[Editor's Note: I apologize for letting this blog slip. My writing on Substack has been my focus, as well as academic projects I am working on as well. I plan on using this space for more personal and pop cultural thoughts with more frequency. Don't worry, Orson Welles will be back!]
In the 1980s fundamentalist Christians felt far more confident in attempting to censor cultural life in the United States. They did not merely criticize "the culture," they were of the mind to drive out what they didn't like completly. In the era of the internet the explicit content stickers added to so many tapes and CDs seem absolutely quaint. Likewise, the Satanic Panic of the 1980s sounds like a joke, but in the moment some people really did think that Dungeons & Dragons and heavy metal music were full of satanic messages. This panic destroyed lives, but it was in many ways tamer than what we have today. QAnon, for example, is the Satanic Panic directly applied to our politics, with far greater harm.
No one cultural figure embodied what the culture warriors opposed more than Ozzy Osbourne. Growing up in a small Great Plains town in the 1980s (as I did) he was less a musician than either a folk hero or a demon, depending on who you talked to. For the hordes of disaffected teen headbangers in these places he was a demigod, an avatar of rebellion. Your Ozzy t-shirt told everyone around you that you were not interested in conforming to the rules of conservative small town life. Now that parental figures are less interested in regulating their children's pop culture diets, we really don't have people like this anymore.
I was not a metal head at all, and the metal kids felt dangerous and scary to a meek altar boy like myself. Despite not being a part of that crowd or liking the music, I respected Ozzy because I really disliked the fundamentalists and their agenda. Part of this was my Catholicism, which I knew marked me lesser in their eyes. Part of it was the folk libertarianism of teendom, with its "just leave us alone" attitude regardless of what the adults were trying to regulate. My opposition to music censorship ended up being the germ of my growing feeling that I did not align with the conservative politics of my hometown.
In the 90s in high school I was one of the earliest adopters of grunge in my hometown, a music that made the metal heads look like yesterday's news. I didn't really learn to appreciate metal until I was in college, due to my friend Dave. He was a Black Sabbath superfan, and dubbed the Paranoid album onto a cassette tape for me (remember doing that?) At that point I was hooked. He also moved to Chicago after college, and in the year we roomed together I really got immersed in Sabbath. Dave had every single album of theirs (no mean feat pre-CD burning), including strange non-metal ones like Technical Ecstasy and Never Say Die. He had a VHS tape with a documentary about the band that we watched a few times, which made me appreciate Ozzy's talents as a live performer.
At that point I realized that Ozzy was not some demigod of rebellion or a demonic influence, but an outcast working class kid from Birmingham who was saved by rock and roll. It made his appeal to so many of my classmates in high school make more sense because the same could be said about their circumstances as well. Dave did not quite come from such a background, but he was a totally unique character who was very self-conscious about being a misfit. He knew he was never going to fit in no matter where he went, and Ozzy helped him embrace that.
I also remember one day Dave told me a unlikely story in our apartment. He was riding the bus in downtown Chicago, and swore he saw Ozzy, but he looked very feeble, and there was an older woman helping him cross the street. I was initially doubtful of this sighting, but a couple of years later when The Osbournes reality show came out I realized Dave had not been lying at all. That show completely dispelled the whole "prince of darkness" thing and showed Ozzy as a befuddled family man. It was the final nail in the coffin to the propagators of the Satanic Panic from two decades before.
When I head the news of Ozzy's death, Dave was the first person I thought of. He sadly didn't make it as long as Ozzy, dying suddenly in his mid-30s. Other deaths since have impacted me, but none has lingered as long as his. There's hardly a week that goes by that I don't think about him. This week I am not mourning Ozzy so much as the Dave, one of the many misfits who found a kindred spirit in times hostile to eccentricity.
