Bat eater, Alamo pisser, drug addict – the singer Ozzy Osbourne, who died on July 22, was many things, but, first and foremost, he was a groundbreaking musician. The pioneer of heavy metal, Osbourne’s songs about doom created a whole new genre of music.
Born to a working-class family in Birmingham, Osbourne struggled in school, facing bullying, before dropping out. He soon became a burglar, spending three months in jail after a heist gone wrong.
Soon after being released from jail, in 1968, Osbourne formed a band with three other Birmingham natives. As the band tried to discover its sound, it was influenced by two ideas. The first was that the music of the time was too bright and happy, unable to seriously reflect the experiences of people like the bandmates in grim, industrial towns, according to the BBC. The second was that people enjoyed going to horror movies, and perhaps that template of paying to be terrified could work for music, too.
With this in mind, Black Sabbath, named after a horror movie, began prolifically creating music. Black Sabbath’s first, eponymous album was released in February 1970, with “Paranoid” arriving months later. Although Black Sabbath’s work was originally lambasted by critics, it resonated with many people, becoming immensely popular and defining the heavy-metal genre.
The song “Black Sabbath,” which opens the first album, begins with the sound of church bells ringing ominously before slow, leaden guitar riffs enter and repeat. When Osbourne comes in, he sings haunting, surreal lyrics before breaking down, desperately shouting “No! No! Please! No!” The unforgiving, eerie riffs continue once he pauses singing before accelerating and changing into a new, almost video-game-like accompaniment as Osbourne resumes.
The style of the song anticipates Black Sabbath’s later work with its heavy repeated guitar riffs and disturbing lyrics, elements that would be repeated in later hits like “Iron Man” and “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath.”
As Osbourne continued singing for the band, he also began taking drugs, which led him to behave erratically. After he slept through his own concert, Black Sabbath fired him in 1979.
Osbourne persevered and, in 1980, began his solo career with the album “Blizzard of Oz.” The album, on which he screamed, sang, and laughed maniacally, saved his career, popularizing him as a singer; he soon followed it up with more work.
As he grew more popular, though, Osbourne’s life grew more chaotic. In one episode, he bit the head of a dead bat off during a concert in Iowa. In another, he peed on a memorial just outside the Alamo. The event with the bat was so memorable that Osbourne joked that his obituary would read, “Ozzy Osbourne, born 1948. Died, whenever. He bit the head off a bat.”
Fellow musicians remembered him for much more. Eulogizing Osbourne, Elton John wrote in an Instagram post that Osbourne “was a dear friend and a huge trailblazer who secured his place in the pantheon of rock gods – a true legend. He was also one of the funniest people I’ve ever met.”
“I will miss him dearly.”