Ozzy Osbourne, legendary Black Sabbath singer, dies

BarcelonaBritish musician Ozzy Osbourne, vocalist of the group Black Sabbath, died this Tuesday at the age of 76, according to reports. The Guardian, which includes the family's statement. "It is with a sadness that words cannot convey, we must announce that our beloved Ozzy Osbourne passed away this morning. He was with family and surrounded by love. We ask everyone to respect the family's privacy at this time," the statement reads.

The British singer's last public appearance was on July 5 in Birmingham, the city where Black Sabbath was born, which is the same as saying the city where heavy metal was born. That day he received a particularly moving tribute at a concert that included bands such as Metallica, Slayer, Pantera, Gojira, Anthrax and Mastodon, and musicians such as Tom Morello (Rage Against the Machine), Billy Corgan (The Smashing Pumpkins) and Slash (Guns N' Roses), among others. These are names that speak volumes regarding the magnitude of the legacy of John Michael Osbourne, a man who blazed dark and powerful musical trails alongside guitarist Tony Iommi, drummer Bill Ward, and bassist Geezer Butler. Legend has it that everything you need to know about heavy metal is in Black Sabbath's first four albums. In any case, without those four albums, things would have been very different, and certainly less exciting.

Ozzy Osbourne was born on December 3, 1948, in Marston Green and grew up in Birmingham in a working-class environment. Context matters, because the music he pioneered became the soundtrack to many working-class lives. At the same time, he developed a dark, prince-of-darkness image, influenced by horror films. All of this came together in the late 1960s, when Iommi, Ward, Butler, and Osbourne created Black Sabbath, a name inspired by a Mario Bava film starring Boris Karloff. The goal was to tap into the fertile well of blues-rock, the well that also quenched the thirst of bands like Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin. But the style was different, with rarer tunings and a predilection for the tritone, and with dark lyrics. It was the nightmare of the Age of Aquarius, and it was made by four guys from Birmingham.

Osbourne knew how to add theatricality to his performance and acting, and quickly achieved his own personality as a singer and performerBetween 1969 and 1975, he made a decisive contribution to writing the sacred bible of heavy metal and all the derivatives that emerged afterward, including the injection sound of death metal and the ominous sonority of black metal; and grunge owes a good group of riffs to Black Sabbath (this credit goes to Tony Iommi, of course). The bible in question is six albums long: Black Sabbath (1970), Paranoid (1970), Master of Reality (1971), Flight 4 (1972), Sabbath Bloody Sabbath (1973) and Sabotage (1976).

Despite taking refuge in darkness and monsters and satanic metaphors, Black Sabbath's lyrics did not simply provide escapism or symbolic weapons to combat the consequences of policies that were slowly eroding the British working class. There were also anti-war calls such as War pigs, one of the band's best compositions, which also reminded us that war was caused by the rich and suffered by the poor.

Against all odds, that infernal voice, those insidious riffs, and that rhythmic depth were successful. Or perhaps it simply happened that they connected with an army of people who discovered they were being offered the soundtrack to their lives. Success and the lifestyle associated with rock also took its toll, and after a lackluster tour and several disagreements, the band decided to expel Ozzy Osbourne in 1979. The Prince of Darkness entered a creative roller coaster. He had to live up to the seismic shift he had caused in the early seventies, and he came out ahead with the first album in his name: Blizzard of Ozz (1980), the album of songs like Mr. Crowley and Suicide solution.

At that time Black Sabbath replaced Ozzy Osbourne with Ronnie James Dio, the singer of Rainbow and one of the best vocalists in the history of heavy metal. With Dio they made the remarkable Heaven and Hell (1980). All of this was bound to spur Ozzy on, but the eighties were years of addictions and erratic decisions, such as insisting on grotesque theatricality just as metal was experiencing the thrash metal revolution led by Metallica, Megadeth and Slayer, bands that inherited the sound.

Osbourne returned to sing with Black Sabbath in the late nineties, but they didn't record material together until they made the album 13, produced by Rick Rubin in 2013. At that time, Osbourne had been exploiting a curious side of fame for some time, which reached its peak with the reality show The Osbournes, which coincided with health problems related to Parkinson's. Theatrical and contradictory, brilliant and inimitable, Ozzy Osbourne is an unavoidable figure if we want to properly tell the history of rock, especially that of heavy metal in all its forms.