I just read that Ozzy Osbourne died at the age of 76. It seems a little absurd to go on about the death of an aged metal singer at a time like this, but almost any man’s death diminishes me, Ozzy’s included. So forgive me.
Ozzy was a mediocre singer, and the less said about his public persona, the better. But he was blessed to work with some great musicians, and together they wrote some immortal songs. Black Sabbath deserves a place in heaven for “War Pigs” all by itself, but “I Don’t Know,” “Over the Mountain,” “Flying High Again,” and “I Don’t Wanna Stop,” all make worthy contributions to the aesthetic education of man, and are all candidates for the musical equivalent of eternal life.
Photo credit: F darkbladeus, Wikipedia
Ozzy himself was notably inarticulate, even incoherent, in ordinary speech, but could achieve crystalline clarity in song. “I Don’t Know” professes ignorance on all of the tough issues of cosmology, but manages to get things right where they matter:
Nobody ever told me, I found out for myselfYou gotta believe in foolish miraclesIt’s not how you play the game, it’s if you win or loseYou can choose, don’t confuseWin or lose
It’s up to you
The first two lines are clear enough, a paean to autonomous inquiry where the “foolish miracle” in question is the very possibility of success at the venture. But haven’t we always been taught that it’s how you play the game, not if you win or lose? Has Ozzy fucked up here?
No, he’s managed deftly to marry Aristotle to Kant: how you play a game depends on why you’re playing, in the teleological sense–the object of the game, the rules that constitute it–which in turn dictates the point of the game, and the standards of winning and losing. If you decouple the how from the why, you lose the point; if you decouple the why from the how, you lose integrity. Ozzy keeps them both together. Once chosen, your standards govern your life, making “winning” both an internal matter of character and a moral imperative. But the imperative is a matter of autonomous choice, not external imposition. That’s why you had to discover it yourself; you had to, because no one, not even God, was there to spoonfeed you the answers. It’s all “up to you”–the knowing, the choosing, the doing, and the winning.
Ozzy then proceeds, with the intensity of prayer, to repeat that Sartrean (or Miltonian) liturgy three times, building eventually to an ecstatic crescendo, followed by one of Randy Rhoads’s best guitar solos:
It’s up to you. It’s up to you. It’s up to you (“Go, go, go…!”)
People sometimes ask me what it was like to make the pilgrimage to Mecca and experience the transcendent spirituality of that sacred place. I don’t know about spirituality. It just seemed like a great metal venue: great acoustics, plenty of open space, a big black cube for a stage with an ancient meteorite inside. If only they’d had Ozzfest there.
Courtyard of the Great Mosque at Mecca, photo credit: Richard Mortel, Wikimedia Commons
Blasphemous, I guess, but what’s metal without blasphemy? Thank the Prince of Darkness for that. Never before Ozzy has metaphysical freedom been so loud. Never before him was the message so clear. And never before him has there been a better proof of the proposition: if it’s too loud, you’re too old. RIP, Ozzy. If anyone could be said to have earned eternal rest, it’s you.
Policy of Truth 