Ozzy or Sabbath, that is. Probably Ozzy’s, but as I first got into rock music I heard lots of slagging him off, not for his drug abuse or befuddled demeanor or anything, but for the idea that his music was meant for little kids or something like that. He called one of his 90s tours the Retirement Sucks Tour and the joke was that it should have been called Junior High Sucks. I remember that. I do not know any songs from Ozzmosis, but the only post-1983 Black Sabbath song I heard anywhere back then was “Time Machine” in Wayne’s World.

I don’t know that the reality show did much to gain his music new fans. I remember he did an album of covers back then that Roland Fratzl (normally nice to latter-day albums by total dinosaur hard-rock acts, right?) said was the worst thing he’d ever heard, and I know he did some album that “flirted with nu-metal” and that got slagged off, and I know that one review of the reality show said that it “confirmed that whatever else one thinks of Osbourne, his music is absolutely awful.” So yeah you’re probably right. Did YOU hear the covers album?

Oogie boogie, this is the 30th anniversary of ME entering junior high. Bad memories abound.