“Nothing like each other”: the metal mainstay Ozzy Osbourne refused to watch
Heavy metal boasts a seemingly unending number of subgenres, styles, and distinctive scenes, placing it among the most expansive genres from across the musical landscape. However, none of those countless different niches would exist without the pioneering efforts of Ozzy Osbourne or Black Sabbath, who blazed a trail for virtually all future metal outfits from their inception in 1968. Yet, the ‘Godfather of Metal’ himself has never been particularly keen on the title of ‘heavy metal’.
Over the years, Osbourne has rallied against the term ‘heavy metal’ in countless different interviews and live appearances, and it seems his animosity towards the genre stretches all the way back to his time with Black Sabbath. After all, the Birmingham outfit was among the first groups to be branded with the metal tag, despite the band members instead referring to themselves as hard rock. “At first we didn’t like being called heavy metal,” bassist Geezer Butler has since shared. “But everyone likes to put you into certain pigeon holes, so we sort of got used to it.”
Not only did Black Sabbath get put into that pigeon hole, they essentially invented the hole. Their revolutionary music laid the foundations for multiple generations of metal artists and spawned a variety of different scenes and subgenres throughout the 1970s and beyond. Still, the band – and Osbourne in particular – seem to resent the term heavy metal, largely due to the fact that it lumps a plethora of vastly different groups together under the same umbrella term.
When Sabbath started out, they were among only a few groups playing that specific brand of heavy, hard rock, alongside the likes of Deep Purple or Led Zeppelin. As a result, the band were given opportunities to perform alongside a wealth of different artists, all belonging to different styles and subgenres, whereas, in the modern age, metal bands perform almost exclusively with other metal bands. “In the ’70s, you’d get bands like the Eagles, Yes, and Sabbath playing the same gig,” Osbourne recalled in a 2012 interview for Spin.
“We opened up for James Taylor one time,” the singer continued, highlighting the changing tides of the music industry. “Nowadays, it’s like these rap packages, these metal packages, these alternative packages.” These simplistic collections of artists are by no means a modern invention, and, in the metal world, it was arguably the MTV show Headbangers Ball which started this trend.
First airing in 1987 and showing on and off until 2012, Headbangers Ball collected music videos and performances from a wealth of different artists, all collated under the banner of ‘heavy metal’. This, of course, included Black Sabbath and Osbourne’s extensive solo catalogue, but the man himself never saw the appeal of the show.
“To be totally honest with you, Headbangers Ball, I couldn’t watch it because it’s too much,” he shared. “And I’m called heavy metal. But it went from Poison, Bon Jovi, Aerosmith, Ozzy, Motörhead [to] Metallica.” Osbourne concluded. “We were all called heavy metal, but we’re nothing like each other musically.”
Despite his apparent appreciation for outfits like Metallica, Osbourne’s issue with the heavy metal terminology appears to be the oversimplification that it brings. Bon Jovi, for instance, has very little in common with Motörhead, so to class them in the same category is not only lazy but borderline offensive, at least in the eyes of the genre’s progenitor.
