The artist Ozzy Osbourne called “integral” to creating metal
Ozzy Osbourne always ate, breathed, and slept all things metal.
As much as people saw him as something completely different once he embraced the world of reality television, there was always a charm coming from his ability to get up onstage and drive everyone crazy singing some of Geezer Butler’s most macabre lyrics for Black Sabbath. But despite being one of the founders of metal, Osbourne was always kind in saying that heavy metal was something that had to be forged over time.
Looking through rock and roll history, there was more than Sabbath that laid the groundwork for metal music. The Beatles had their fair share of heavy tunes that could be classified as proto-metal, and The Kinks certainly have their place in both hard rock and punk history for coming up with ‘You Really Got Me’, but by the late 1960s, you can hear Sabbath’s influences everywhere. Cream had been pioneering a louder sound that no one else had heard, and what Sabbath was doing almost felt like a gloomier version of what Led Zeppelin had done.
But with Osbourne, it was still about having fun. As much as ‘Black Sabbath’ was enough to scare the life out of any unsuspecting pop fan, it’s clear that ‘The Prince of Darkness’ was having a lot of fun taking the building blocks of blues and turning them into his own little horror movie over the course of a few minutes. Then again, who said metal always had to be dark?
The music should have been the kind of thing meant to piss off every parent in the world, and the early hard rock bands had that down to a science. Alice Cooper was making sure that people knew how macabre rock and roll could get, and The Who managed to get people riled up through the sheer volume that they were using onstage, but when it comes to pure metal, Osbourne felt nothing compared to what Lemmy had done during his lifetime.
However, does Motorhead technically qualify as a metal band? Sure, they can play loud and have created some of the finest rock and roll tunes of their era, but Lemmy always stood by the fact that they played rock and roll, and when listening to the rest of their catalogue, there aren’t too many people who would disagree with that hearing their mix of hard rock, punk and blues on each record.
Still, Osbourne felt it was worth giving Lemmy a seat in the metal community, saying, “Lemmy Kilmister was a very integral part of this. In my opinion, Lemmy Kilmister was the ultimate metal guy. He lived blues, meth, and malt brews. And he was a dear friend of mine. I really miss not having Lemmy around anymore.” But even for a genre known for being gritty, Osbourne also clicked with Lemmy as a songwriter before anything else.
For all of the claims that Lemmy wrote the same song every single time he made a Motorhead album, songs like ‘Mama I’m Coming Home’ only prove how wrong that assessment is. Yes, metalheads might have the reputation of being people who bang their head and don’t give a damn about anything, but no one is without that tender heart every now and again, and whether it’s listening to Lemmy pen a beautiful ballad, the swagger of ‘Ace of Spades’ or the acoustic sounds of ‘Whorehouse Blues’, he always put his heart and soul into everything he did.
And, really, that should be enough to put someone like him into rock and roll heaven for life. Osbourne was certainly proud of the mark that he left on the world, but he realised that a lot of the trappings that a lot of people take for granted these days all come back to when people like him and Lemmy were testing things out and seeing where rock and roll could go beyond the three-minute single.
