>>2406541>I half agree. You're not wrong that Black Sabbath is considered important because of the boomers, but they've would've seemed fresh in 1970. You have to give the boomers credit for making a lot of original stuff at one point. It's just that it has been more than 50 years since then because these zombies just won't die, and there's like 10,000 Black Sabbath boomer tribute bands playing their songs in bars because they're not that complicated to learn. Dummmm Dummmm DURM DRUM DURRMMRMMMM.Yeah, I guess their esthetic - the dark themes, the name of the band, the heavier sound - was something new compared to the hippie/flower-power/fake eastern philosophies thing of the time, even if they were basically the same as almost every other 20-something of the time: long hair, psychedelic shirts, bell-bottom trousers, a few of them even sporting big moustache, the whole thing basically.
It has to be said, tho, that others were already experimenting with certain themes: take Arthur Brown for example or Screamin' Jay Hawkins many years before, then Alice Cooper, who got inspired by Grand Guignol and Vaudeville theatre. Also, mainstream bands like the Kinks, the Yardbirds and others already had an heavier, more distorted sound than the Beatles or the Rolling Stones.
The thing is, especially in the musical press, many boomers are still active and influential and even when they retire or kick the bucket altogether, they have still groomed later generations to their own tastes and proclivities, so you often get comparisons and references to muh Lennon-MacCartney or muh Jagger-Richards or muh Twentyseven club. If instead of them, cultural egemenony in that field were wielded by women who were children or teenagers in the early eighties, we'd constantly got references to Simon Le Bon, Tony Hadley, Howard Jones, Gahan and Gore and so on.
>But Ozzy was also too trashy, canivalesque and schlocky to get the overloaded treatment that David Bowie did. I like Bowie but he's the sort of musician that art critics would get carried away praising as some human godling. I almost have to hate on Bowie a bit because no human being can possibly be that good. It's even worse with Lou Reed because he didn't have any talent at all. Ozzy is at less of a disadvantage because he was dumb enough and his music tastless enough to scare off the art critics while remaining appealing to the hoi polloi. He also came from a working-class background of factory workers and kept his highly regional English accent. Well, there couldn't be a better contrast than between Ozzy and Bowie, really! DB was the quintessential art school kid, he was all conceptual and intellectual, and he reinvented himself a few times, like when he created all his personas and then he killed them to open a different chapter. And he definitely had full artistic control of his output. On the other hand, Ozzy, after his brain was completely gone in the late 70s and he was sacked from BS, was "reinvented", yes, but by his own wife-manager, they moved to America and then, after they had him detoxed enough to make him look somewhat functioning, they jumped on the early mtv-driven train of so called "hair metal", with him being backed by younger, cooler and technically competent musicians, while selling his "prince of darkness" angle: he was a thirty something - and quite knackered - guy with a wife and kids, so he couldn't do the Motley Crew routine - 24/7 cocked up and sexed up with a bunch of playboy's playmates always around - and instead they pushed for the "satanic" thing, a cunning play in America, with all that moral panic and crazy evangelicals.
>>I remember he was already a trembling husk like in the early 2000s when they put up that awful "reality show" about him and his family on mtv>American trash TV at its finest.To be fair, all that shitshow looked very classy and cultured if compared to later radioactive waste like the Kardashians. At least, they were quite natural and they were capable of genuine humor at times, while the plasticky heiresses of the notorious Armenian lawyer are the non plus ultra of fakeness in every aspect of their being.