Ozzy Osbourne: An Appreciation

When Ozzy Osbourne passed away in 2025, he was one of the most loved musicians on the planet. It’s funny because growing up in his classic years, he was the epitome of heavy metal and shock rock. His music was the stuff of cult legend and Hard Rock radio. Things change over time, of course. At its release “Crazy Train” would fall short as a Top 100 single. No surprise there, of course, but over time it would become a guitar rock classic and that momentum would continue, until at some point, it became a song that everyone knows. 

Early 80s Ozzie was the PMRC nightmare. Prior to Metallica, Slayer, thrash metal and death metal, it’s hard to think of anything that evoked the shock of Metal in those days. When the mention of Ozzy didn’t evoke blasphemous cover art, songs with titles like “Suicide Solution” or that famous bat incident, it was the out of control rocker that appears in Penelope Spheeris’s glam metal documentary The Decline of Western Civilization Part 2 in a mix of mental fog and physically shaking unable to pour a glass of orange juice, instead spilling it all over the counter Another defining moment was a 1982 Des Moines concert in which Ozzy bit the head off of a bat. While Ozzy clearly expected it to be a rubber bat, it only turned the story in one of the all time great rock legends. In each decade, there have been trends in rock that defined the genre- classic rock then glam rock then grunge and alt rock then nu metal and emo; and no matter your tastes, if is hard to avoid what’s popular when you are in those defining ages. 

 For me, I loved punk and new wave, but glam metal ruled my school in those years. For me, it was no surprise that the best at it in the 90s were the guys who innovated the genre at its beginning- Alice Cooper and Ozzy. Osbourne’s 1991 album No More Tears was a commercial success. I spent plenty of time with it and although it’s an outlier to my usual listening, it’s quite an enjoyable record, but more about that later. While most of Ozzy’s best loved songs had been recorded by 1986, he had his biggest hit with Lita Ford in 1988. In a genre known for its power ballads, the pairing was perfect to push the song all the way to # 8 on the pop charts. In 1991, he made a cameo for Cooper with the anti-drug song “Hey Stoopid”, another rock radio hit. This set up the stage for his bid for mainstream success - 1991s “ No More Tears”. Mama I’m Coming Home” was the kind of on-the-nose ballad that would earn him a larger audience. Ozzy would find himself on the Top 30 again. 

I thought the title track was a killer mix of metal and goth, miles better than a lot of 90s records. I wasn’t apt to stick around but the next album gave us the “Perry Mason” single- a song much better than its name. As Ozzy became a rock elder, he switched to the mode of a Johnny Cash or Willie Nelson, his collaborations were a who’s who of the “hit band” of the day. Take a look at his singles on Wikipedia and you will see him paired with as varied artists as Type O Negative, Fear Factory, Elton John, Eric Clapton, and Lemmy. He’d have a late era run at the chart again in 2020 with a collaboration with Post Malone which brought two generations together- “Take What You Want” would go to # 8 and seemed to go viral on social media. 

 But the biggest change may have came in 2002. The preceding years gave us Ozzfest which was for metal what Lollapalooza, Lilith Fair, and the Warped Tour had been for their genres- a generation defining event. You can’t deny Ozzfest but it was also Autumn 2002 that gave us the MTV television show “The Osbournes”. I don’t know if it was the first reality show or not, but in retrospect, it is the first one that comes immediately to mind. We sit 20+ years later with shows like Vanderpump Rules, Real Housewives and Project Runway and dozens that you probably are thinking of, have come and gone to this day, and are still a big bulk of tv programming. I think The Osbournes tv show is a large part of how Ozzy became a household name. We all knew each member of the Osbourne family and we sympathized with the dad trying hard in Ozzy. No longer the scary prince of darkness, but someone your mom had heard of. Such is life. 

As Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson aged from rebels to crowd favorites, so did Ozzy and Snoop Dog. Rock (the genre) became more extreme but some of the color went out of it. It’s that atmosphere where songs like “Crazy Train” and “Bark at the Moon” became part of the Great American Songbook. Ozzy even went to the charts with his daughter Kelly for a cover of the classic Sabs ballad “Changes” in 2003 amidst a run at the charts by her. A year later in 2004, Trick Daddy sampled “Crazy Train” for his song “Let’s Go”. Genres blurred. Rap rock was mainstream and Ozzy was cool regardless of where you came from. The song went all the way to # 7 on the charts. Lastly, I want to mention Black Sabbath. They are one of the coolest bands of the day now, but that is a recent event. It doesn’t help, that the Sabbath of my youth didn’t have Ozzy, and it didn’t have Dio either. Instead, Tony Martin lead them to diminishing sales. 

It wasn’t his fault. But a band born in the 1970s with its sound and look stuck there, especially when compared to bands like Metallica and Skid Row, not to mention bands that were popping up like Nine Inch Nails, White Zombie and Godflesh Yes, while Martin’s Sabs found some cult success in 1989s Headless Cross, the roots of a Sabbath revival were growing in an unexpected place, but we will get there later. In the early 90s, despite my contrary experience in high school, alt rock was well loved by the critics but metal was considered “not serious”. 

It’s unlikely I would have become a Sabbath fan if a friend of mine wasn’t a huge fan. It was enough to convince me to buy the “We Sold Our Soul for Rock N Roll”, the 1976 compilation that picks the best of the Sabbath albums to that point, drawing largely from the first four records. It’s an ‘All Killer, No Filler’ collection that became a mainstay for my CD player that summer. But it wasn’t going to just be me that was converting, but everyone started to love the Sabs in the US. To bands like Nirvana and Soundgarden, Sabbath was a defining part of their sound. P

laces like Spin magazine were calling Grunge music- the trending music of the day as “Black Flag meets Black Sabbath”. Punk was important to the sound but so was classic 70s metal. In 1994, many of the bands defining the new sound of hard rock came together for NIB- a tribute album. Megadeth, Sepultura, Faith No More, Biohazard and others made Sabbath cool again. The tributes to Ozzy transcend generations and genres. Even when I was young, he had become a metal legend, but I doubt anyone could have imagined that he would become this rock icon that so many would revere.