The band Jack Black said “changed the landscape of music”
There was one seismic moment in my musical fandom that made me realise I might just love classic rock. It was when Jack Black, or as I knew him then, ‘Mr Schneebly’, was driving the students of Horace Green back to school after a successful audition, and belting out the vocal line of Led Zeppelin’s ‘Immigrant Song’ to celebrate.
In that scene, and in the entire movie, he was a beacon of rock, bridging the gap between generations. Through his enthusiasm, a whole alumni of burgeoning music fans, including myself, enrolled in his “rock appreciation” class and learned about the greats. Zeppelin, AC/DC and Black Sabbath were all on order, as we bounced through this crash course of bona fide rock.
But as I dug a little deeper, and began to understand Jack Black, the man. He felt like the embodiment of rock and roll, the sort of person whose hand is perennially striking the devil horns symbol. And the only other goddamn person in entertainment who immediately provokes that image in my head is Ozzy Osbourne.
Together, the pair felt like musical blood brothers, charging forward with one goal in mind: to celebrate rock in its finest fucking form. So, given how Black handles himself, it’s no surprise that Osbourne is hailed as one of his all-time heroes. “Ozzy was my introduction to heavy metal music,” Black once said. “I bought Blizzard Of Ozz back in the early ’80s, and it changed my life. He’s a true inspiration and a hero of mine.”
Ozzy’s part operatic, part menacing vocal style is one that Black has adopted in his own performances. Whether it be as part of a character played in School of Rock or High Fidelity, or in his own musical project, Tenacious D, the footprints of Osbourne’s influence can be easily identified.
He continues on to herald Osbourne and Black Sabbath’s role in creating heavy metal, as his source of inspiration, explaining, “But in the same way that people think of The Beatles as inventing rock ’n’ roll, I think of Black Sabbath as inventing heavy metal.”
Perhaps what is most interesting, however, is the inadvertent annoyance Black causes by consistently labelling Sabbath as the pioneers of heavy metal. It was a genre and a label they were quite keen to shrug off in the early years of their career, for they saw the limitations it brought.
“We called it heavy rock,” guitarist Tom Iommi once explained to the BBC. “The term heavy metal came about from a journalist when I came back from America (in the ’70s).” With bassist Geezer Butler adding, “At first we didn’t like being called heavy metal.” Continuing on to say, “But everyone likes to put you into certain pigeon holes.”
But for Black, it wasn’t a pigeonhole at all. It was a window into a world of musical possibility. Delving into that world, Black came to understand what it was to create music that shone with aggressive power and then used that blueprint to make an iconic career of his own.
