Ozzy Osbourne, who rose to fame as the lead singer of Black Sabbath, has died at the age of 76, two weeks and a couple of days after playing his final concert. That concert, dubbed Back to the Beginning, took place in England, in his hometown of Birmingham, before a crowd of 45,000 people and a global audience of nearly 6 million.
He performed on a throne built for the event; Osbourne, diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in February 2019, could no longer walk. From this throne, he sang, for the last time, songs that comprise the bedrock of heavy metal: songs which, when new, spoke both musically and lyrically to profound feelings of alienation and frustration, themes seldom addressed in popular music before Black Sabbath.
His musical accomplishment has few points of comparison. He did not play an instrument; with a few exceptions, he did not write the lyrics he sang. (Geezer Butler, his bassist, did that.) Osbourne’s role within Black Sabbath was frontman, a term that tells you more about the blocking of the stage than the requirements of the position. His vocal melodies, for the first several Black Sabbath albums—the ones that cemented the band’s reputation and legacy—follow the guitar lines almost obsessively. “After Forever,” from Master of Reality, exemplifies this trait: “Well I have seen the truth, yes I’ve seen the light and I’ve changed my ways/And I’ll be prepared when you’re lonely and scared at the end of our days,” he sings along with Tony Iommi’s monolithic riff. Within the line there’s barely room for breath, yet his delivery is neither frantic nor inattentive. It is casually exact, present and available to the song, and, therefore, to the listener. His task was to embody the feeling within the lyrics Butler wrote specifically for him to sing. His job, to speak crassly, was to sell us the songs.
And yet, within this framework, his musical accomplishment is so immense that it sets a standard most frontmen can only hope to approach. Possessing, by most estimates, an average vocal range of three-and-a-half octaves, give or take, he brought to his craft a natural, relatable mood, remarkably infectious across time and presumptive cultural barriers, playing in at least 43 countries during his 57 years as a performer.
The timbre of his voice—instantly recognizable; once heard, never thereafter mistaken for anybody else’s—allowed those who experienced it to feel addressed; recognized; seen. This set him apart from his peers in hard rock, vocalists of greater force and technical mastery. You cannot, on your best day, imagine being Robert Plant, but Osbourne is like Jerry Garcia. When he’s singing, he might even be you, given different circumstance. He makes the moment feel generally available.