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- John Darnielle on Ozzy
John Darnielle tells an incredible story involving his habit of finding out what music people were into.
On an overnight train ride, he spotted some older kids/young adults sneaking off to drink beers and smoke.
He got one of the guys to himself, asked his standard music question, and received the answer, “Ozzy Osbourne.”
All the concerts or videos or posters couldn’t deliver the weight some cooler, older, stranger on a train could deliver.
Nothing passes passion down like word of mouth or quietly shared experiences. For as much self-discovery as I’ve done, there’s still an act of curation at the core of everything I love.
My Ozzy experience (tied to my dad and classic rock radio) is no different than my Beastie Boys experience in this way (tied to a school/church friend’s older brother).
With Ozzy’s passing, I’m guessing - if you’re like me - you’ve been taking all sorts of reflections in on his career.
I keep seeing YouTube videos and reading obituaries and falling down all sorts of rabbit holes - but I think I’ve found the one that will stick to me far into the future.
Mostly because he weaves in why Ozzy mattered so much to him personally, within the broader context.
I feel like I want to save a few passages and re-share a few of the smaller stories here.
Take this macro-obituary context for starters. Note how he weaves the micro with the macro and the personal significance here (my emphasis added):
The function of an obituary is to situate its subject’s life and work in historical context. This is a dry way to treat the meat and bone that went into living that life and doing that work, but it’s an article of faith with me. The work is what matters; we honor it by describing it as clearly as we can. “Principles before personalities,” as they say. But part of that context, too, is how this life and work play out in the lives and hearts and minds of the people who see it, and who hear it, and who respond to it.
Darnielle never tells a story without embedding all of those layers.
The Ozzy obituary is no different from a Mountain Goats song or a piece of his writing in so many (wonderful) ways.
He unpacks the macro cultural impact. He digs into micro stories (bats, doves, urination - Ozzy’s non-musical story-sharing hits). And then he gets personal (with his story about the train).
What is it about art that ages alongside us, about stories of art that reshape their importance at all these scales - this is what pushes our awareness outside of space and time. It’s magical.
Here’s Darnielle (and my added emphasis) again:
My habit was to ask every older person what music they liked, to get as much information as I could. From a swiveling chair near him, I asked: What are you into? And he said—word for word—“Ozzy Osbourne. I’m just telling everyone I know, Ozzy Osbourne.”
I was desperate to learn what the grown-up world was like. I registered this lesson as if I might later need it under duress.
Under the stewardship of his wife, Sharon, and with the support of his family, Osbourne’s fame grew until he’d successfully infiltrated the mainstream. About that, and about the head of the bat and also the dove, and the TV show and the pissing event at the Alamo, you can read in all the other obituaries. But for me, as, I suspect, for many of us who have followed his music through various lineups, departures and returns, cycles of growth, the nameless bearded guy in the bubble car speaks to the Ozzy whose work would be with us when, in harder years, we became the guy stealing beer from the unattended bar, and revealing our hearts to whoever happened to be nearby.
Contemplating the music that would speak to us then, in our time between stations, surrendering out of necessity to the uncertain motion of the moment—that moment of need, not for direction but just for the voice of someone who sounded like he understood. Someone who might be us, if we got lucky: who sounded like us when we sang to ourselves, hollering “Yeah!” when the intensity peaks but otherwise requiring words written by a friend. Because sometimes you can’t, yourself, find the words beyond the moment. So you lurch, and you whip your hair, or you lean back drunk in your chair. Lost. Wasted. Telling everyone we know: Ozzy Osbourne.
Read this bit one more time.
“That moment of need, not for direction, but just for the voice of someone who sounded like he understood.”
Art that ages with us is art that understands something we don’t know.
And it’s art we can tell, somehow, that it knows something about life that we don’t.
We all want to understand.
Even if full understanding is never attainable, our attention in reflection - that’s our best moments, as humans.
We’re all connected there, on or off the craziest of trains, in appreciation for how life and death make us feel.
h/t Dave Nadig, Ryan M., Jeff C., and everybody else who’s been sending me videos, obituaries, and articles these past few days - keep them coming!