“Ozzy, Ozzy, Ozzy,” the crowds chanted as Ozzy Osbourne’s funeral cortege paused at Black Sabbath Bridge, in his home city of Birmingham, and his widow and children laid their own flowers amid the amassed bouquets, fan-sketched portraits, customised football scarves and bat-shaped balloons.
Amid the litany of abject grimness otherwise known as just another summer news bulletin, it was heavy-metal fans who provided the unity and warmth of spirit. Through tears, Sharon Osbourne, the singer’s wife, flashed them a peace sign; their daughter Kelly waved to onlookers.
The Black Sabbath frontman said he wanted his funeral to be a celebration, not a “mope-fest”, and though the ceremony itself was private, the procession lived up to his desired billing, with the hearse preceded by a local brass band playing Sabbath tunes and the gathered thousands chipping in both reverent vocals and swells of raucous appreciation.
“That was worse than the queen, that was,” one male fan reckoning with his emotions told the BBC. Television coverage of this public homage to the “Prince of Darkness” did indeed have the touch of a royal event about it, with reporters vox-popping fans about what Ozzy meant to them and why they had come.
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The difference was that John Michael Osbourne, possessing no birthright whatsoever, had actually moved culture along in his time, and this was a day laced with humour, relatability and grit. Love for Ozzy was not only wrapped in municipal pride but also inseparable from the reassuring sense of belonging that being a fan of certain bands or genres of music gives people – or used to, at least.
Watching this salute, I was struck by the feeling that we are close to the start of what is likely to be an inverted U-shaped graph of music-superstar send-offs, ones where people are given the chance to pay mass tribute to shared idols. There’s definitely more to come, a lot more.
I remember thinking during the televised funeral of Shane MacGowan – complete with the church rendition of Fairytale of New York by a supergroup of musical luminaries – in December 2023 that this was a gloriously new benchmark, one that the families of other artists would be inspired to replicate when the time comes.
But once all the icons whose careers thrived in more culturally finite times are gone, then what?
It’s not that you need a monolithic music scene or analogue broadcasting industry for moments of cohesion like these. Heavy metal was always much marginalised by the media. But you do need a world that hasn’t fallen victim to the dead hand of tech platforms that simultaneously flatten out music culture and fragment it to the point where its role in identity formation is now much less potent than before.
“Is Gen X dying before our eyes?” the Hollywood Reporter wondered last week. Before our eyes! I hope not. (Osbourne himself, born in 1948, predates it.) Still, despite the Black Mirror-ish image this headline conjured up, the article wasn’t wrong when it cited the death of Kurt Cobain, in April 1994, as the defining event for a generation characterised in youth as disaffected and doom-filled.
Shown on MTV News throughout that year as mourning snowballed, footage from the Seattle vigil for the Nirvana singer burned on my teenage brain. I’d never heard anything as raw in my life as Courtney Love’s taped message to fans, in which she read out part of her husband’s suicide note while simultaneously railing against its most dangerous assertions.
Preserved on YouTube, the stunned silence of the crowd remains palpable, and – whether it was a wise thing to do or not – you can almost see Cobain’s legacy embedding itself in the cultural soil in real time.
When we’re let into someone else’s shock and pain like this, it alters our relationship with celebrity. Expectations change. MTV, by then already pioneering the reality genre with The Real World, played its part in shifting fan culture away from one of distant, unknowable icons into something messier, more open, more confessional.
It was later the home of The Osbournes, of course, which is the unrepeatable facet of Ozzy’s story: here was a musician who built his base in a terrestrial landscape, achieved a new style of fame via a cable-TV megahit and died in the era of social media and live streaming.
For devotees beyond Birmingham, there was a link to follow the procession as it passed Black Sabbath Bridge. This yielded hunger for more access, with some YouTube commenters disappointed that it turned out to be a fixed street camera with no sound – they were advised to consult fan-made videos instead.
Even without comparable hometown-hero status, waves of household-name artists whose careers straddled similar eras are on track to receive huge, internet-fuelled public goodbyes, in which pure admiration mingles with personal nostalgia and sentiment. But will any of them be as uplifting and uncomplicated and fond as Ozzy Osbourne’s? That seems more doubtful.
