“This is sup­posed to be my farewell tour,” says Ozzy Osbourne in a clip includ­ed in the Biog­ra­phy tele­vi­sion doc­u­men­tary above. He then gives the fin­ger and adds, “We’ll see.” The year was 1993, and indeed, there turned out to have been much more to come for the for­mer front­man of Black Sab­bath, the band that opened the flood­gates — or per­haps hell­gates — of heavy met­al. After an impov­er­ished child­hood spent play­ing in the bomb sites of post­war Birm­ing­ham, Osbourne hopped from job to job, includ­ing one failed stint at a slaugh­ter­house and anoth­er as a crim­i­nal. He then turned singer, receiv­ing a PA sys­tem from his father and form­ing a blues group with a few local musi­cians. Peo­ple pay good mon­ey to see scary movies, they one day reck­oned, so why not make scary music?

The time was the late nine­teen-six­ties, when lis­ten­ers approached record albums as qua­si-cin­e­mat­ic expe­ri­ences. Tak­ing their name from Mario Bava’s anthol­o­gy hor­ror film, which had come out a few years before, Black Sab­bath deliv­ered on expec­ta­tions many weren’t even aware they had. Today, any­one can put on an ear­ly Black Sab­bath album and iden­ti­fy the music as heavy met­al, not a world apart from any of its new­er vari­ants.

But more than half a cen­tu­ry ago, the world had nev­er heard any­thing quite like it: there was the much-inten­si­fied low end of the sound, with its tuned-down, dis­tort­ed gui­tars liable to break into ener­getic riffs, as well as the flam­boy­ant­ly dark themes. On top of it all, Osbourne some­how man­aged to imbue the words, even when deliv­ered in a wal­low­ing or mum­bled man­ner, with a para­dox­i­cal clar­i­ty and exu­ber­ance.

Osbourne’s exist­ing ten­den­cies toward dis­or­der were sent into self-destruc­tive over­drive by suc­cess. Any­one would have put mon­ey on the odds of his ear­ly death, yet he man­aged to come back from dis­as­ters both per­son­al and pro­fes­sion­al — many of them inflict­ed by his own sub­stance-fueled Jekyll-and-Hyde per­son­al­i­ty — again and again. Hence the title of the Biog­ra­phy episode, The Nine Lives of Ozzy Osbourne. For fans who missed out on Black Sab­bath’s reign, there was Ozzfest, Osbourne’s rock fes­ti­val that occurred around the world between the mid-nineties and the late twen­ty-tens. The real­i­ty show The Osbournes made him a pop-cul­tur­al icon beloved even by view­ers with no inter­est in his music. Ulti­mate­ly, his real farewell did­n’t come to pass until Black Sab­bath’s final live set, which came as the cul­mi­na­tion of a day-long fes­ti­val put on in his home­town less than three weeks before his death. And though Ozzy Osbourne may now be gone, the Prince of Dark­ness per­sona he cre­at­ed will remain heavy met­al’s ani­mat­ing spir­it.

The Nine Lives of Ozzy Osbourne will be added to our col­lec­tion of Free Doc­u­men­taries, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Ozzy Osbourne’s Gui­tarist Zakk Wylde Plays Black Sab­bath on a Hel­lo Kit­ty Gui­tar

Who Invent­ed Heavy Met­al Music?: A Search for Ori­gins

Watch Heavy Met­al Park­ing Lot, the Cult Clas­sic Film That Ranks as One of the “Great Rock Doc­u­men­taries” of All Time

Kids Orches­tra Plays Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train” and Zeppelin’s “Kash­mir”

1980s Met­al­head Kids Are Alright: Sci­en­tif­ic Study Shows That They Became Well-Adjust­ed Adults

The Sovi­et Union Cre­ates a List of 38 Dan­ger­ous Rock Bands: Kiss, Pink Floyd, Talk­ing Heads, Vil­lage Peo­ple & More (1985)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Frank Zap­pa called them the “Moth­ers of Pre­ven­tion,” the group of wives mar­ried to mem­bers of Con­gress who decid­ed in the mid-80s to go to war against rock lyrics and whip up some good ol’ con­ser­v­a­tive hys­te­ria.

