Outside the Beltway

Ozzy Osbourne, 1948-2025

The heavy metal legend has passed at 76.

James Joyner · Tuesday, July 22, 2025 · 13 comments

BBC, “Black Sabbath’s Ozzy Osbourne dies aged 76, his family announces“

Black Sabbath singer Ozzy Osbourne has died at the age of 76, his family has announced.

A statement said: “It is with more sadness than mere words can convey that we have to report that our beloved Ozzy Osbourne has passed away this morning. He was with his family and surrounded by love. We ask everyone to respect our family privacy at this time.”

Sad news, indeed. Of course, had you told me when he was biting the heads off bats that he would make it this long, I’d have been quite skeptical.

Rolling Stone, “Ozzy Osbourne, Black Sabbath Singer and Heavy Metal Pioneer, Dead at 76“

Ozzy Osbourne, the singular metal legend whose Black Sabbath virtually invented heavy metal and in later years became a reality-TV pioneer, died on Tuesday at the age of 76.

[…]

The singer had an electrifying and unpredictable onstage presence and a dry sense of humor that endeared him to hordes of adoring fans. His excitable energy helped transform the anthems he sang — “Iron Man,” “Paranoid,” and “Crazy Train” — from radio hits into sports-stadium staples. As a member of Black Sabbath, he helped draft the blueprints for heavy metal, but in conversation, he was always humble about his contributions to music. He knew his limitations and was open about his addictions, but he always attempted to better himself. He was an underdog everyone would want to rally behind.

As Black Sabbath’s doomsayer-in-chief, Osbourne could summon a true sense of terror in his keening cries in a way that heightened the band’s muscular dirges. When he bellowed “What is this that stands before me, figure in black which points at me?” in the song “Black Sabbath,” it was a performance worthy of a horror flick. He sang “Iron Man,” about a scorned golem seeking revenge, with believable wrath. And when he screeched, “Dreams turn to nightmares, heaven turns to hell,” in “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath,” it was with a demonic fury not even Milton could have summoned. He made sense of his bandmates’ heavy swagger and brought their supernatural racket back down to earth in a way that has resonated with millions for decades.

Although groups had been testing the limits of hard rock for a few years by the time Black Sabbath arrived, the band purified their aggression into a forceful, unrelenting sound that would define a new style of rock. “On any given day, the heavy-metal genre might as well be subtitled ‘Music derivative of Black Sabbath,’” Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich said, when inducting Black Sabbath into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2006. Osbourne’s voice and performances were crucial ingredients to the group’s modus operandi. Queen guitarist Brian May once described Osbourne as “a willowy singer wailing in a way that made the kids’ parents despair” — and that is exactly what the kids wanted in the music.

As a solo artist, Osbourne zeroed in on the more gothic aspects of Sabbath’s approach and tweaked the tempos so fans could graduate from head nodding to headbanging. But his art still reveled in darkness — mutually assured destruction (“Crazy Train”), Hammer Horror vignettes (“Bark at the Moon”), false prophets (“Miracle Man”). The big difference was that, as bandleader, Osbourne discovered a new side of himself — an entertainer whose sharp wit and lust for partying was just as outsized as his music — and let it overcome him. Aided by his wife and manager, Sharon, and a succession of six-string virtuosi — Randy Rhoads, Jake E. Lee, Zakk Wylde — he reinvented himself as a performer who could both preside over a séance and a kegger with equal panache. His legend grew.

Between his solo music and recordings with Black Sabbath, Osbourne was the most ubiquitous artist on Rolling Stone’s ranking of the Greatest Metal Albums of All Time; Sabbath’s Paranoid claimed the list’s top spot. He won four Grammys, including a Lifetime Achievement nod with Black Sabbath, and nearly all of his albums have been certified gold or platinum.

New York Times, “Ozzy Osbourne, ‘Prince of Darkness’ Turned Reality TV Star, Dies at 76“

Ozzy Osbourne, who achieved enormous success as a pioneer of two wildly popular entertainment genres, heavy metal music and reality television, died on Tuesday. He was 76.

[…]

As the lead singer of Black Sabbath, Mr. Osbourne was one of the inventors of heavy metal. As a solo artist, he became a remarkably durable star, with 13 platinum albums and the nickname “Prince of Darkness.”

But he achieved even wider fame for his rock ’n’ roll excess, including an onstage incident in which he bit the head off a bat.

The hit MTV reality show “The Osbournes” presented a comedic counterpoint to his infamy and his taste for satanic imagery; revealing himself as the befuddled patriarch of a chaotic but loving family, he became a TV star.

“All the stuff onstage, the craziness, it’s all just a role that I play, my work,” Mr. Osbourne insisted in an interview with The New York Times in 1992. “I am not the Antichrist. I am a family man.”

[…]

An indifferent student with undiagnosed dyslexia and attention deficit disorder, Ozzy dropped out of school at age 15 and had a series of short-lived jobs, including 18 months at a local slaughterhouse. After he was fired from that job (for fighting), he had a brief career as a burglar; when he was arrested, his father declined to pay the fine, and Ozzy spent three months in prison, which led him to abandon his criminal ambitions.

His father did, however, buy a P.A. system so Ozzy could pursue his dream of being a rock singer. That system, plus a flyer reading “Ozzy Zig Needs Gig,” got him into a band in 1968 with three young Birmingham musicians: the bassist Geezer Butler, the drummer Bill Ward and the guitarist Tony Iommi.

After some false starts, including a stint as a blues band called Earth, the group embraced the logic that people paid to be scared at horror movies, and the young musicians renamed themselves Black Sabbath, inspired by a Boris Karloff film with that title. They also used the name for one of their early songs, which laid out their sonic template: deafening volume and grinding tempos, with Mr. Osbourne yowling about portents of doom.

The quartet released its debut album, also called “Black Sabbath,” in 1970, and followed with seven more over the next eight years. The band’s music was largely reviled by critics and snubbed by radio stations, but its albums were consistently certified platinum, and songs like “Paranoid,” “Iron Man” and “War Pigs” became anthems for generations of disaffected youth.

Mr. Osbourne was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame twice, as a member of Black Sabbath in 2006 and as a solo performer in 2024. When he inducted Black Sabbath, Lars Ulrich of Metallica praised the group’s “huge hymns of doom.” “When it comes to defining a genre within the world of heavy music,” he said, “Sabbath stand alone.”