Last week, founding Black Sabbath member (and, arguably, the founder of heavy metal) Ozzy Osbourne passed away. Coming just a few weeks after a poignant, triumphant final performance at “Back to the Beginning” on July 5th, his passing marks the end of a major chapter in the genre of heavy metal. It sucks, a lot, but I take a little comfort in reflecting on the legacy he helped shape with Sabbath and his solo career. I wouldn’t be playing drums were it not for what Ozzy created, and I probably wouldn’t be writing this post either. Both of these things are, perhaps, not net positives for the world, but he also inspired thousands of amazing bands!
I asked our writers to tell us about how Ozzy impacted them, in any way they chose, and I also asked them to pass along a favorite song. The unifying element here is that Ozzy is baked into our very bones: our lives would be terrible, empty things without the kaleidoscopic sprawl of heavy metal he unleashed. I’ll drop one of my deeper-cut favorites here with zero explanation, but please read the IO staff’s tributes to the man below.
— Ted Nubel
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Ozzy undoubtedly deserved his “Prince of Darkness” moniker, but let’s be real here: the man knew how to have fun, and I don’t mean ingesting every mood-altering substance within a 30 meter radius. To see this in action, look no further than “The Wizard”, the second track on Black Sabbath’s debut album and a much-needed jolt of energy after the primordial doom metal of the eponymous opener. But you wouldn’t get that impression on your first listen. I certainly didn’t when I was just a wee lad spinning a burnt CD copy of Black Sabbath in the early 2000s. Ozzy’s simple yet haunting harmonica intro made me think that another dirge was right around the corner, but this couldn’t have been further from the truth. Once the rest of the band joins in, “The Wizard” transmogrifies into an upbeat hard-rock number, and Ozzy’s performance on the ol’ blues buzzer only enhances the song’s peculiar charm. He even gets a little solo, trading licks with Tony after the second verse. And of course there are the vocals, soulful and distinctly nasal in a way that somehow gels perfectly with the distorted growl of the verse riff. “The Wizard” has always been a delightful anomaly amidst the album’s death and gloom, which makes it a perfect song by which to remember Ozzy now that he’s passed on beyond the wall of sleep.
–Alex Chan
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Undoubtedly, John Michael Osbourne, the man, is the last influential musician. Influential as in there is not a single musician who does not owe an aspect of themselves, or their sounds, to the consequences of Black Sabbath and the image of Ozzy Osbourne. We swim in Black Sabbath and Ozzy Osbourne has been painted all over culture. One can hardly forget when the Prince of Darkness, wearing pink, showed up to Wrestlemania II in 1986, alongside Captain Lou Albano, during the Rock ‘n’ Wrestling boom. Then, decades later, there was The Osbournes which, for better or worse, defined an entire decade of reality television. Do not lie, I know you watched it. The present decline of both radio and television is what seals Ozzy’s place in history. There will never be another man who challenges, scandalizes, and, later, bizarrely embraces the mainstream in such a manner, because, soon, there will no longer be a definitive mainstream. We enter the murky twilight of the icons. The Prince of Darkness is the last gargoyle at the gates before we exit out into a new sort of night.
I must admit these images of Ozzy are how I was introduced to him so, in my world, he was always a disarming figure I associated with a daily life based upon radio hits (do I even need to list them?). There was nothing particularly evil about Ozzy and Sabbath because, by the time I was listening, Sabbath and Ozzy had totally won. A rural kid could pick up Guitar Hero 3 to play “Paranoid” on a crappy, plastic guitar controller and download (totally legally, I swear!) all the Black Sabbath albums off the Internet. I remember, one Christmas, sitting in the car before midnight mass when “Mr. Crowley” came on the radio. We did not go in until the song was over because my dad likes Ozzy, but is cold on Black Sabbath. My mom always tells me that, back in the day, the local bar always played “War Pigs” to signal last call. You stumbled out into the dark with Ozzy wailing that Judgment Day was at hand. There is a reaffirming truth that Ozzy could sing those last few verses and, as they say in the Bible, “be not afraid.”
I can always say: “In this house, we respect Ozzy.”
— William Pauper
“Mr. Crowley, won’t you ride my white horse?”
