{"id":93767,"date":"2025-07-26T09:45:14","date_gmt":"2025-07-26T09:45:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/93767\/"},"modified":"2025-07-26T09:45:14","modified_gmt":"2025-07-26T09:45:14","slug":"from-rock-to-reality-tv-he-remained-an-icon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/93767\/","title":{"rendered":"From Rock to Reality TV, He Remained an Icon"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tBlack Sabbath<\/a> was scary from the start. The first song on its debut album \u2014 both called \u201cBlack Sabbath\u201d \u2014 opens with the sounds of a rainstorm and church bells, then a wicked guitar riff. Then Ozzy Osbourne<\/a> howls a question: \u201cWhat is this that stands before me?\u201d When the album came out, in early 1970, it was, pardon the pun, a hell of a question. Led Zeppelin<\/a> had released its first album a year before, but Sabbath was darker, sludgier, laden with doom. The band\u2019s psychedelic visions were dark and haunted, as far from the colorful optimism of flower power as its native Birmingham, U.K., was from San Francisco. \u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThe first four Sabbath albums \u2014 the debut, followed by Paranoid, Master of Reality and Vol. 4 \u2014 laid out the blueprint for the entire genre of heavy metal. Osbourne\u2019s success with Sabbath would propel him into a successful solo career as a recording artist and a top touring act. What\u2019s harder to figure out \u2014 the light mystery at the heart of the Prince of Darkness \u2014 is how he became a sitcom dad in The Osbournes, remained popular enough until this summer to headline the \u201cBack to the Beginning\u201d concert in Birmingham on July 5 and loomed large enough as an icon to receive a tequila-poured tribute<\/a> from Drake<\/a> that made it into the paper of record<\/a>. In the end, even the Gray Lady bowed. \u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tHis secret, I suspect, was not taking himself too seriously. \u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThis might sound bonkers considering just how serious Sabbath sounded \u2014 not to mention how genuinely frightening Osbourne seemed in the eighties. As a pre-teen early in that decade, I heard rumors that Osbourne bit the head off a live bat<\/a> (true, but he thought it was fake), did the same to a dove<\/a> (apparently true) and sacrificed live chickens onstage during his show (I can find no evidence of this, although he apparently once put a chicken full of antifreeze<\/a> on a fence to scare away coyotes). This sounded dangerous \u2014 but, since parents hated it, possibly also fun. \u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tTwo decades later, he was a befuddled sitcom dad, struggling to figure out how to work the remote control on The Osbournes. He didn\u2019t seem frightening at all \u2014 just slightly confused, dedicated to his family, knowing about his flaws, and much more plainly decent than anyone would have suspected. This figure who once menaced parents was a parent himself \u2014 one who just happened to have a job as a rock star. \u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThe reason this worked was that Osbourne was in on the joke. It didn\u2019t always seem that way \u2014 mostly because he mumbled. But he knew that the idea that the Prince of Darkness couldn\u2019t housetrain his dogs was comedy gold. And, like few other rock stars, he wasn\u2019t afraid to laugh at himself. \u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThis might seem like slight praise, but how many aging pop stars, especially in rock, realize that, on some level, they are professional entertainers doing a young person\u2019s job? (They can also be serious artists! This isn\u2019t mutually exclusive.) This also changed with the times. In the \u201970s and \u201980s, a little mystique went a long way \u2014 Led Zeppelin hardly ever appeared on television, and it probably helped. By the end of the nineties, maintaining an image seemed tired \u2014 the radical move was to embrace exposure, deflate the myth, offer a view backstage, or at least a limited view of it. \u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tOsbourne became bigger than ever. The Osbournes boosted Osbourne\u2019s albums and Ozzfest, and he was on the cover of Rolling Stone in May 2002 and then again in July. In 2004, MTV created \u201cBattle for Ozzfest,\u201d a contest to win a spot on the tour \u2014 booking as a revenue stream. His wife, Sharon Osbourne, became a celebrity in her own right, the wickedly funny host of a UK talk show, judge on the UK X-Factor and co-host of The Talk. Sometimes, she was the truly scary one, extreme and even vindictive in the defense of her client and husband. Every artist should be so lucky. \u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tOsbourne slowed down after his 2018 \u201cNo More Tours II\u201d concerts \u2014 they took place a full quarter decade after his \u201cNo More Tours\u201d shows \u2014 and his music, at least before his death, didn\u2019t stream in a way that reflected his fame and his appeal as a touring act. He took quite a final bow, however, at \u201cBack to the Beginning,\u201d an all-star metal show that raised \u00a3140 million ($188.4 million) for Acorns Children\u2019s Hospice, Birmingham Children\u2019s Hospital and Cure Parkinson\u2019s. It seems like quite a charitable move for a guy who started his career singing about Satan. But the truth is that Osbourne was both more complicated than he appeared \u2014 and at the same time not so complicated at all. \u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Black Sabbath was scary from the start. The first song on its debut album \u2014 both called \u201cBlack…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":93768,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[529,171,61979,7775,975,6337,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-93767","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-analysis","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-follow-the-money","11":"tag-genre-rock","12":"tag-music","13":"tag-reality-tv","14":"tag-united-states","15":"tag-unitedstates","16":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114918898235821624","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93767","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=93767"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93767\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/93768"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=93767"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=93767"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=93767"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}