Osbourne at age 76 was given front-page, top-story coverage by most media outlets. As happened with John Lennon’s death back in 1980, the drug-fueled excesses that produced sometimes over-the-top behavior were mostly air-brushed out of the stories, or given the light touch of “boys will be boys” treatment. Yet the testimonials were not just about his music, but included his foray into reality TV with his wife Sharon and their children. So, it could be said that Ozzy paved the way for the mainstream acceptance of both heavy metal music and reality TV. Are we better off as a culture for this?

As with most people who have lived on this Earth, there were at least two sides to Ozzy – the tender side who loved his family despite driving them all half-crazy; the friendly neighbor as described by Pat Boone; and at the same time, the guy who sang about doom, gloom and despair and bit the head off a live bat (he claimed he thought it was a rubber imitation).

For many years now, the foibles of rock stars have been either minimized as a feature, not a bug in their lifestyles, or simply dismissed. But in at least a nod to their increased risk of untimely mortality, a running joke about Rolling Stones’ lead guitarist Keith Richards is that he’s survived so much abuse to his body that he, along with cockroaches, will be the only survivors of a nuclear war. If Richards is a poster boy for rock stars who went hard at both booze and drugs for most of their lives, then Ozzy Osbourne was right there with him until he finally got sober, when most of his career as a rock star was behind him. In a way, it’s almost more miraculous that Ozzy lived as long as he did (especially when he had Parkinson’s disease on top of his other problems) than that Keith Richards is still with us.

All right, I’ll admit that I’m totally turned off by heavy metal music, so Ozzy and his Black Sabbath band were never my cup of tea. My dislike stemmed not just from the unpleasant racket, although that was annoying enough, but also from the spiritually dark place most of their tunes and lyrics were coming from. It was one thing to hear Alice Cooper (who has since become a Christian) rant about being a “killer,” “dead babies,” and having his ex-girlfriend “under my wheels,” but that was positively light and tongue-in-cheek, compared to a typical Black Sabbath lyric. For instance, here is a verse from their hit song “Iron Man:”

Now the time is here
For Iron Man to spread fear,
Vengeance from the grave
Kills the people he once saved.

Not a lot of hope or optimism in that, is there? And, since this song came out in 1970, it’s really rather tame in comparison to where many heavy metal bands have gone in the years since, including of course the obligatory profanity. That is, Black Sabbath served as the template for other metal bands to follow and add their own “embellishments.” Ozzy insisted that those who criticized his music simply didn’t understand the message he was trying to convey. For instance, his song “Suicide Solution” was blamed and he was sued for the suicide of a teenage fan many years ago. The court upheld Ozzy’s claim that the song was more of a warning to avoid bad behaviors than an advisory to take one’s own life out of despair.

For those who love the genre, though, they would scoff at anyone who takes the dark lyrics as seriously as I do. One of my former bosses, a real white-shirt-and-tie type of guy at work, was a “metalhead” and made no apologies for it. Once, while traveling by air, he took off his headphones to use the restroom and apparently shocked those seated nearby as the metal music blasted through the speakers. What was hilarious was that these passengers apparently came to the same conclusion I did. How did this seemingly strait-laced businessman have an affinity for that “crazy” music? It just didn’t seem to fit, but for him it did.

There’s little wonder to me that so many rock bands are turned on to drugs as an escape from their reality. It’s not just the pressure of stardom and the accompanying busy schedules and travel. It’s also the spiritual emptiness that gnaws at their souls. But because we live in a celebrity-saturated culture and put them on pedestals that they don’t deserve to occupy, we too readily overlook the seedy side of their glamour. I have nothing against Ozzy Osbourne the person, but any glorification of Ozzy the rock star is to me a symptom of a larger cultural problem.