Heavy Music

A bit of reflection on the death of Ozzy Osbourne and his legacy's impact on my own life.

I was 13 when I started playing music. Up until that point, I had only wanted to skateboard, but as I was soon starting high-school, and more of my close friends had stopped skating to pursue other interests, I was also looking for what I could do to supplement my lonely skate sessions.

As with most teenagers, around this age was when I started taking an interest in music. I started searching for music – hearing songs that I liked, looking up the bands, downloading their Limewire discogs, searching for their contemporaries and influences – rinse and repeat, all while turning my family's computer into an expensive paper weight.

Naturally, most of the music I initially did seek out came from the world of skateboarding: songs from skate videos and from Tony Hawk's Pro Skater. Apropos, I started to develop an inclination towards "heavy music". This dovetailed into me starting to learn to play the Bass & then the Guitar. One of the first songs I learned? "Paranoid" by Black Sabbath.

Hardcore music was particularly impactful on me, but my first time listening to a hardcore band was practically by accident. I was 14 and at a shopping mall where I walked into a store called "Hot Topic". I don't recall what I went in to buy – probably something stupid like fingerless gloves or something, but I do remember seeing a CD display on the register counter, to which I probably thought to myself something along the lines of "Oh, that has a giant skull and flames on the front. I'ma buy that." The CD was titled "Supremacy" by a band called "Hatebreed". From a young age, Hatebreed had a lasting impact on my music interests. Hardcore music and the ethos of hardcore has acted as a sort of "grounding" for my interests and perspectives; they've ebbed and flowed, but have always found a sort-of center in hardcore. Accidentally listening to Hatebreed, at 14, turned out to be a pivotal event in my life.

Not long after was when I shifted focus to primarily playing the Drums. Ever since then, I've played music, continuously – starting bands, writing songs, recording music, releasing music, playing shows, traveling the world to play music, with friends and other friend's bands. Most of that music was hardcore and so-called "heavy music".

In my late teens, when I first felt falling in love, I wrote and recorded a series of 4 acoustic songs (this so happened to not be "heavy music"), and then gifted them to her on a cassette tape. And then when I first felt that keen sting of a broken heart, I spent a summer with a fellow friend in his attic home-studio together writing and recording music.

Becoming older through my 20s, I lived with my bandmates in a house where we wrote and recorded music together in yet another home-studio.

Friends that I've lost to death – I take solace in the music we created and the memories of playing it together.

Every groomsmen in my wedding were either current or former band mates.

All of this is to say that playing and listening to music, particularly "heavy music", has had an everlasting impact on my life. I don't intend to ever stop playing music. I can confidently assert that none of that would've happened, in that way, without Ozzy Osbourne, his music, and his band's "Black Sabbath" music.

It's hard to overstate the impact this band has had on guitar-driven music, and by extension my own life. Black Sabbath was the band that triggered the paradigm shift in guitar-led music towards what we now colloquially refer to as "heavy music". For years, one of the largest heavy music fest in the world was called "Ozzfest". Like – this band literally invented the "breakdown"; the first one ever is in "Sabbath Bloody Sabbath" if you're interested.

Every heavy band that's ever existed, that I've ever listened to, that I've ever heard of, that I've ever played with, that I've ever played in – practically every single one is downstream from this one band, that was fronted by Ozzy Osbourne.

Thank you, Ozzy Osbourne. Thank you for "heavy music".

Postscript:

The day Ozzy Osbourne died – that night I went to a show. At the show, I watched all the bands with two of my friends, both band mates (one of them was one of those groomsmen, in my wedding I mentioned earlier). Between sets, the venue played music exclusively from Black Sabbath and Ozzy Osbourne. During the last set, the headlining band gave a posthumous shoutout to Ozzy Osbourne, acknowledging his legacy and the impact his music had on their band, their lives, and their music. The headlining band? They're called "Hatebreed".