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25-07-2025
- Entertainment
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Watch Coldplay Honor Ozzy Osbourne With Cover of Black Sabbath's ‘Changes'
Coldplay paid tribute to Ozzy Osbourne during their concert in Nashville Tuesday night following the musician's death. Frontman Chris Martin dedicated the performance to Osbourne before the band showcased a cover of Black Sabbath's 1972 ballad 'Changes.' 'We'd like to dedicate this whole show to the incredible genius, talent, and character-full gift to the world who was Ozzy Osbourne,' Martin told the audience at Nissan Stadium. 'We send our love to his family.' Coldplay then showcased a stripped down rendition of 'Changes,' which opens with the lines, 'I feel unhappy, I feel so sad/ I've lost the best friend that I ever had.' More from Rolling Stone Lita Ford Remembers Ozzy Osbourne: 'In Ozzy's Name, Keep Rocking' Drake Honors Ozzy Osbourne at Birmingham Concert Ozzy Osbourne's Top Ten Beatles Songs After the song, Martin added, 'Ozzy, we love you, wherever you're going.' Black Sabbath released 'Changes' as part of their album Vol. 4. In his 2011 autobiography, I Am Ozzy, Osbourne noted that the song was inspired by the end of guitarist Bill Ward's first marriage. In 2003, Osbourne and his daughter Kelly Osbourne released a duet version of the track with revised lyrics. Earlier this month, Yungblud performed a cover of 'Changes' live at Black Sabbath's Back to the Beginning benefit concert at Villa Park in Birmingham, England. Yungblud paid tribute to Osbourne in a lengthy Instagram post, writing, 'I will never forget you — you will be in every single note I sing and with me every single time I walk on stage. Your cross around my neck is the most precious thing I own. You asked me once if there was anything you could do for me and as I said then and as I will say now for all of us the music was enough. You took us on your adventure — an adventure that started it all. I am truly heartbroken. You were the greatest of all time.' Best of Rolling Stone Sly and the Family Stone: 20 Essential Songs The 50 Greatest Eminem Songs All 274 of Taylor Swift's Songs, Ranked Solve the daily Crossword
Yahoo
25-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Why the World Never Fell Out of Love with the Prince of Darkness
Ozzy Osbourne told Rolling Stone in 2002 he already knew what his epitaph would say. 'I guarantee that if I was to die tonight, tomorrow it would be, 'Ozzy Osbourne, the man who bit the head off a bat, died in his hotel room …'' he said. 'I know that's coming.' He'd made his peace with that fate. 'I've got no complaints. At least I'll be remembered.' But Ozzy got this one wrong. The world is in mourning for him, after the news of his death yesterday at 76. But not as a cartoon metal maniac chomping on bat flesh. We're mourning for Ozzy as one of the most unimpeachably human voices in music, and one of the most cherished legends in pop culture. It was Ozzy's moon. The rest of us just barked at it. For a guy with such a niche background — no rock band had ever set out to scare normies away like Black Sabbath — he became a universal figure as beloved as Ringo. Who else could sing duets with Lita Ford, Busta Rhymes, Elton John, Post Malone, and Miss Piggy without losing any metal cred? No matter how prolific or unprolific he was, even when he was a mess, people cherished Ozzy with an intensely loyal affection that was really unlike anything else. The world never fell out of love with this Prince of Darkness. More from Rolling Stone Ozzy Osbourne Documentary 'No Escape From Now' Still Set for Release This Fall Lita Ford Remembers Ozzy Osbourne: 'In Ozzy's Name, Keep Rocking' Drake Honors Ozzy Osbourne at Birmingham Concert Ozzy blew up into a Seventies teenage antihero because he seemed to speak for the misfits, the rejects, the outcasts. He helped invent metal as we know it with Black Sabbath, but he kept rolling through the years with one of the longest and strangest rock careers. With The Osbournes, he became the world's favorite sitcom dad. By the 2000s, he could show up at Buckingham Palace for Queen Elizabeth's Royal Jubilee, to celebrate her 40th anniversary, and serenade Her Majesty with 'Paranoid.' There was nothing at all controversial about the Prince of Darkness singing for the Defender of the Faith. She greeted him in the reception line with 'I hear you're a bit of a wild man.' 'Prince William said to me later, 'It would have been great if you had done 'Black Sabbath,''' Ozzy told RS. 