“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.