We’ve talked about this time before on this site, espe­cial­ly as Zap­pa him­self tes­ti­fied in front of Con­gress and sparred on the Sun­day Belt­way shows like Cross­fire.

Vox’s Ear­worm series tack­les this moment in a time that would have lit­tle ram­i­fi­ca­tion before the design-ugly “Parental Advi­so­ry: Explic­it Con­tent” stick­er. (Just an aside: I know their head­line is click-baity, but real­ly? Heavy met­al and Satan gave us this stick­er? More like Tip­per Gore and their family’s pres­i­den­tial ambi­tions gave us it. Oy.)

Any­way, Gore’s Par­ents Music Resource Cen­ter (PMRC) gave us a list of the “Filthy Fif­teen,” includ­ing songs like Sheena Easton’s “Sug­ar Walls” and Madonna’s “Dress You Up,” which either con­tained lyrics “pro­mot­ing” vio­lence, sex­u­al ref­er­ences, drugs and alco­hol, and Satan’s favorite, the “occult.”

Estelle Caswell explores that last cat­e­go­ry and dives into the increas­ing pop­u­lar­i­ty dur­ing the ‘80s of heavy met­al music, which was often invok­ing Satan in its lyrics, or cre­at­ing occult-like atmos­pheres in its pro­duc­tion.

This campy, hor­ror­show cul­ture ran right into the grow­ing pow­er of con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­tians and evan­gel­i­cal preach­ers who made a *lot* of mon­ey whip­ping up “Satan­ic Pan­ic” among their nation­al flock. They lis­tened to rock records back­wards, believ­ing they heard sub­lim­i­nal mes­sages.

Of course, none of this would have gone much fur­ther than church­es if it wasn’t for the major net­works turn­ing a noth­ing sto­ry into headlines–the Vox video reminds us how com­plic­it Ted Kop­pel, Bar­bara Wal­ters, Ger­al­do Rivera, et al were in pro­mot­ing it. They also looked at the ris­ing teenage sui­cide rate and used heavy met­al as a scape­goat, instead of–as the video explains–family breakups, drug abuse, eco­nom­ic uncer­tain­ty, and increas­ing access to guns.

The warn­ing label itself appeared in 1990, just as rap was tak­ing off and a new lyri­cal boogey­man appeared. Dig­i­tal media and file shar­ing, along with YouTube and oth­er sites, mut­ed this kind of cen­sor­ship. And par­ents, in the end, still need to do the job over what their chil­dren see or don’t.

How­ev­er, cen­sor­ship is back, but there are no Wash­ing­ton Wives act­ing as scolds. Now it is the whims of cap­i­tal, or it is a faulty algo­rithm that cen­sors old mas­ter paint­ings filled with nudi­ty, just as guilty as porn, that are our new decen­cy guardians. Where are those con­gres­sion­al hear­ings?

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2019.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Young Pat­ti Smith Rails Against the Cen­sor­ship of Her Music: An Ani­mat­ed, NSFW Inter­view from 1976

1980s Met­al­head Kids Are Alright: Sci­en­tif­ic Study Shows That They Became Well-Adjust­ed Adults

A Brief His­to­ry of Hol­ly­wood Cen­sor­ship and the Rat­ings Sys­tem

Frank Zap­pa Debates Whether the Gov­ern­ment Should Cen­sor Music in a Heat­ed Episode of Cross­fire: Why Are Peo­ple Afraid of Words? (1986)

Watch Heavy Met­al Park­ing Lot, the Cult Clas­sic Film That Ranks as One of the “Great Rock Doc­u­men­taries” of All Time

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts.

Fifty years ago this month, Lou Reed near­ly destroyed his own career with one dou­ble album. Met­al Machine Music sold 100,000 copies dur­ing the three weeks of sum­mer 1975 between its release and its removal from the mar­ket. More than a few of the many buy­ers who prompt­ly returned it would have been expect­ing some­thing like Sal­ly Can’t Dance, Reed’s solo album from the pre­vi­ous year, whose slick­ly pro­duced songs went down eas­i­er than any­thing he’d record­ed with the Vel­vet Under­ground. What they heard when they put the new album on their turnta­bles (or insert­ed the Quadro­phon­ic 8‑track tape into their decks) was “noth­ing, absolute­ly noth­ing but scream­ing feed­back noise record­ed at var­i­ous fre­quen­cies, played back against var­i­ous oth­er noise lay­ers, split down the mid­dle into two total­ly sep­a­rate chan­nels of utter­ly inhu­man shrieks and hiss­es.”

