Ozzy Osbourne, Heavy Metal, and the Sound of Searching Souls

Evangelization doesn’t always mean avoiding the noise. Sometimes it means listening for what’s beneath it.

Ozzy Osbourne has died. The voice of Black Sabbath — a band that leaned into scary-movie aesthetics by naming itself after a 1963 Boris Karloff film — has gone silent at 76, just weeks after the band’s final show. While most headlines focus on the mayhem, debauchery and decades of chaos, I find myself thinking back to something quieter … relatively speaking.

The Opening Riff​

I was a teenager when I first heard Sabbath’s thunder. I played bass in a garage band in high school — exactly as glorious and awkward as it sounds. We’d cover their songs (usually not very well), but there was something in those riffs that felt bigger than the music. I couldn’t have named it at the time, but I know now what it was: longing.

They didn’t just sound heavy; they sounded like they were searching for something. That became especially clear the first time I went to Ozzfest in Camden, New Jersey, in 2000 — with my dad. He was far from being a “metalhead,” but he was a good sport and came with me. That day was a lot to take in. The volume, the imagery, the intensity. I didn’t quite know what to make of it all — but it stayed with me.

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