It’s easy to forget that Ozzy Osbourne is a heavy metal singer. The reality show, his wife’s talk show, his kids’ drug problems and his kids’ musical problems are only part of the reason. Thirty-five years in the rock & roll business has made Osbourne more of an archetype than an actual creative presence in the metal world. His image (or at least the image most metal fans hold dear, which would be to say, not the doddering old fart) is a powerful thing, and his imprimatur on every year’s Ozzfest is what has made the tour such a continuing success. To be sure, Osbourne has always been about image, and from the devilish dirtbag of his Sabbath days to the drunken demon of his early solo career to the wistful overlord of today, he’s been a careful steward of that image.
Image is one thing, but what will be Ozzy’s true legacy? Some of us will remember him as the sordid pills/booze/coke-hound of Blizzard of Ozz days, others as the metal godfather of Ozzfest, while still others as the doddering old fart on the TV show. (Osbourne himself remarked in a recent Esquire article that his tombstone will read: “Here lies Ozzy Osbourne, the ex-Black Sabbath singer who bit the head off a bat.”) Note that all those things relate to his image and not his music. Prince of Darkness, a new four-CD set, seems to be a step by Osbourne (or at least his record company) to remind people that, at the end of the day, he is a heavy metal singer.
To that end, the box is successful. It splays out 52 songs most are non-album tracks as a testament to a musical career that has been surprisingly consistent, despite the singer’s rather inconsistent lifestyle. Although the packaging is lame, consisting primarily of old fliers and song lyrics, the introductory track-by-track comments by Ozzy are a hoot. The expected hits are spread over two discs, but many of them (“Flying High Again,” “Bark at the Moon”) are live versions, while others (“Mama, I’m Coming Home”) are demo versions that eclipse the high-polish releases. (The re-recorded studio versions of tracks from the first two albums are here, too, unfortunately.)
But what makes this such an odd set is that the other two discs are given over to covers and collaborations (Ozzy with Miss Piggy, Ozzy with Wu-Tang Clan, Ozzy with Was Not Was you pick the weirdest). The cover disc is flabbergasting in a good way. Versions of “Mississippi Queen” and, most notably, Arthur Brown’s “Fire” make the songs sound as if they were written for Ozzy, while covers of The Beatles’ “In My Life” and King Crimson’s “21st Century Schizoid Man” show that he’s a little less metal than some folks may have thought.
So yes, Prince of Darkness lands with a thud, proclaiming that Ozzy is ultimately a heavy metal singer. He’s not a particularly inventive songwriter and all his most memorable musical moments come courtesy of the endless string of amazing guitar players he’s worked with. But if he manages to avoid letting his wife trot him out for some other exploitative adventure, this box will go far in preserving his legacy and, perhaps, adding an extra line or two to that tombstone.
This article appears in Apr 6-12, 2005.