Ozzy Osbourne: Rock’s last shadow
By LoffMusic Staff Writer
Birmingham – July 23, 2025
Ozzy is dead.
It’s not an easy sentence to write. Not because we didn’t know it was coming – it’s been years since his body wrote him checks that neither science nor the devil could continue to cash – but because now that the echo has died down, the silence sounds terrifying.
This Monday, in his native Birmingham, John Michael Osbourne – better known as Ozzy, more feared as the Prince of Darkness, more loved as the fucking antihero of rock – breathed his last surrounded by his family, closing an existence as absurd as it was sublime, as painful as it was unforgettable.
The last roar
Earlier this month, we saw him for the last time. Sitting like a cursed emperor on a black throne in Villa Park, the stadium was shaking not because of the decibels, but because of the truth: we were witnessing the end. The beginning of the end of everything.
Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler, Bill Ward. The four men who turned riffs into pagan prayers and incantations into heavy rock were reunited once again. Not out of nostalgia. Out of necessity. To come full circle with elegance, pain and gratitude. It was a mass. A ritual. A farewell without tricks. And Ozzy, as broken as he was invincible, screamed “Paranoid” as if his soul was escaping down his throat.
And among all the moments of that impossible night, there was one that remained carved in the collective memory of rock: a child, standing on his father’s shoulders, wearing a Black Sabbath T-shirt, chanting “Iron Man” at the top of his lungs with his eyes shining with emotion. The camera caught it just as Ozzy looked up in the direction of that sea of generations united by the same roar.
It was as if the past, the present and the future merged into a single chord. As if Ozzy had approved, with an almost invisible gesture, the next generation of lost souls who will find solace in his noise.
The original accident
Ozzy didn’t invent heavy metal. He was heavy metal.
His voice was not academic or virtuosic. It was a factory scream. The song of the damned. He grew up in a tough neighborhood, in a gray city, listening to the Beatles like someone who discovers an emergency exit in an endless tunnel. He was a butcher, a thief, a teenage alcoholic and, with Black Sabbath, the spark that ignited a sonic revolution in 1970 with a single tritone chord.
“Music should make you uncomfortable if it’s honest,” he used to say.
And that’s why the world felt so alive with “War Pigs,” “Children of the Grave” and “Into the Void.” Because they weren’t songs. They were warnings.
The martyr of excess
Where does the character end and the man begin?
In Ozzy, that line blurred decades ago. Bathed in booze, bathed in fake blood, in lawsuits, in cheap fame and real tragedies. He bit a bat in Iowa. Pissed on the Alamo. He lost Randy Rhoads. He lost himself on several occasions. And yet he was resurrected so many times that even Jesus Christ wouldn’t have his service record.
He was accused of attempting to murder his wife Sharon, who was also his resurrection and his jailer. He was a cartoon figure on MTV, an absentee father, a terrible husband, a fragile soul. And at the same time, a survivor. A real one. The kind that bleeds, not the kind that poses.
Eternity does not need autotune
Ozzy was never cool. He was never cool in the traditional sense. He didn’t make records with algorithms in mind. Nor in TikTok. His last musical breath was Patient Number 9, an introspective and chaotic work, where he already seemed to sing to the afterlife.
In 2024, he was inducted into the Hall of Fame as a solo artist, and although he laughed about it in interviews, it escaped no one’s notice that something in his eyes seemed to be saying goodbye.
Ozzy Forever
The networks were flooded with tributes. The stadiums lit candles. Radios dusted off “Crazy Train”. But the real tribute is not in the hashtags. It is in the teenager who feels misunderstood in 2025 and finds in Master of Reality a religion.
Ozzy wasn’t perfect. He was something better: he was real.
He sang our shadows. He was our dirtiest mirror. And at times, our most unlikely savior.
Today rock is in mourning, yes. But in truth, rock is grateful. Because we had him. Because it screamed for all those who couldn’t. Because he turned chaos into art.
Because even though his voice no longer booms, Ozzy is not dead.
He has become a legend.
And legends are not buried.
Legends rumble.
