Yeah, I was not a super huge Ozzy fan. Black Sabbath was mostly before my time, and I was always more interested in the guitarists on Ozzy's solo albums than I was in Ozzy himself. So since the news, I've been trying to pin down what made Ozzy the popular icon he is. For someone who represented a musical genre, he really didn't do much to define it. I mean, he didn't have an objectively great singing voice. He didn't compose the music or write the lyrics that were responsible for this new musical genre and which made him famous. I think he maybe only came up with some of the vocal melodies in his Sabbath and solo catalog. Musically, he was a front man in the most cynical use of the word. A figurehead who attained heights with a lot of others creativity doing most of the heavy lifting. And he had this whole career outside of making music that was engineered primarily by his wife.
So what made Ozzy an icon? Ultimately, I think it was that Ozzy was Ozzy and nothing more or less. The Alamo-pissing, bat-head-biting Prince of Darkness. And people of a certain age and social standing loved him for it. He was the square peg to society's round hole who really had no capacity to be anything notable in established and traditional ways. So he lived life without much regard for if or how it might line up to anyone else's expectations and damn if he didn't wind up digging himself a hell of a square hole to exist in. That's something that resonates, man. Timelessly, across generations. Its the struggle of all young people coming of age and wondering how they could possibly become anything of note in a world that they seem to live on the fringes of. If Ozzy could do it, they can do it.