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My history with Ozzy Osbourne goes back to when we got our family dog when I was 3; a St. Bernard who my father and uncle named Ozzy Osborne and we referred to as Ozzy for the duration of his life. Later I would learn that the human version helmed the original incarnation of Black Sabbath, was a part of classics like “Iron Man” and “Paranoid,” and was the subject of a reality show that had an opening track that sounded vaguely familiar, although my young teen self wasn’t sure what it was. Flash forward to a trip to the 2003 version of Ozzfest and pilfering my father’s copies of Paranoid and No More Tears, likely courtesy of Columbia House, and the rest was history.
I missed Ozzy in 2003 due to my brother and his crew being in shambles from a day of baking alcohol into their respective livers, but I wished that I had seen the Ozz Man himself. In the meantime I surgically picked apart the first 6 Black Sabbath albums and hunted on eBay for the Jet Records versions of Blizzard of Ozz and Diary of a Madman, all while gaining an appreciation for all his guitar players: Tony Iommi, Randy Rhoades, Brad Gillis, Jake E. Lee, and Zakk Wylde; that late ‘80s run of The Ultimate Sin and No Rest For The Wicked are criminally underrated. I did finally get to see him tour with Sabbath for 13 at the very same PNC Bank Arts Center in Holmdel, NJ and was finally able to check that box off. Ozzy Osbourne was a singular personality with no equal, a man who transcended music and television and touched the lives of so many, I truly don’t know where I would be without The Prince of Darkness. RIP Ozzy Osbourne.
–Tom Campagna
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One of my earliest memories of seeking out and listening to music on my own was listening to Crazy Train on a loop as a little kid. I remember absolutely hating how it went from that killer, heavy intro riff into what little eight or nine year old dumbass me thought was lame stuff- but I listened to it anyways, because the start was so cool. Some of my strongest musical associations with middle school are jamming that, Iron Man, and Paranoid just on a loop. Decades later, those songs are still a regular part of my life, and I’ve finally come to appreciate Crazy Train for the hit that it is. I think a less charismatic singer couldn’t have carried it, but I regularly have “I’m going off the rails! on a crazy train!” pop into my head, and I’ve come to really appreciate that taking that sweet intro riff and bringing it back as a refrain after some less ballsy ones just makes it hit all the harder for it. Randy Rhoads was already gone before I was born, but in a way Crazy Train has been a constant companion in my life, and it’s surreal to think that only Bob Daisley is left from the lineup that gave us Blizzard of Ozz. Farewell to the original Prince of Darkness. Goodbye, and thank you for everything.
–Brandon Corsair
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This is an article detailing our personal history, or some sort of farewell to Ozzy, following his passing on 22 July 2025. I think this is supposed to be a personal history. I didn’t read the email fully [Editor’s Note: Close enough!]. We will eventually get to Black Sabbath, I promise. If you don’t have patience, there are many better writers probably with more interesting memories of Ozzy Osbourne than me as I didn’t really start listening to metal seriously until I was in college. I talked about some of my history with metal with and my time with Black Sabbath didn’t really start until a few months after I was a student teaching in Pittsburgh. This is sort of similar.
At the end of any education degree a teacher does some sort of student teaching in a school district and for Penn State it was in the Pittsburgh City School District. Many teachers just move there and get their own apartment and do their four months of teaching but since I wanted to be adventuresome I moved in with one of my friends who had what could be considered an apartment but in reality was one room, a hallway, and a tiny kitchen. This was most likely a storage area or maintenance corridor that they fashioned into an apartment by a landlord and sold to college students for 400$ a month. My suspicions were sort of confirmed as we had a few people try to open our door as if this was something else a few months prior. Actually, thinking about it now, I think I could put up with a lot more if I had a rent of 400$ in the middle of the city.
At the time of my student teaching, I was sleeping on a futon and immediately felt the longing for privacy. This probably came to a full realization when I got strep throat and spent a week sweating on a couch while my roommate did homework on the computer three feet from my dying shell of a body. I believe when you are younger you have distant boundaries when it comes to privacy. Before this, I lived in an apartment with three other people sleeping on unlinened mattresses with a sleeping bag as a blanket and the sound of 3 boxes fans running 24/7. Though I should have been prepared for this Burroughs novel style of living, my student teaching apartment allowed me to find out my boundaries around space very quickly. I didn’t want to be social and looked for any way to be by myself even for a few hours. Some places I found were the laundromat down the street where the guy at the desk let me watch Law and Order whenever I came in to do laundry for the third time of the week. The other place was the University of Pittsburgh computer lab where I would log in with my friends’ account and listen to music for hours using whatever design programs they had to make websites. This is where I would bring a small case of burned MP3 CDs which had discographies of bands. One of them was the discography from Black Sabbath with everything from the 60’s and 70’s in alphabetical order.
