How Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath pioneered an entire world of metal

No one planned it. Least of all Black Sabbath and definitely not Ozzy.

\When Ozzy and Sabbath took to the stage and looked out at the crowd at Villa Park, they weren’t just looking out at a mass of individual fans; they were looking out at a culture, a way of life, a living, breathing world unto itself.

None of the accounts repeated over the years by Ozzy and the members of Black Sabbath give much of a sense that, when they started out, they were trying to build anything other than an audience. One much-told story is that in the early days their rehearsal space was across the road from a cinema and that, one day, either Geezer Butler or Tony Iommi had the idea that if people would pay to be scared by a film, they’d pay to be scared by music (sometimes the story claims that this revelation was sparked by a specific horror film showing at the cinema, Black Sabbath, featuring Boris Karloff ).

Neither Butler nor Iommi mention the exact story in their memoirs, but Ozzy did recount it in interviews, so he may be the origin of it. Apocryphal or not, perhaps members of the band had an intuition that there was an unmet need, a certain kind of person waiting for what Sabbath could offer. Sabbath also felt like outsiders in the music industry. This had a lot to do with being from unfashionable Birmingham, outside the orbit of the music industry in then-swinging London, as much as anything. That alienation may have fed a conviction that there was a similarly alienated audience waiting to be served. On such fragile intuitions, a world now rests.

You can trace all human civilisations back to insubstantial beginnings. One of the mos extraordinary examples can be found in language. About 5,000 years ago – or possibly more, researchers disagree – a group of people, likely to be nomads, lived on the Pontic-Caspian steppes in what is now Ukraine and Russia. They never developed anything like an empire or a state, we have no idea what they called themselves, and they left very limited traces in the archaeological record. However, they spoke a language that, while it was never recorded or written down, is the common ancestor of languages spoken today by billions. What linguistics call ‘proto-Indo-European’ evolved into languages as distinct from each other as Hindi, Persian, Icelandic, Lithuanian, Russian, Spanish and English.

Metal is only in its sixth decade. Its development has been so rapid that it is becoming difficult to see how the individual branches on the metal family tree are related to each other, let alone to their common ancestor. As we will see, while Back to the Beginning did not offer a complete cross-section of all known metal genres, the lineup still showed how remarkably diverse metal’s evolution has been. Tool’s lengthy and intricate noodling seems to have little in common with the violence and speed of Slayer. Gojira’s tight and austere riff ology is a world away from Guns N’ Roses’ rockist posturing.

Black Sabbath themselves sounded like no one else on the bill. Musical languages – just like spoken tongues – can develop much faster than the cultures within which they are spoken. Despite the rapid evolution of metal music, metal culture still retains a sense of itself as some kind of whole. Perhaps it is like a family in which some relatives adore each other while others feud or ignore each other: thrash and death metal still love to hang out with each other; black metal pretends to stand alone from everyone else but in practice is very much a part of things; 80s hair metal was once an embarrassing youth, but now, as they’ve aged, everyone has a soft spot for them.

Black Sabbath is the safe conversation topic you can have when, a few drinks down, feuding relatives start to kick off around the dinner table. While metal has many ancestors,not everyone in the family acknowledges the debt they owe to all of them (Grand Funk Railroad is a forgotten great uncle). Sabbath are the beloved grandparents everyone claims to respect.

Metal remains a family, a culture – for the time being at least – in part because outsiders still often treat metal as if it were homogenous. The subtle distinctions between deathcore and metalcore mean very little in the wider world. A bouffanted hair metaller on the Sunset Strip in 1988 may not be seen by the world as distinct from a bedroom black metal miserabilist in provincial Norway in the early 1990s. We are living in a world where the main protagonist in the 2019 film Sound of Metal is supposed to be understood as a metal musician when his band is more like noise rock. To even point out such distinctions to non-metalheads is to come across as a nerdish pedant. The world wants metal to be one thing, and we have little choice but to go with it.

Still, metal culture isn’t just bound together by family resemblances and external definition. Metal isn’t just something you listen to or play; it is something you do. That is what makes it a scene (or, more correctly, a family of interlinked scenes). A scene – or a metal scene at any rate – isn’t just a collection of individuals; it is a network of tangible institutions and practices. Metal scenes are websites, record companies, fanzines, magazines, venues, promoters, rehearsal rooms and people who just seem to make things happen.

Without this, there would be nothing. This ‘infrastructure’ is built on a variety of scales. In the 90s and 2000s, the Ozzfest – the travelling festival set up by Ozzy and Sharon – was one of the most important institutions in introducing established and upcoming metal acts across North America and beyond. It also made serious money. The uncountable number of tiny labels releasing obscure extreme metal recordings to tiny audiences are similarly essential in building the scene’s vitality from the ground up.

Taken from THE BEAUTIFUL DEATH OF OZZY OSBOURNE: How Metal Teaches Us to Live by Keith Kahn-Harris.