That descrip­tion comes from vol­u­ble Creem rock crit­ic and avowed enthu­si­ast of deca­dence Lester Bangs, who also hap­pened to be one of Met­al Machine Music’s most fer­vent defend­ers. At one point he declared it “the great­est record ever made in the his­to­ry of the human eardrum.” (“Num­ber Two: Kiss Alive!”)

Much of what we know about the inten­tions behind this baf­fling album come from Bangs’ writ­ings, includ­ing those that pur­port to tran­scribe con­ver­sa­tions with Reed him­self, who’d been one of the crit­ic’s read­i­est ver­bal spar­ring part­ners. The inspi­ra­tion, as Reed explained to Bangs, came from lis­ten­ing to com­posers Ian­nis Xenakis and La Monte Young, who dared to go beyond the bound­aries of what most lis­ten­ers would con­sid­er music at all. Reed also insist­ed that he’d delib­er­ate­ly insert­ed bits and pieces of Mozart, Beethoven, and oth­er clas­si­cal mas­ters into his son­ic mael­strom, though Bangs clear­ly did­n’t buy it.

“Met­al Machine Music does­n’t seem so weird now, does it?” asked an inter­view­er on Night Flight just a decade or so after the album’s release. “No, it does­n’t, does it?” Reed says. “In light of Eno and all this stuff that came out now, it’s not near­ly as insane and crazy as they said it was then.” Indeed, it sounds almost of a piece with an influ­en­tial work of ambi­ent music like Bri­an Eno’s Music for Air­ports, though that album was meant to calm its lis­ten­ers rather than dri­ve them from the room. Over the half-cen­tu­ry since its release, Met­al Machine Music has accrued enough appre­ci­a­tion to be paid trib­utes like the live per­for­mances by Ger­man ensem­ble Zeitkratzer that have con­tin­ued long after Reed’s death. The lega­cy of his “elec­tron­ic instru­men­tal com­po­si­tion,” as he said after one such con­cert in 2007, also includes a name­sake clause in record­ing con­tracts stip­u­lat­ing that “the artist must turn in a record that sound like the artist that the record com­pa­ny signed — not come in with Met­al Machine Music.”

Relat­ed con­tent:

A Huge Anthol­o­gy of Noise & Elec­tron­ic Music (1920–2007) Fea­tur­ing John Cage, Sun Ra, Cap­tain Beef­heart & More

Teenage Lou Reed Sings Doo-Wop Music (1958–1962)

Hear Ornette Cole­man Col­lab­o­rate with Lou Reed, Which Lou Called “One of My Great­est Moments”

David Bowie and Lou Reed Per­form Live Togeth­er for the First and Last Time: 1972 and 1997

Lou Reed Cre­ates a List of the 10 Best Records of All Time

Lou Reed Album With Demos of Vel­vet Under­ground Clas­sics Get­ting Released: Hear an Ear­ly Ver­sion of “I’m Wait­ing for the Man”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Back in 2008, Bob Boilen (host of All Songs Con­sid­ered) and NPR music crit­ic Stephen Thomp­son attend­ed a noisy con­cert where they strug­gled to hear Lau­ra Gib­son per­form. Jok­ing­ly, Thomp­son sug­gest­ed that Gib­son per­form at Boilen’s office desk instead. She did. And, with that, the NPR Tiny Desk Con­cert was born. Since then, more than 1,300 musi­cal acts have per­formed their own stripped-down, authen­tic shows in the cramped con­fines of NPR’s head­quar­ters in Wash­ing­ton, D.C. That includes every­one from Tay­lor Swift to Dua Lipa, to the Pix­ies, the Grate­ful Dead­’s Bob Weir, and Gary Clark Jr. In the video above, Archi­tec­tur­al Digest takes you behind the scenes, show­ing the set where the mag­ic hap­pens. There you can see “a real desk in a real office, sur­round­ed by shelves packed with price­less memen­tos left by artists–from Adele’s water bot­tle to Sab­ri­na Carpenter’s mar­ti­ni glass and even Chap­pell Roan’s wig.” And you can meet the team behind the pro­duc­tion, while learn­ing how Tiny Desk became a beloved series. Below watch a com­plete playlist of all Tiny Desk Con­certs. Enjoy!