At times I have nostalgia for times that I never lived through. It was 2005 and I was in a computer lab listening to music while watching the Windows Media Player visualizer project psychedelic colors while listening to Vol. 4, Master of Reality, and Sabbath Bloody Sabbath. I would imagine I was a stoned teenager in the midwest circa the late 70s listening to the same music staring at a psychedelic poster that I pinned to my ceiling. Maybe I would go out with some friends and shoot glass bottles with an airgun or go try and get young adults to buy me beer at the corner grocery store. Sabbath’s music fit this imaginary persona that I could see myself being only if I was born in 1960. I would have probably listened to them at the time. They were popular enough for my fictional midwestern area of influence. I would be a person who would be too young to fully appreciate the late 60’s counter culture but old enough at the time when pot was cool and hip but still punishable with lifelong prison sentences. It would be the music that Ron Slater from Dazed and Confused would probably listen to someone who would just cruise through life with the rule of cool and their moral compass.
Sabbath’s music for me fit this idea of a far out listener who blew their mind on heavy music but also didn’t give a shit about rules. Over time and after I became a mod for r/metal, I saw Sabbath as a band who continued to defy rules and challenge people’s conceptions about what heavy metal was. Heavy metal didn’t have to be obscure as they were one of the most famous bands in the history of metal and if you would ask 100 listeners for their favorite metal records, they would be in the top 10 in some order. Heavy metal didn’t have to be heavy, as Sabbath’s music in the 1970s continued to push progressive boundaries guided upon the gentle wings of what was described as speaker boxes full of cocaine. Heavy metal also didn’t really have to be cool, as my time with Sabbath came at the tail end of the Osbournes , one of the most popular sitcoms starring Ozzy and his family in some sort of middle American reality. Sabbath’s music, despite all seemingly plausible contradictions, has continued to be eternal and was a sign of coolness. Ozzy Osbourne has long been elevated from person to rock star to some sort of mythic cautionary tale about the dangers of excess. He continued to be a fallible but lovable character despite a long stretch of darkness. Ozzy is no longer a person, or even a rockstar; more of a figure or myth who will live through decades of listeners.
I don’t write a lot about metal anymore compared to other genres of music and I was only really a part of Invisible Oranges as a dungeon synth writer. Still though when I was asked to write a farewell, I didn’t have to pretend to have a history or look through a Wikipedia page (it’s actually up in a tab) as I knew Sabbath’s discography up to the mid 80’s by heart. Sabbath and Ozzy have made their ways into everyone’s life even if it was through some of their most popular radio hits or through the most obvious answer of their best album. Over my time moderating r/metal and writing about Sabbath for Album of the Weeks, I have come to appreciate an enjoyment as Sabbath as sort of a default where you have to try really hard not to have a good time since the band only wants you to drop out and be far out.
My time with Sabbath wasn’t really historic, but at the time it still is encased in escapism being the cushion I would fall back on when things didn’t really make sense. My time on the computer talking and researching music probably led to me enjoying sitting at a computer reading up on the music I was listening to as some sort of immersive research project now with visuals in a separate window. My time with Sabbath seems kinda of silly but this is a band who has been around for so long and almost ubiquitous among heavy metal fans that each story is probably unique and across different time periods. I’m sure that person who was stoned looking at posters on the ceiling existed in some fashion and I like to think we are metaphysically related, united by our love of music and the abandonment it has to offer.
My parents gave to me at a very young age a sympathy for a musician’s passing as they were deeply affected by Jerry Garcia’s passing in 1995. Even though you don’t personally know the person, their music and its place in your life is very real so their passing makes you feel something and reflect on its presence and your time with it. I think we all expected this to happen and even I mused the day it would eventually come. I could still see it not though as Ozzy continued to defy all expectations — probably because he was a part of some myth that only had one foot in reality.
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— Kaptain Carbon
