Today In Pop Culture: Eat Fresh With Ozzy Osbourne

By Jeffery X Martin

Modern-day 21st century heavy metal is boring. Yeah, I said it. Boring. There’s no flair, no theatricality, no sense of something greater than itself. Bland long-haired boys with guttural voices and quadruple-kick drums, honking and snorting their way through what they loosely refer to as “songs” while the audience punches each other and waits for the breakdown.

The Eighties, though? That was the time. That was the Golden Age of Heavy Metal. Bands were real bands, and wore codpieces without shame or cause. There were pyrotechnics and crazy visual effects. The stage was a giant Satanic playground, with pentagrams flying like boomerangs everywhere. It was goofy and joyous, and sometimes it went a little too far.

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Waxing Nostalgic Cover Albums: Ozzy Osbourne, Under Cover

By Jeffery X Martin

Ozzy Osbourne has been around since, what, the Dark Ages? Has he ever not been somewhere, skulking around a stage with one hand in the air and one hand on his stomach, like he’s about to do a drunk trick? He has done it all, seen it all, and even if reality television success did spoil Ozzy Osbourne for a while, he still has the respect of musicians and metalheads alike. It’s not a surprise to find three generations of Ozz-heads at a show. He has become transcendent.

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Bringin’ the Crazy, Part II: In Which John Cale Beheaded a Chicken

By Emily Carney

It’s no secret that John Cale may have had some slight mental health issues during the mid-1970s. During this period in his esteemed career, Cale was suffering from a nasty cocaine and alcohol addiction. In 1975, he went through a particularly acrimonious divorce from his second wife, ex-GTO Cindy Wells, who infamously slept with dopey ex-Soft Machine singer Kevin Ayers during their tumultuous-at-best marriage.
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So They Were Stars: The Razzle Dazzle Rockin’ Reign of the Hudson Brothers

By Cait Brennan

The Bible says music tore down the mighty walls of Jericho. In the 1960s and ’70s, rock and roll did the same for a generation of girls and young women. The rise of pop culture brought women and girls an unprecedented level of freedom, power, and influence. Perhaps it can’t quite be called “feminist,” and it may seem like a small thing, but before the mid-’60s, before the Beatles and Monkees, who could have imagined whole magazines devoted to pin-up boys?
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Time, See What’s Become Of Me

Back when I was 12, liking a certain band could get you in trouble. I remember that my classmates were almost violently divided between who was better: Adam Ant or Ozzy Osbourne. As a fan of the former, I was frequently the object of considerable disdain.
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