Ozzy's Gone

Long Live the Prince of Darkness

Right. Sit down. Read a bit. Try not to vomit on yourselves.

The man is dead. Ozzy Osbourne is dead. This is not a cause for tears. This is a cause for awe. You will not see his like again. You probably wouldn’t survive it if you did.

Ozzy was proof of something important. Proof that humanity can chew its own arm off in a trap, laugh about it, and keep moving forward. Proof that you can drown yourself in chemicals for decades, burn bridges, burn cities, burn brain cells, and still crawl onto the stage and scream your throat raw in front of tens of thousands of people who love you for the wreckage you carry inside you.

He came from Birmingham, which is already a handicap to any kind of sanity, and turned himself into a living monument to chaos. He sang like a man screaming through an industrial accident. He howled like he was sending a message to some long-forgotten god of noise and violence. And people listened. Millions of them. Across generations. Across continents. Across the great cultural wasteland where taste goes to die.

He bit the head off a bat. Yes, we know. That story’s older than half of us. It was never about the fucking bat. It was about commitment. Commitment to madness. Commitment to spectacle. Commitment to being the thing everyone warned their children about. Ozzy lived in that space where fear meets fascination and somehow found a way to laugh at it, with a voice soaked in whiskey and ruin.

And through it all, love. Love for music. Love for family. Love for the people who showed up night after night to scream his name back at him. He survived more than any human body should survive. He fell down, he got up. He fell down harder, he got up again. He lost friends, he lost pieces of himself, but he kept moving. He turned pain into art and suffering into performance and never once apologized for any of it.

The man was heavy metal. Not the sound — the weight. The burden. The unstoppable gravity pulling every misfit and freak and lost soul toward the noise, giving them a home beneath that screaming, electric sky where the heavy metal falls.

Now he’s gone. Finally. Probably sitting on a cloud somewhere arguing with Lemmy about who gets to DJ tonight.

Raise your glasses. Play it loud.

Long live the Prince of Darkness.

Long live Ozzy.