'If I had done 'Black Sabbath,' the fucking royal box would have turned to stone, and the Archbishop of Canterbury would have had to douse them in holy water.' Ozzy's nine lives had nine lives apiece. He managed the historic feat of getting kicked out of Black Sabbath for doing too many drugs, in 1979. The fact that he kept waking up alive every morning for the next 40-plus years is one of the weirdest things that's ever happened in rock & roll. Nobody would have bet on this guy to survive the Eighties, much less keep getting more famous every year, but his star never stopped rising. He did more farewell tours than Cher, Elton, and the Who combined, following up No More Tours in 1992 with his Retirement Sucks tour, then going out again in 2018 with his awesomely titled No More Tours II. But he hated being offstage, and talked constantly in his final years about his drive to get back out there, despite his Parkinson's diagnosis. He even got to attend his own farewell party, performing his last concert with his old mates in Black Sabbath just a couple of weeks before his death, in his hometown of Birmingham, England. The 'Back to the Beginning' farewell show was a full-on celebration of his life and legacy, an electric funeral, with a host of fellow music legends paying their respects. One of the most poignant and heartfelt tributes came from Dolly Parton, with whom Ozzy has a surprising amount in common. Both became anti-establishment stars in the 1970s, too out there for the mainstream, dismissed as cartoon jokes, yet finally celebrated as true heroes decades ahead of their time. Her video message played on the screen between sets. 'Now, are we supposed to be saying farewell to you?' Dolly said. 'Well, I don't think that's going to happen. How about we just say good luck, God bless you, and we will see you somewhere down the road. Anyway, I love you, always have. And we're gonna miss you up onstage, but you know what? I wouldn't be surprised if you don't show up somewhere else — and I'll be there.' It all came down to his voice. Even when Ozzy wasn't the one writing the lyrics, they were inseparable from his quavering voice, as pure in its earnest simplicity as Brian Wilson. He sang about the morbid sense of doom that Seventies and Eighties kids felt during the era of the superpower nuclear arms race, a topic he revisited far more than any other rock star, in classics like 'War Pigs,' 'Crazy Train,' 'Children of the Grave,' or 'Electric Funeral.' He was one of very few voices anywhere in pop culture who brought this much moral wrath and empathy to the kids living under the mushroom cloud, especially the American teenagers reaching draft age around the time Paranoid and Master of Reality came out. For them, the fiery doom of 'Black Sabbath' was no occult metaphor. Ozzy's Iron Man and Bowie's Major Tom were the twin rock images of alienated youth in the 1970s, pissed off at the nuclear future their elders had built for them, sneering in aloof disdain behind a spaced-out mask. As Ozzy said, they'd seen the future and they'd left it behind. Right from the start, Ozzy sang with an authentic purity, but that purity was more than just part of his voice — it was his voice. Unlike other hard-rock singers at the time, he did not try to get bluesy, and he did not aspire to the muscle of a soul belter. He didn't bother with sexy-stud posturing or macho bluster. He was one of us. His moral force is part of what made him so genuinely scary when he arrived — Alice Cooper, that guy was funny and cool, but Ozzy's power was all in the way he undeniably meant every word he sang. Black Sabbath's music was terrifying to me as a kid, growing up in the suburbs — it was the stuff that the cool, scary older kids listened to when the adults weren't around, when they were smoking and partying, scared kids in the dark. On the bridge near my house, by Milton High School, the words were spray-painted: 'Welcome to Ozzy's Coven.' (Which was how I learned the word coven.) Yet Ozzy's voice sounded so benign and compassionate, downright vulnerable. The first time I ever heard his voice was at my next-door neighbor's house, in his big brother's basement pad, where he kept a piranha and played the first Sabbath album. I remember hearing 'N.I.B.,' with Ozzy singing in the voice of the devil. Yet what made it so scarily piercing was how forlorn and frail he sounded. It blew my mind when he quoted Buddy Holly, singing 'Your love for me has got to be real' — I knew that line from my Fifties-rocker parents listening to 'Not Fade Away.' What did Ozzy mean by making the devil a Buddy Holly-style romantic? It was a world away from the just-call-me-Luuucifaaaah strut of Mick Jagger. Ozzy's devils sounded so scary because they were mostly afraid of themselves. In his solo years, he played up the comedy, in a great hit like 'Flying High Again,' kicking off with a massive Randy Rhoads riff while Ozzy burbles in his most hapless voice, 'Oh noooo! Here we go!' It sums up his immensely lovable warmth right down to the way he sings, 'Am I just a crazy guy?' and then snickers, 'You bet.' But he still had that unimpeachable realness in his voice — for him, it was practically all he had in his voice. John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats really captured his mystique for latter-day fans in his novella Master of Reality, written in the voice of an institutionalized teenage Sabbath fanatic. 