Heart in Darkness
Musician, Critic, Satirist, Role-Model: Ozzy Osbourne, 1949-2025
They live their lives in fear and insecurity
And all you do is pay for their prosperity
The ministry of fear, that won’t let you live
The ministry of grace, the doesn’t forgive
Do what you will to try and make me conform
I’ll make you wish, that you had never been born.
Our latter day, and very much theatrical, prince of darkness is no more. Legendary pop musician Ozzy Osbourne has left a certain and indelible legacy upon both contemporary music and its performance, but as well upon hundreds of millions of fans spanning multiple generations. I am one such fan, and not even one of the oldest. Not by far, given that Black Sabbath’s self-titled offering appeared when I was but three years old. But my important encounter with Osbourne began some dozen years later, in 1981, with the release of his second solo album, Diary of a Madman.
With the young virtuoso guitarist, Randy Rhoads, Ozzy’s solo career had taken off the year before, after the band he co-founded jettisoned him for his ongoing aberrant conduct. Rhoads himself met an unlikely and untimely death soon thereafter, cementing many popular myths about the long shadows of the English occultist and travel writer Aleister Crowley, one of Ozzy’s many real-world inspirations, which also included Richard Latimer, the Canadian man who murdered his 14 year old daughter who herself lived in misery due to a incurable illness. One leitmotif of Osbourne’s song-writing is that he never shied away from exploring the most difficult of human situations. He penned epistles concerning self-abuse and self-loathing, addiction, suicide, the mockeries of faux religion, and most of all, was a great and persistent critic of a self-righteousness that masked itself as righteous, one of the most prevalent themes of our contemporary public life.
And yet this, by far the most profound aspect of a person one could only refer to as a true character, is almost entirely absent in the tributes which have poured in from around the globe and from every quarter therein. For Ozzy was, first and foremost, a political figure. A true populist, unlike such-named career politicians, he wrote many such political tracks for his parent band spanning the 1970s. This sensibility, that of a working class rust-belt Briton whose life was hand-to-mouth before the advent of Sabbath, never left his heart no matter how much glitz, wealth, and sheer lunacy he became surrounded by. And though famous musical peers agree that Ozzy was one of the most authentic persons one could ever meet, nevertheless there did exist a persona to the man, even if only as thespian. The real Ozzy did not practice the occult method of ‘consecrated hosting’, for instance, as imaged on the front and back covers of the 1981 release, though with his death, some might pine for him to have in fact done so! On stage, he was a force, but was also unafraid to engage in farce. Somewhat off stage, as revealed in The Osbournes, he was a gentle and affectionate parent; a much better role model for all those considering child-raising than any member of the many parents groups who sought to vilify him. He is also recalled as a most witty fellow, whose Pythonesque sense of the absurd he himself very much owned. Beyond this, to all those who did not know him, he was an inspiration for each of us to both become, and remain, our own persons.
For this is the message in his music. Within the political critique and social commentary, and as well animating the more intimate scenes his songs sketched out, the conception of a self-reliant, thinking individual, unswayed by either ideology or religion, or yet one’s own baser desires, is the persona of authenticity that Ozzy attempted to express and indeed live throughout his career. And this in an age of illusions and delusions both, the work necessary to simply be one’s own person can often be daunting. For this is his inspiration: no matter what the world deals to you, always maintain your ipsissimous hand. At the time I purchased and first heard Ozzy’s music, in 1981, I had just lost the first love of my life as well as my family, and these dual losses were not unrelated. The person Ozzy represented to me, myself being one epitome of his target audience – the disaffected male teenager who was in danger of being swallowed up by his Wertherian sorrows in the very depths of Cold War terror – was crucial to my youthful survival. Although I never of course knew the man personally, yet I owe Ozzy very much a personal debt, and I imagine I am hardly the only one who does so.
Anyone who sneers at Osbourne’s presence, manifest and manifold, is someone who is himself afraid of a human life. For this is the ethic: never give over the source of your human freedom; that one must become who one is. That no other quite made headlines like Ozzy should be taken as a simple exemplar of a prophet whose individuated mayhem mirrored, in earthy strokes, the Kerygmatic ability to make meaningful a happenstance existence. Ozzy was no existentialist by profession, but he could never be said to have not lived his life to the utmost. May then each of us find in his legacy the seeds of such self and freedom both.
G.V. Loewen is the author of 65 books in ethics, education, aesthetics, health and social theory, as well as fiction. He is co-founder and CRO of Insightful Ethics Communications, a health and wellness digital media corporation.