I was embarrassingly old when I realised that Ozzy Osbourne wasn’t one of those celebrities who was just famous for the sake of being famous. I was born in 1996, and the Double-O’s reality show The Osbournes dominated discourse from 2002 to 2005 and beyond. I was too young to watch it as it aired, but I still caught clips and heard chatter about his unhinged antics as they made it into everyone else’s living rooms.
Not one of those whispers or snippets ever connected the dots for me. Never was it explained that that guy was the man who helped pioneer heavy metal while fronting Black Sabbath. For the longest time, that was just who Ozzy Osbourne was: MTV’s one-man swear jar.