'No matter how many songs he sings, Ozzy always always sounds like they just grabbed him off the street and stuck him in front of a microphone, and then they either handed him a piece of paper with some lyrics on it or he already had some written on his hand or something.' In Rolling Stone's year-end issue for 1990, the first page had loads of stars giving their summary of the year, mostly pimping their latest career highlights. But Ozzy kept it short and sweet. 'One of the greatest heroes of all time said it in 1969: 'Give peace a chance.' Let's all try for it in 1991.' A typical Oz statement, full of contradictions (he was only a year past getting arrested for attacking his wife in a drunken stupor) but also that innate Ozzy sincerity. John Lennon had a similar cocktail in his personality, but he was also armored with complex layers of defensive wit and irony that Ozzy simply didn't have in his system. 'Give peace a chance' remained an aspirational ideal for Ozzy, the guy who kept doing the peace sign in public long after it went out of style for rock stars. 'We were the last hippie band,' he told RS in 2002. 'We were into peace.' After bombing out of Sabbath, he could have symbolized everything complacent, decadent, and dull about old-school rock. Yet he was never a joke. Like Geddy Lee, his opposite in so many other ways, he was cherished as an evolutionary mishap who symbolized his own kind of uncompromised integrity. One of the highlights of seeing my first Replacements show, a dingy all-aged matinee in the summer of 1986, was seeing Paul Westerberg and the boys lock into 'Iron Man,' one of the few songs they came close to finishing. Later that year, the Beastie Boys opened Licensed to Ill with the sampled 'Sweet Leaf' riff of 'Rhymin and Stealin,' dragging Sabbath into the Eighties the same way Run-D.M.C. did for Aerosmith. One of his best Eighties moments: Ozzy's classic egg-frying scene in Decline of Western Civilization Part II. He's the rock star at home, puttering around the kitchen in a leopard-print robe, a Real Housewife of Darkness, looking more like Rue McLanahan in The Golden Girls then any rock star you could name. He fixes breakfast, ineptly frying eggs and bacon while trying to pour himself a glass of orange juice on the counter. He gets about half of it into the actual glass. He also discusses his latest attempt to get sober. Director: 'Do you feel better now?' Ozzy: 'No.' He became even more iconic in the Nineties. Beck gave him a classic shout-out on MTV's 120 Minutes, in his famous February 1994 sit-down with Thurston Moore and Mike D — perhaps the most Nineties moment of television ever aired. Beck wore a thrift-store hockey shirt that proclaimed 'Stop! Tell Me I'm Ozzy Because I Am.' He'd written 'Ozzy' on a piece of masking tape and stuck it over whatever the original word was. He also made his plea in 'Ozzy' on his album Stereopathetic Soulmanure. (Sample lyric: 'Ozzy, Ozzy, Ozzy/What does it mean?/The fire is green.') By now, Ozzy was a fact of life that songwriters couldn't resist evoking as a way to set the table. 'It's reigning triple sec in Tchula/And the radio plays 'Crazy Train,'' David Berman drawled in the 1996 Silver Jews classic 'Black and Brown Blues,' with Ozzy as an unelectable symbol of ur-American burnout ordinariness. The Hold Steady's Craig Finn sang 'Playing records in a rented room/Hotter Than Hell into Bark at the Moon' in 2012, just as his songwriting heir MJ Lenderman sang a dozen years later, 'I've never seen the 'Mona Lisa'/I've never really left my room/I've been up too late playing Guitar Hero/Playing 'Bark at the Moon.'' He went on to help invent reality TV with The Osbournes, the blockbuster MTV hit that turned him into a sitcom dad. It starred a real-life family who could only communicate with a camera crew present, constantly cutting a promo in every interaction, with dialogue full of bleeped profanity. It's fitting since reality TV became the social menace as feared and dreaded as metal used to be. But my favorite Ozzy memory will always be seeing him on the Retirement Sucks tour in 1996, at Meriweather Post Pavilion in Maryland, a love-fest where Ozzy basked in the adoration of the audience, which he craved, but nowhere near as much as the audience did. Nobody really cared that Ozzy needed a teleprompter, which was a shocking innovation at the time; everybody within six miles of the venue knew all the words to 'Iron Man,' down to the security guards, but absolutely nobody was mad that Ozzy was the only one there who didn't. 'Is anyone smoking that sweet leaf?' he asked. 'When I said I quit, I fucking lied!' It was an overwhelming feeling of warmth and joy just to be in the same room with Ozzy, as it always was. And as long as his music lives on — which it will — being in the same room as Ozzy is always the place to be. Best of Rolling Stone Sly and the Family Stone: 20 Essential Songs The 50 Greatest Eminem Songs All 274 of Taylor Swift's Songs, Ranked Solve the daily Crossword
Yahoo
25-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Ozzy Osbourne Documentary ‘No Escape From Now' Still Set for Release This Fall
