Ozzy Osbourne dies aged 76<\/a><\/p>\nDescribed as one of the founders of heavy metal music, John Michael Osbourne was known for his incredible voice and charisma.<\/p>\n
“We are often compared to Survivor and Big Brother, but we are not like those shows,” he told RN Breakfast in 2002.<\/p>\n
“That’s the family, but for every 500 minutes of footage that we shoot, we use one minute.<\/p>\n
“We are a comedy \u2026 We are structuring our show so it feels more like a sitcom.”<\/p>\n
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Ozzy Osbourne with his kids, Jack and Kellie, who starred alongside him in The Osbournes. (Reuters: Alessia Pierdomenico\/file)<\/p>\n
The show \u2014 a hit for Network Ten at the time \u2014 was an early version of a format that would become hugely popular in the following years.<\/p>\n
This kind of not-quite-reality TV, filmed inside a family unit and heavily edited, became the format for the various Housewives seasons and Keeping Up With The Kardashians, among others.<\/p>\n
And just like the Kardashians used their TV show to grow their brand and sell their own merchandise, The Osbournes helped Ozzy and his family re-energise the singer’s celebrity for a younger generation unfamiliar with Black Sabbath.<\/p>\n
“We broadened our audience by millions,” he said in 2002.<\/p>\n
The series went on to win an Emmy for outstanding reality program that year.<\/p>\n
In the show, Ozzy would swear and argue and complain, but his manner was always tinged with innocence.<\/p>\n
The Prince of Darkness ultimately seemed like a good husband and father.<\/p>\n
A classic rock ‘n’ roll frontman<\/p>\n
What’s interesting about that later-in-life view of Ozzy was that it supplanted the idea of Ozzy the musician.<\/p>\n
The Birmingham-born untrained singer had a voice that fit the glam rock genre he grew up in. It was theatrical, like he was the evil character in a Broadway production.<\/p>\n
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Ozzy Osbourne during a press conference in Australia in 1973. (ABC)<\/p>\n
First with Black Sabbath and later as a solo artist, Ozzy was a rock ‘n’ roll frontman at a time when the rock ‘n’ roll frontman was a must.<\/p>\n
Every long-haired, tight-panted rock act worth their elaborate rider \u2014 Led Zeppelin, Iron Maiden, Alice Cooper \u2014 had a point man (and it was always a man) whose job was as much to throw around his sex appeal as hold a note.<\/p>\n
But where Zeppelin’s Robert Plant stood out for his tenor, Ozzy had not just a great voice but character and a backstory.<\/p>\n
This was the working-class troublemaker who got kicked out of Black Sabbath for being a drug addict \u2014 quite a feat \u2014 and who famously bit the head off a dead bat.<\/p>\n
His pop cultural cache was off the charts.<\/p>\n
He found his way onto The Simpsons, Wayne’s World and elsewhere. Late in life, as it was revealed he was battling Parkinson’s, he collaborated with Post Malone, a legend among people under 25.<\/p>\n
The two Ozzys<\/p>\n
Which version of Ozzy will prevail?<\/p>\n
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Black Sabbath were pioneers of hard rock. (Wikipedia Commons)<\/p>\n
The menacing singer of a pioneering hard rock band who commanded huge crowds across a decades-long career?<\/p>\n
Or the big, befuddled family man, roaming around his mansion swearing at his dogs for shitting on the carpet?<\/p>\n
The answer is both.<\/p>\n
We all contain multitudes, and this dichotomy was Ozzy’s.<\/p>\n
He’ll be remembered differently by several different generations, and that’s almost the definition of a pop cultural icon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There were a few times, back in the 2000s, where I would watch Ozzy Osbourne’s reality TV series…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":14618,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[64,63,447,134,16027,6815,11252,15580,15581],"class_list":{"0":"post-14617","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-celebrities","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-ozzy","13":"tag-ozzy-osbourne","14":"tag-reality-tv","15":"tag-sharon-osbourne","16":"tag-the-osbournes"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14617","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14617"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14617\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14618"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14617"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14617"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14617"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}