His father turned his nose when he listened to the Beatles as a boy, fearing for the bad influence that Lennon and partners could have on teenagers: he would not have imagined who would become the son in question, other than Fab Four. Because Ozzy Osbourne – who died yesterday at 76 years old, after a long illness: he was in a wheelchair and suffered from Parkinson’s disease – he was pure horror, but a horror Handsomecontagious, true. Who does not – or at least, in the long run, has no longer done – fear. The Heavy Metal in purity, here, the extreme rock he invented with his group, the Black Sabbath, around 1970. For the sounds, there is to ask the travel companion and guitarist Tony Iommi, who before firing himself from the factory, to devote himself to music, had an accident: a machine amputated two superior falanges, he then returned to play with prostheses but The tuning of the instrument, thus giving life, without wanting it, to the hard and gloomy atmospheres that will make school. Big Bang. Ozzy put us scenic presence, charisma, face. And what does it do.

Working Class Hero

Folgorato from music since childhood, listening to the Beatles, he has no Rockstar physique: he grows in the worker poverty of Birmingham, he is dyslexic, stutterer and with attention deficit, so much so that the nickname Ozzy was born to mockery. But so much: if he tattoo alone, on his hands, when not even of age ends up in prison for the theft of a TV – that falls on him during his escape, trapping him, film scenes. Have pain, he doesn’t know how to channel him. Then yes. The music of the Black Sabbath has no half measures or compromises because boys like this simply cannot afford to have them: from there they throw down a wall, upset a genre, they become myths of one hundred million copies sold to date; The rock star that could not do it, that is not as leafy as colleagues, in the end changes the rules of the game by itself. Because that destructive fury is joy.

But I discount a large price: in the seventies, fame overwhelms them, as well as the consumption of alcohol and drugs, with various periods to the limit. He was hunted by the band in 1978, now worn out, and the excesses become literature in himself: sniff of ants only for the fun of the bystanders, another – the most famous – with his mouth detaches the head of a bat in a concert. It is 1982. “I believed it was fake”, he justifies himself later. Fake? “You know, my concerts are a lot of strange people. It’s rock’n roll.” And in fact under his stage hundreds of thousands come, looking for escapism: whatever happens, knowing that Osbourne there iswhich despite everything will combine something bigmakes him a symbol for at least three generations, that his records are passed, in the sign of a cult, that for Heavy Metal, which with the codes and rituals still resists. He was the godfather, the tales of excesses in this sense are still wasted – like all the investigations on the alleged suicides installs by satanic messages behind his music – but not for this reason it was only an image, indeed.

Theory and practice. The first discs of the Black Sabbath – the homonymous e Paranoidboth from 1970 – and the first as a soloist, above all Blizzard of Ozz (1980), that of the solo rebirth, are real masterpieces, rock milestones that inspired dozens of musicians who then achieved even greater success than hers. They created a style, a way of being. Music has always been the nucleus of everything then, of course, there is not a career always to be expected at the top, gaming, but a real, lived, with ups and downs. For those who want to get an idea, the advice is to read autobiography I Am Ozzyhilarious and a British self -irony that tells well what brain to the fury was hiding behind the fury – or otherwise there is the whole archive of reality shows, of which he was a pioneer. For this, in any case, it is one of those artists Largen Than Lifean icon greater than his own music.

Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne celebrate 40 years of marriage: the dedication after a difficult year

Monsters and normal

The farewell concert in Birmingham showed it, in front of 20 thousand people, fatally celebrated on 5 July: he tired but still magnetic, dozens of climbs and descents later, on a Gothic style throne that for one evening replaced the wheelchair; Around, his spiritual children, bands such as Metallica, Slayer, Alice in Chains and Guns N ‘Roses to pay homage, in addition to the historical formation of the same Black Sabbath, with which he had tried various reunions, without great results; And in front, a crowd that seems in veneration, prayer. Seeing it like this, charisma intact but weakened in the body, elderly and sick, made it reflect: the times of self -destruction, of the public enemy number one, have long since passed on, but not for this reason has lost in power. He played cards with life sometimes without even wanting to, and now here he is still here: it is a news that he had not died in 1980, when to dispose of the farewell from the original group he had closed three months in a hotel room between alcohol and drugs, and who knows how many times. Imagine.

More: the normalization / non-Normalization of Ozzy, the affection Good Of the people, the fear of the different that is no longer there, but above all the millions of outsiders and different in turn in the newspaper who have found in his songs an identity, a hope, they remind us that those we consider monsters, in the end, are not. So much closely no one is normal. And Osbourne was one of us.