There is a strange silence today in the world of rock. It is the type of silence that follows lightning, a shot, a roar that rowed in a now empty arena. Ozzy Osbourne, the prince of darkness, is gone. And with him one of the most powerful, charismatic and irreverent voices that the music has ever known. He was not just a singer, he was not just a frontman: Ozzy was an icon, a language, a generational symbol. And with his death something ends that, after all, we all consider unrepeatable.

“I can sing”

Like a frontman consumed, Ozzy has gone to the show concluded. He would have liked a great world tour: he tried twice. First the Covid and then the aggravation of his condition prevented him from realizing what was supposed to be his dream, a last crowd. He had explained it very well during a long interview in 2023, in which he said he did not bear the conditions in which he was reduced: “There are only two things that I can still do: I can write songs, and I can sing. I know that I can no longer perform, not as before: but I can sing. And the only thing I want to do is get on a stage and sing. Ok, I can’t even go up. Parkinson had devastated the container, but never trapped the head, funambolic, excessive and always eager to be at the center of the scene, of a man who never cried on him. Not even at the worst moment. His show of 5 July last, in front of over six million spectators online with an extraordinary cast of characters, was not the tribute of rock to a dying man, but the celebration of the rock itself, who recognized himself in one of his creators. Unable to get aside.

Horror and comics

Born in Birmingham in 1948, in one of the most gray workers’ suburbs of industrial England, John Michael Osbourne should have been a worker. Like his father and his mother. As a boy they call him Ozzy: because as well as dyslexic and discalculic, he was also stammering. He struggled to pronounce even his surname. Osbourne: And his John Os-OS-OS … Bourne became OZ-OZ-OZ … Ozzy. At school he ends up from the principal on more than one occasion: the one in which he overturns the chair on the head of his mathematics teacher. The one in which you play like a drum with a classmate who took him for the butt for his stuttering is decisive: Antonio Francesco Iommi. The two end up in punishment, one with the swollen lip and the other with a pesto eye. The Black Sabbath will merge. Mother Lilli, in love with the Beatles, tries in all the ways to make him listen to training music: he secretly sells the family collection of The Shadows records, to buy a small amplifier. And he ends up in having stolen a TV from a neighbor’s house. He will return to the family after six weeks of ‘College and training works’ with the letters Ozzy tattooed on the phalanges of the right hand. The rest is history. In love with horror and comics, but also of wrestling and porn, he convinces his companions to baptize the band Black Sabbath, quote from his favorite film, the three faces of the fear of Mario Bava. Films that will also influence Dario Argento in the Madri trilogy (Suspiria, Inferno and the third mother).

The incredible debut

The debut album, Black Sabbath (1970), published – in a completely prophetic way – on a Friday 13 February, was a slap in the conventions. Dark, threatening, imbued with aesthetic satanism and sound dissonances. It was the perfect soundtrack for a restless era and an uncertain future. Ozzy, with her lacerating and visceral voice, becomes the prophet of an electric and agnostic religion. The years with the Sabbath were intense, devastating and dazzling: Paranoid, War Pigs, Iron Man, Children of the Grave, Snowblind. Songs that still define a genre today, which have survived decades of evolutions and fashions. But they were also years of unsustainable excesses: alcohol, drugs, quarrels. In 1979, Ozzy was removed from the band due to his self -destructive behavior. In a band of acute drug addicts, he was considered the unrecoverable one. It seemed the end. And instead it was the beginning of another myth. With the help of the manager – and then wife – Sharon, Osbourne embarrasses a solo career that few could have predicted. It is the first rebirth from the abyss. The album Blizzard of Ozz (1980) was a triumph. He contained Crazy Train, Mr. Crowley, Suicide Solution. The entry of the guitarist Randy Rhods on the scene, with his neoclassical touch and his supersonic speed, made Ozzy’s solo project one of the most innovative realities of the 80s. Even after Rhods’ tragic death in 1982, Ozzy knew how to reinvent himself, joining musicians like Jake E. Lee and Zakk Wylde. He will earn a lot, take a lot of drugs, he will be alcohol to almost kill himself. He will crash several times by car and on motorbike. The famous bite at the head of a bat, that he was convinced was a rubber animal that someone had pulled him on stage, almost costs his skin: the rear views save him by a miracle. And they cost him a piece of liver who had not yet burned with alcohol and drugs. It was not just music, however, to make Ozzy a character. It was his way of being on stage, theatrical and grotesque, a mask that exploited a unique voice – as imperfect as recognizable. In addition to its incredible ability to transform its vulnerability into a scenic effect. Weak, fragile, employee: “A born loser, a badly hard lift …” he said. And perhaps it is also this terrible self -consideration, which for years – before the arrival of his wife to put order – will bring him inside the depression and the verge of suicide, to make him empathically human.

The nineties

In the 90s, with the arrival of MTV and the transformation of musical tastes, many would have thought of a slow end. The glam kills metal. The grunge blows the old bands. Video Killed The Radio Star. And instead Ozzy survives. He founded the Ozzfest, becomes mentor. And it gives space to new generations of metal and alternative bands. He is the protagonist of surprising collaborations (such as the one with Korn, Rob Zombie, Post Malone), managing to become a television star with the reality show The Osbournes, who brought millions of spectators into the chaotic and surreal life of his family. For many years, The Osbourns becomes the format to be copied: no cable network will do so much public and so much money. The millions become billions: Ozzy, with its vulnerabilities, becomes icon. His black humor, the surreal jokes, the uncertain walk, the continuous falls and climbed have made him a mythical figure even for those who did not listen to Heavy Metal. Ozzy has been parodied, imitated, venerated. But never exceeded.

The health of recent years

In recent years, his health had become precarious: back operations, parkinson, falls, multiple surgical interventions. But he was still there, with a slightly broken voice, with the look terribly tired under heavy makeup, but with the same desire to sing. In 2022 his latest album, Patient Number 9: a real masterpiece, demonstrating that art, for him, was not a job but a breath. Ozzy Osbourne represented the most brazen soul of rock. Not the patina or heroic one, but the dirty, tormented, real one. He sang madness, despair, darkness. But also the ecstasy. It was a modern Gothic Arlecchino, a tragic clown that turned into a symbol, icon, and finally legend. Today rock loses one of its most surreal voices. But it also loses a face, an energy, a story. Ozzy screamed. He laughed. He cried. He built, destroyed and reconstructed. But above all, he lived. Ash and Phoenix.