Ozzy Osbourne Was Master of His Own Reality

Ozzy Osbourne was always a character, but he was never pretending.

With his band, Black Sabbath, and as a solo artist, Osbourne is considered foundational to heavy metal music—a genre that is so often about mystery. The dark iconography, a penchant for costumes and face paint, and the thick layers of distorted guitars have a way of cloaking the musicians in service of creating a mythology. And while Osbourne leaned into occult imagery, wore eye makeup, and was backed by plenty of distortion, his theatricality felt strangely fun.

It was a mischievous, rebellious, chaotic fun, but it always carried this sense that the man shrieking about going off the rails on a crazy train actually felt incredibly lucky to be on board in the first place. Perhaps this is because he grew up in the rough, industrial city of Birmingham, England, where future prospects usually involved finding your place in a warehouse assembly line. When he first teamed up with the band that would become Black Sabbath, Osbourne assumed it’d be a few years of free beers and rocking out. That the party would last until he recently passed away at age 76 is something he never took for granted.

Watch a fan-shot video of the reunited Black Sabbath play "Paranoid," which would end up being Osbourne's final performance before his passing on July 22:

We wouldn’t be talking about him 55 years after his debut album if it was just about the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle. When he was famously ejected from Black Sabbath due to his excessive partying, rather than become a footnote in the annals of rock hedonism, he surrounded himself with generations of top-tier musicians and released some of his best work, including “Crazy Train,” “Shot in the Dark,” and “No More Tears.” Jeff Dorenfeld, professor emeritus, toured with Osbourne in the ’80s and recently told ABC News that while the party animal we heard about was real, “He was serious [about his music] and he had the knowledge to pick a great band.”

As Dave Marvuglio, instructor in the Bass Department, told CBS News, those “musicians he had cycling through his own band went on to be influential in their own careers.” As metal evolved into countless styles and subgenres over the decades, Osbourne remained active musically while also becoming a mentor of sorts. Along with his wife Sharon, Osbourne launched the metal festival Ozzfest, which ran for over 15 years, and was both a gathering place and launching platform for dozens of bands. “There’s so much history,” Marvuglio said. “He’s the big root of this tree.”

As he entered his elder statesman era around the turn of the century, Osbourne and his family starred in MTV’s The Osbournes, a reality series that reframed the metal icon in an often hilarious and endearing domestic light. The man known as the Prince of Darkness who famously bit the head off of a live bat was now a dad in track pants grumbling about the mess his house pets were making. The show, as Associate Professor Katherine Dacey described to KNX-AM/FM (Los Angeles), “rehabilitated his image” and “emphasized the human behind the music.”

While it may seem an odd move for a musician to go from making hard-edged albums like 1971's Master of Reality to being an early master of reality television, it was further proof that Osbourne wasn’t here to play by any scenester rulebook. In fact, over the years, Osbourne humbly downplayed his status as metal’s architect, saying that "it was always just rock music." 

Despite his protestations, his role as one of the most singular voices in the rock and metal canon is undeniable. “Even though the sound of metal was changing a lot, I think some of the ideas of metal—the fascination with the occult and the supernatural and taboo subjects—all of that goes back to that first Black Sabbath album,” Dacey said. “That’s part of his legacy . . . he’s inspired several generations of artists.”