Relat­ed Con­tent

Jimi Hen­drix Unplugged: Two Great Record­ings of Hen­drix Play­ing Acoustic Gui­tar

David Bowie Per­forms an Ethe­re­al Acoustic Ver­sion of “Heroes,” with a Bot­tle Cap Strapped to His Shoe, Keep­ing the Beat (1996)

A‑ha Per­forms a Beau­ti­ful Acoustic Ver­sion of Their 1980s Hit, “Take on Me”: Record­ed Live in Nor­way

“The last peo­ple any­one expect­ed to come out of that gig as being the mem­o­rable ones was Queen,” said Bob Geld­of in an inter­view, look­ing back at the band’s stun­ning 24 minute set at Live Aid on July 13, 1985. In front of 72,000 peo­ple in Wem­b­ley Sta­di­um and mil­lions watch­ing world­wide, Queen resus­ci­tat­ed their career with a selec­tion of hits and new mate­r­i­al.

The band, as Roger Tay­lor says in the mini doc here, was “bored” and “in a bit of a trough.” They also had been crit­i­cized for play­ing Sun City in South Africa dur­ing the reign of Apartheid.

Going into Live Aid, a lot of the artists didn’t know what to expect of the entire event. Many, includ­ing Bob Geld­of him­self, won­dered if the event would flop. But Queen more than any of them seemed to intu­it right from the start the impor­tance of the day, though they were very ner­vous back­stage. But once onstage they com­plete­ly own it, even more so Fred­die Mer­cury who ris­es to the occa­sion as a front man and as a singer, giv­ing one of his best per­for­mances.

In that short set, Queen gives a full con­cert worth of ener­gy and the audi­ence responds. Not all were Queen fans, but by the end every­body had become one, singing along to “We Are the Cham­pi­ons” and “We Will Rock You.” Across the Atlantic, the 90,000 strong Philadel­phia audi­ence fol­lowed suit, watch­ing the jum­botron simul­cast.

“Do you know how hard it is to get someone’s atten­tion who’s on the oth­er side of the room?” asks Dave Grohl of Foo Fight­ers in this oth­er short doc on the set. “Imag­ine a sta­di­um and mak­ing them sing along with you.”

This hot sum­mer con­cert would turn out to be the zenith of Queen’s career. There would be more albums and sin­gles, but Fred­die Mer­cury would slow­ly suc­cumb to AIDS, and dis­ap­pear from pub­lic view, until pass­ing in 1991. The Live Aid set stands as one of the band’s final, icon­ic, and major achieve­ments. Watch it, in all of its glo­ry, above.

You can watch the full Live Aid broad­cast on Inter­net Archive. You can also watch 10+ hours of the best per­for­mances here on the Live Aid YouTube chan­nel. Videos will be added to the playlist below through­out the day.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch 16 Hours of His­toric Live Aid Per­for­mances: Queen, Led Zep­pelin, Neil Young & Much More

Watch Queen Rehearse & Metic­u­lous­ly Pre­pare for Their Leg­endary 1985 Live Aid Per­for­mance

Bob Geld­of Talks About the Great­est Day of His Life, Step­ping on the Stage of Live Aid, in a Short Doc by Errol Mor­ris

Sci­en­tif­ic Study Reveals What Made Fred­die Mercury’s Voice One of a Kind; Hear It in All of Its A Cap­pel­la Splen­dor

Lis­ten to Fred­die Mer­cury and David Bowie on the Iso­lat­ed Vocal Track for the Queen Hit ‘Under Pres­sure,’ 1981

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts.

Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue changed jazz. It changed music, peri­od. So I take it very seri­ous­ly. But when I see the ani­mat­ed sheet music of the first cut, “So What,” I can’t help but think of Charles Schulz’s Peanuts car­toons, and their Vince Guaral­di com­po­si­tions. I mean no offense to Miles. His modal jazz swings, and it’s fun, as fun to lis­ten to as it is to watch in ris­ing and falling arpeg­gios. The YouTube uploader, Dan Cohen, gives us this on his chan­nel Ani­mat­ed Sheet Music, with apolo­gies to Jim­my Cobb for the lack of drum nota­tion.

