Ozzy Osbourne has passed away at age 76, and given his history of consuming suicidal amounts of drugs over the decades, I'm surprised he lived as long as he did. He did, no argument, change the course of rock and roll , he created , with Black Sabbath, a sound and a lifestyle without intending to, he enjoyed what he did for a living, and he was not an intellectual, not a poseur. It was an , but what an act. Ozzy Osbourne wasn’t a force of nature—he was exactly who he was within a system that demanded and rewarded conformity, even among its artists and avant-gardists. His instinct to perform, drink, and embody the worst fears of what the world was becoming wasn’t rebellion—it was just a kid in a rock and roll band who couldn’t bring himself to mouth the party line of what the counterculture was (literally) selling. He felt more at ease singing Geezer Butler’s lyrics—fatalistic, doomsday-cadenced, dark, even malevolent. Ozzy was at home reflecting an attitude shaped by the hard-nosed grit of Birmingham, England. Born John Michael Osbourne in 1948, he grew up in Aston, a working-class district of Birmingham, in a cramped two-bedroom home with five siblings. His early life was marked by poverty, dyslexia, and brushes with the law, including a stint in prison at age 17 for burglary. Industrial towns like Birmingham do that to you—just as Detroit did to the MC5 and the Stooges. His music was a horror show based on already real horrors, even if it was the terror of waking up in a crappy city to get ready to go to a brain dead school program, a job that felt like a long jail sentence, and anticipating the punks on your way to the bus stop who could either slap you on the back or kick you the groin. No wonder the guitars were so loud, all that volume to drown out the screaming. RIP.
