The Beautiful Death of Ozzy Osbourne: How Metal Teaches Us to Live
Author: Keith Kahn-Harris
ISBN-13: 978-0008819804
Publisher: HarperNorth
Guideline Price: £16.99
Nothing became Ozzy Osbourne’s life like his leaving of it. On July 5th at Villa Park in Birmingham, just a few hundred metres from where he grew up, he sat on an ornamental throne – he was too ill to stand – and made his last Black Sabbath performance.
It was part of Back to the Beginning, the metal equivalent of Live Aid, which generated €150 million from live tickets and streams, the profits of which went to local charities.
Seventeen days later he died of a heart attack at the age of 76. Given his multiple health issues, both self-inflicted from many years of drink and drug abuse, and natural from Parkinson’s disease and various other maladies that affect the ageing human body, it is a wonder that he lived so long.
The Beautiful Death of Ozzy Osbourne is an attempt by metal scholar and journalist Keith Kahn-Harris to make sense of his subject matter’s life and death.
He argues, successfully in my view, that metal is a genre of music that deserves to be taken seriously, not least because, unlike other forms of music, it does not shy away from the fundamental reality that we will all die some day.
Kahn-Harris posits that you don’t need to like metal – most people don’t – to recognise that it “embodies much-needed values: loyalty, resilience, community and a sense of history”.
The author does not shy away from Osbourne’s many transgressions – his various addictions and his violent behaviour towards his wives, most notably his attempts during a psychotic episode to strangle Sharon Osbourne in 1989, an incident that was forgiven by her but not forgotten.
As Kahn-Harris points out, metal is an “unusually non-judgmental place”.
The book ventures into a wider discussion of contemporary metal culture, focusing on the line-up of Back to the Beginning which Kahn-Harris notes was overwhelmingly white, male, ageing and Anglo-American.
It is a reflection on the tastes of those who put the show together, but not reflective of the fact that metal has become a truly international genre.
I’ve always been a big fan of Black Sabbath and Ozzy Osbourne’s solo work, but never of the singer himself. I always thought of him as a bit of a self-obsessed man-child, but this sympathetic and empathetic book has given me pause for thought.
Kahn-Harris has done his subject matter a great service. It’s not just a book about Osbourne, but a book about legacy and mortality. Ozzy Osbourne was a flawed person, but aren’t we all?