Also from Cohen’s chan­nel, we have Char­lie Parker’s music ani­mat­ed. Nev­er one to keep up with his admin, Park­er left his estate unable to recu­per­ate roy­al­ties from com­po­si­tions like “Con­fir­ma­tion” (above).

Nonethe­less, every­one knows it’s Bird’s tune, and to see it ani­mat­ed above is to see Park­er dance a very dif­fer­ent step than Miles’ post-bop cool, one filled with com­plex melod­ic para­graphs instead of chordal phras­es.

And above, we have John Coltrane’s mas­sive “Giant Steps,” with its rapid-fire bursts of quar­ter notes, inter­rupt­ed by half-note asides. Coltrane’s icon­ic 1960 com­po­si­tion dis­plays what Ira Gitler called in a 1958 Down­beat piece, “sheets of sound.” Gitler has said the image he had in his head was of “bolts of cloth undu­lat­ing as they unfurled,” but he might just as well have thought of sheets of rain, so mul­ti­tudi­nous and heavy is Coltrane’s melod­ic attack.

See Cohen’s Ani­mat­ed Sheet Music chan­nel for two more Char­lie Park­er pieces, “Au Pri­vave” and “Bloom­di­do.”

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2013.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Miles Davis Plays Music from Kind of Blue Live in 1959, Intro­duc­ing a Com­plete­ly New Style of Jazz

Char­lie Park­er Plays with Dizzy Gille­spie in the Only Footage Cap­tur­ing the “Bird” in True Live Per­for­mance

Behold John Coltrane’s Hand­writ­ten Out­line for His Mas­ter­piece A Love Supreme

Char­lie Park­er Plays with Dizzy Gille­spie in the Only Footage Cap­tur­ing the “Bird” in True Live Per­for­mance

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

In 1939, Igor Stravin­sky emi­grat­ed to the Unit­ed States, first arriv­ing in New York City, before set­tling in Cam­bridge, Mass­a­chu­setts, where he deliv­ered the Charles Eliot Nor­ton lec­tures at Har­vard dur­ing the 1939–40 aca­d­e­m­ic year. While liv­ing in Boston, the com­pos­er con­duct­ed the Boston Sym­pho­ny and, on one famous occa­sion, he decid­ed to con­duct his own arrange­ment of “The Star-Span­gled Ban­ner,” which he made out of a “desire to do my bit in these griev­ous times toward fos­ter­ing and pre­serv­ing the spir­it of patri­o­tism in this coun­try.” The date was Jan­u­ary 1944. And he was, of course, refer­ring to Amer­i­ca’s role in World War II.

As you might expect, Stravin­sky’s ver­sion of “The Star-Span­gled Ban­ner” was­n’t entire­ly con­ven­tion­al, see­ing that it added a dom­i­nant sev­enth chord to the arrange­ment. And the Boston police, not exact­ly an orga­ni­za­tion with avant-garde sen­si­bil­i­ties, issued Stravin­sky a warn­ing, claim­ing there was a law against tam­per­ing with the nation­al anthem. (They were mis­read­ing the statute.) Grudg­ing­ly, Stravin­sky pulled it from the bill.

You can hear Stravin­sky’s “Star-Span­gled Ban­ner” above, appar­ent­ly per­formed by the Lon­don Sym­pho­ny Orches­tra, and con­duct­ed by Michael Tilson Thomas. The YouTube video fea­tures an apoc­ryphal mugshot of Stravin­sky. Despite the mythol­o­gy cre­at­ed around this event, Stravin­sky was nev­er arrest­ed.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear The Rite of Spring Con­duct­ed by Igor Stravin­sky Him­self: A Vin­tage Record­ing from 1929

How Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring Incit­ed a Riot? An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion

Igor Stravin­sky Appears on Amer­i­can Net­work TV & Tells Sto­ries About His Uncon­ven­tion­al Musi­cal Life (1957)

Watch 82-Year-Old Igor Stravin­sky Con­duct The Fire­bird, the Bal­let Mas­ter­piece That First Made Him Famous (1965)