The New Yorker:

The Black Sabbath front man set out to capture the sound of evil. Somehow, he became widely loved.

By Kelefa Sanneh

If you trust Ozzy Osbourne’s recollection—and, given the long and eventful life he led, as well as the chemical compounds he loved, perhaps you should not—then the idea for his band, Black Sabbath, came from a simple observation: people seemed to like horror movies. It was the end of the nineteen-sixties, and Osbourne was a boisterous rock-and-roll fan from Birmingham, England, who had decided to play loud music with some guys he knew. One of them was Tony Iommi, a guitar player who was developing an austere, unflashy style. “It was Tony who first suggested we do something that sounded evil,” Osbourne recalled, in “I Am Ozzy,” his 2009 autobiography. He said that Iommi’s proposition was simple: “Maybe we should stop doing blues and write scary music instead.”

Osbourne died this past Tuesday, at the age of seventy-six; his family didn’t announce a cause, but he had previously disclosed that he had Parkinson’s disease. By the time of his death, Osbourne had been doubly transformed by Iommi’s good idea about “evil.” Starting in 1970, Black Sabbath released a string of albums so popular that they made Osbourne not just a rock star but a cultural antihero. He became known as the Prince of Darkness and, relatedly, the godfather of heavy metal, which emerged as the name for the subgenre that flourished and then fractured in the wake of Black Sabbath’s success, spawning sub-subgenres and sub-sub-subgenres through the decades. As a boy in the nineteen-eighties, I remember hearing that Osbourne was some kind of maniac, and that he had bitten the head off of a dove, or maybe it was a bat. (The answer was both: the dove in a record-company meeting, because he wanted to cause a scene, and the bat during a concert, because he thought it was fake.) But in time he emerged from the shadows to become a beloved paterfamilias. He was the guiding spirit of Ozzfest, the travelling metal festival launched by his wife and manager, Sharon Osbourne, in 1996. And he was the lovable, bumbling dad on “The Osbournes,” an MTV reality show that had its première in 2002.

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