An upcoming documentary about Ozzy Osbourne's health setbacks in recent years and his desire to stage a farewell concert will still arrive later this year despite the heavy metal legend's death Tuesday. No Escape From Now, described as 'a deeply personal portrait of the rock legend's harsh new realities and his battle to take the stage for one final performance,' will hit Paramount+ this autumn, a rep for the filmmakers confirmed to Rolling Stone. More from Rolling Stone Lita Ford Remembers Ozzy Osbourne: 'In Ozzy's Name, Keep Rocking' Drake Honors Ozzy Osbourne at Birmingham Concert Ozzy Osbourne's Top Ten Beatles Songs 'We are truly heartbroken to hear the news of Ozzy's passing,' Phil and Tania Alexander, the creative team behind No Escape From Now, said in a statement. 'Filming with him, Sharon, Aimee, Kelly and Jack for the last three and a half years will always be a cherished and remarkable experience – largely because we got to regularly witness Ozzy's indomitable spirit, his mischievous, irresistible grin and his masterful display of unique one-liners. We will always love you dear Oz. And we send love and strength to Sharon and her family.' In addition to its access to Osbourne, the film features appearances by Osbourne's wife and manager, Sharon, as well as several musicians who have played with him over the years: Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi, Metallica bassist Robert Trujillo, guitarist Zakk Wylde, Guns N' Roses bassist Duff McKagan, and Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith. It will also feature commentary from Billy Idol, Idol's guitarist and Osbourne's close friend Billy Morrison, Tool singer Maynard James Keenan, and record producer Andrew Watt. No Escape From Now also filmed footage at Osbourne and Black Sabbath's Back to the Beginning farewell concert earlier this month, a rep for the film said. A rep declined to comment on what changes, if any, would be made to the film in light of Osbourne's death. 'The last six years have been full of some of the worst times I've been through,' Osbourne previously said of the documentary in a statement. 'There's been times when I thought my number was up. But making music and making two albums saved me. I'd have gone nuts without music. My fans have supported me for so many years, and I really want to thank them and say a proper goodbye to them. That is what the Villa Park show [in Birmingham] is about.' The documentary is one of a handful of projects Osbourne had in the works prior to his death at the age of 76, just weeks after his triumphant farewell show in Birmingham, England. The singer's now-posthumous memoir Last Rites, which also focuses on his health issues, is set to publish in October, while a concert film centered on Back to the Beginning will hit the big screen in 2026. Best of Rolling Stone Sly and the Family Stone: 20 Essential Songs The 50 Greatest Eminem Songs All 274 of Taylor Swift's Songs, Ranked Solve the daily Crossword
Yahoo
25-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Drake Honors Ozzy Osbourne at Birmingham Concert
Drake paid tribute to Ozzy Osbourne during his tour stop in the metal legend's hometown of Birmingham, England, on Wednesday evening. The rapper walked out to Black Sabbath's 'Iron Man,' the 1970 hit track about a time-traveling metal monster off Paranoid. Taking the stage, Drake addressed the thousands gathered at Utilita Arena Birmingham, as fan footage captured: 'Hey Birmingham! Rest in peace to the legendary Ozzy Osbourne.' More from Rolling Stone Ozzy Osbourne Documentary 'No Escape From Now' Still Set for Release This Fall Lita Ford Remembers Ozzy Osbourne: 'In Ozzy's Name, Keep Rocking' Ozzy Osbourne's Top Ten Beatles Songs Drake is currently on his U.K. co-headlining Some Special Shows 4 U tour with fellow Canadian musician PartyNextDoor. Earlier on Wednesday, the rapper reportedly poured one out for the Prince of Darkness at a local memorial with some tequila and told a New York Times reporter, 'I just came out to pay respects to someone who lived it to the fullest.' His homage follows the wave of tributes across the music industry as news of Ozzy Osbourne death spread. The beloved frontman died on Tuesday at the age of 76. Through his storied career, Osbourne collaborated and shared the stage with artists across genres from Slash, Elton John, Motörhead, and Madonna, as well as Busta Rhymes, Yungblud, and Post Malone. Duran Duran, who also hail from Osbourne's hometown, reacted to the loss on Instagram, sharing the musician's 1984 mugshot. 'What can you say about Ozzy? Whatever it is, it's in a Brummie accent,' they wrote. 'Hard to imagine a world without him, Ozzy brought so much joy, humour and raw power to the world, in a life of many chapters. Ozzy was a cat who had way more than nine lives.' Best of Rolling Stone Sly and the Family Stone: 20 Essential Songs The 50 Greatest Eminem Songs All 274 of Taylor Swift's Songs, Ranked Solve the daily Crossword
