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Some things are too big to understand while they’re happening. Ozzy was always like that. He wasn’t just a singer or some rock icon, he was something bigger. Something that felt like a living part of music’s soul. I woke up today to the news and it felt fake at first, like maybe the world got it wrong. But it didn’t. Ozzy’s gone. It’s real, and it hurts in a way that’s hard to name. Maybe because no matter what age you are, if you ever really loved music, at some point Ozzy found his way into your life. And once he did, he stayed there.
There was something brutal and beautiful about where he came from. Birmingham in the sixties wasn’t a dreamland. It was a place of machines, sweat, smoke and gray skies. That kind of place doesn’t hand out music careers, let alone legends. But Ozzy didn’t wait for permission. He, Tony, Geezer and Bill pulled the sound of that place into the world and called it Black Sabbath. And suddenly, everything shifted. Metal wasn’t a genre yet, it was a feeling. It was anger and fear and rebellion, and somehow comfort too. Sabbath wasn’t clean. It wasn’t safe. It was real. And at the heart of it all, Ozzy’s voice, like a warning and a prayer at the same time.
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You couldn’t plan a life like his. Kicked out of Sabbath, left broken, he could’ve disappeared. But Ozzy doesn’t disappear. He crashes through. Blizzard of Ozz wasn’t just a comeback, it was a second birth. Songs like Crazy Train and Mr. Crowley felt like they had been buried underground, waiting for someone like him to dig them up. He stumbled, a lot. The world laughed at him, judged him, watched him fall apart on TV. But he never hid. Even when he was lost, there was always something honest in him. He wasn’t pretending to be a hero. He was surviving, screaming, stumbling forward.
Everything that came before seemed to lead to this month. July fifth. Villa Park. One last Sabbath show with the full original lineup. Ozzy in his home city, in front of tens of thousands, singing like he hadn’t aged a day and yet like he knew he’d never do it again. That concert didn’t feel like a performance. It felt like a goodbye written years ago and just now unfolding. No one said it out loud, but everyone felt it. Watching from home, I cried more than once. I’m the same age as his daughter Kelly, and still, somehow, he reached me like few artists ever have. He didn’t speak to one generation. He belonged to all of us.
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Now the world feels a little quieter. Ozzy’s voice always felt like it could cut through anything, even death. But today it’s silent. He didn’t just make music. He made people feel like it was okay to be strange. To be loud. To be broken. His life wasn’t perfect, not even close. And that’s why we loved him. He didn’t float above us. He crawled through the same mud and madness, and sang while doing it. That’s rare. That’s why he matters. That’s why this hurts. And that’s why even though he’s gone, we’ll keep hearing him. In garages. In headphones. In stadiums. In our bones.
