Cascadia Calling 2025.07.28

my eyes are blind but I can see / the snowflakes glisten on the trees

I promise I don’t plan through-lines in these columns, but sometimes circumstances provide them. Last week I wrote about Taylor Swift and this week I’m talking about another artist with massive impact across music and culture. I’m talking, of course, about Ozzy Osbourne, The Prince of Darkness, who has recently left the mortal coil.

Many writers more talented than I have already written about Ozzy, so if you’re only going to read one thing about his death, I suggest Kim Kelly’s fantastic piece in The Nation. Here, I just want to write about a few songs of his that mean something to me and, I think, presage his influence on modern music.

I discovered Ozzy in reverse. My love of heavy metal started with artists who were two generations after him. When I grew up, we were already in the midst of the Cambrian explosion of genres that has left us with a baffling diversity of metal and hard rock, all with slightly different musical characteristics. I was listening to Metallica, Snake River Conspiracy, Type O Negative, White Zombie and others. My trip into the roots of metal started with an Iron Maiden collection and it peaked my curiosity about earlier metal bands because it sounded so different from the pounding, theatrical (and sometimes schlocky) metal I was used to, but there was clearly similarity there. It was like discovering the common evolutionary ancestor of a whole clade of music that I loved. From there, I listened to Ozzy’s later stuff and haphazardly worked my way backwards into the Black Sabbath years.

Listening to “Snowblind” on repeat this week, I think one of the things that stands out about it is that it’s not maximalist like a lot of modern metal. Metal subgenres are, in a way, all taking one element of the formula and pushing it as far as it can go. Here, you can elements of rhythmic complexity, soaring guitar solos, heavy drums and sludgy bass lines. Grab the aesthetic slider of any of these and crank it to max and you get a different modern genre.

But go back and listen to this song with fresh ears, if you can, completely divorced from how influential Ozzy is. It’s such a triumph. It builds a whole little rhythmic and melodic world and Ozzy’s vocal delivery is imbued with a surprising amount wistfulness. Meanwhile by the end of the song, Tony Iommi seems to have gotten bored and decided to just solo until the tape runs out, and yet his playing still fits the whole. It’s a song like few others. At their best, Sabbath were like nothing before or since.

If you needed more evidence that all metal tendancies are presaged by Ozzy and Black Sabbath, “Sweet Leaf” is my exhibit B. It swings from sludgy guitars and plodding drums to spoodily-spoodily guitar solos and back again, with some soaring melodic bits in between. It’s a little more self-aware than most modern metal. The audio-pan on the coughing that opens the track feels like an in-joke, but it’s also the perfect way to set up the song so that the lyrical innuendos explain themselves.

“Sweet Leaf” also cements Sabbath as masters of hooks the likes of which we don’t get much of in these days. I think the maximalist tendencies cover up for a washed out musical palette in a lot of modern metal. Every Ozzy or Sabbath track feels distinct and complex and never tries to hide behind any one element of the song.

This richness in Sabbath’s songs is what helped birth the diversity of metal and hard rock that we hear today.

You can almost hear a Beatles song in the opening of “Mr. Crowley”. In a way, I think Ozzy’s willingness to be a bit goofy gave permission to all of the metal bands who came after him to do the same. You don’t get Rob Zombie’s schtick or Dragonforce’s guitar wank without Ozzy singing a metal ballad about occultist and self-proclaimed wizard Aleister Crowley with complete earnestness.

And how about that absolutely delightful, completely masturbatory solo?

The Prince of Darkness is dead; The Prince of Darkness lives on. He sired thousands of bands and dozens of genres, and I don’t know that there’s anyone alive on the planet that can claim to have done the same. Hell, even he had the good sense and humility to downplay is own influence, but it doesn’t change the fact that he touched everything in metal that exists today.