When I was growing up in the early 2000s, few cultural figures confused me more than Ozzy Osbourne. He was, I understood, the “Prince of Darkness,” a legendary influence upon Tool, Linkin Park, and various other fearsome and dour bands I worshipped. But Osbourne was also the bumbling, profanity-dribbling star of The Osbournes, the smash reality show about his life of Hollywood domesticity with his wife and kids. On TV, Osbourne wasn’t a demon; he was just some dude.Years later it’s clear that this cognitive dissonance is precisely why he was regarded as a titan. The Black Sabbath frontman, who died Tuesday at age 76, helped invent heavy metal—a sound and a countercultural identity with terrifying connotations. But he showed how that identity was rooted in the very thing that it superficially seemed to obscure: the warm, soft human core inside each of us. Osbourne knew that metal is not the music of hell but rather the music of Earth, not a fantasy but a survival guide.His own survival story began early in life. Raised in a working-class family of eight in the industrial English town of Birmingham, Osbourne had parents who put in long hours at factories. His father was “one of those guys who’d go to work if he’d been in a car accident, if his house had been blown up,” Osbourne later said. Dyslexia caused Osbourne to struggle with academics, and his headmaster once humiliated him by sending him home for looking, as Osbourne remembered it, “not clean enough.” Two classmates routinely sexually abused him—an experience whose effects festered in his psyche for years. “I was afraid to tell my father or mother and it completely fucked me up,” Osbourne said.Like many kids of the ’60s, Osbourne had his mind blown by the Beatles and felt called to form a band. It was first called the Polka Tulk Blues Band, then called Earth, and then called Black Sabbath. Bloody serendipity helped create Sabbath’s signature sound: When guitarist Tony Iommi sliced the ends of his fingers on the job at a sheet-metal factory, he was forced to create false fingertips out of soap bottles, which in turn caused him to play in an eerie, leaden-sounding fashion. But the nightmarish vibe of the band’s self-titled 1970 debut was also the result of strategic thinking—inspired, in part, by the knowledge of how popular horror movies were at the time.Black Sabbath perform live on stage at Paradiso in Amsterdam, Holland on December 04 1971. (Gijsbert Hanekroot / Redferns / Getty)Osbourne sang in the high howl of a man being burned at the stake, and his melodies unfolded in a slow, hypnotic smolder. The lyrics—chiefly written by other bandmates, with input from Osbourne—were about devils and wizards and men made of iron, but they were also about reality. “Wicked World,” a B-side from the debut, delivered peacenik thoughts with a snarl: “People got to work just to earn their bread / While people just across the sea are counting their dead.” The protest epic “War Pigs,” from 1970’s Paranoid, portrayed military generals as evil occultists. Despite what Christian activists during the Satanic Panic of the 1980s would claim, much of Osbourne’s music was doing the opposite of sympathizing with the devil.[Read: How heavy metal is keeping us sane]Black Sabbath partied like any rock band, but Osbourne was famous for partaking of drugs and alcohol at extremes. The group kicked him out in 1979 after he slept through a concert and didn’t wake up until a day later. He went in and out of rehab repeatedly. He described many of his most notorious experiences as resulting from confusion—confusion that seems inextricable from living life intoxicated. When he bit off a bat’s head in 1982, it was because he thought it was a stage prop. When he devoured two doves during a record-label meeting in 1981, he was drunk. When he tried to strangle his wife, Sharon, in 1989, he woke up in jail with no memory of what happened. (He later spoke of the latter incident with horror and regret.)Accordingly, Osbourne’s music captured the viewpoint of someone out of touch with their own mind, whose good intentions are thwarted by horrible urges. On “Paranoid,” Osbourne shouted monotonously from within a maze of riffs, like he was trapped and needing help. On “Crazy Train,” the enduring single from his 1980 solo debut Blizzard of Ozz, his high notes sounded like the Doppler-distorted cries of someone strapped into a vehicle they can’t control. The parents of a teen who died by suicide in 1984 sued him over the lyrics to “Suicide Solution,” claiming it encouraged self-harm. But the song was really about alcoholism, a “reaper” that stalks its helpless victims.Osbourne’s public rebirth with The Osbournes—the MTV reality series that ran from 2002 to 2005—transmuted his erratic nature and past struggles into a miraculous joke. Living in a taupe-painted mansion rather than a haunted castle, Osbourne was clearly mismatched to his surroundings—hence all the befuddled stammering and incongruous black outfits. But he also obviously wanted to be a good dad and husband. This normalcy was something he’d prized for decades. A lifelong Christian, he told The New York Times in 1992, “I am not the Antichrist. I am a family man.”He also eagerly played the role of rock elder statesman by founding the influential Ozzfest with Sharon and seemingly showing up to most any awards show or commercial shoot that would have him. Weeks before his death, Black Sabbath reunited for a final show featuring a host of bands they’d influenced (including my beloved Tool). It now seems like it was an early wake for Osbourne. Frail from Parkinson’s disease and other health issues, he sat in a throne, grinning at the crowd’s adulation. Being so known, so loved, and so loving might not seem very metal. But it takes iron to last like he did.Flowers are left at a makeshift memorial at Ozzy Osbourne's Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on July 22, 2025, in Los Angeles. (Patrick T. Fallon / AFP / Getty)