God is Dead

On Iron Man and Black Sabbath and Ozzy Osbourne

I discovered Ozzy Osbourne, and Black Sabbath, fairly late in life. I only started listening to heavy metal in 2004, when I joined IIMB, and I had a computer with (fairly high speed) internet in my room. Like any college campus with LAN, there was a healthy supply of torrented music (and movies, and “other kinds of videos”). And that’s how I got started.

Back then, though, I don’t remember really being enthused by Black Sabbath. My strategy those days would be load an entire band’s discography on to Winamp and run it in shuffle mode (no concept albums and stuff for me).

With benefit of hindsight, Black Sabbath has four very stud albums (the first four), after which things degrade. There was a small uptick with Heaven and Hell (when Ronnie James Dio joined as singer) but not the same level as the first four albums. So no wonder my strategy didn’t result in my liking the band.

“Baby Has He”

A month or so before my daughter was born, in 2016, Monkee posted about this band called “Rockabye baby” on Twitter. They do “lullaby renditions” of popular songs. And so, once my daughter materialized that September, I started playing these to her. In the Lullaby Renditions of Black Sabbath album, Iron Man was the first song.

Maybe my daughter was a week old when I got bored of listening to this. “She is a baby and has no clue of genres, so I might as well play her the real thing”, I reasoned. And so I started playing Iron Man to put her to bed. She took to it enthusiastically.

Sometime in 2018, I formalized this process by creating a “lullabies” playlist on Spotify, at the head of which was Iron Man. By the time she was two, she would sing the song happily. Singing it with her was a good bonding exercise.

As she grew up and became more vocal, she wouldn’t let me play Iron Man unless it was bedtime. Now I can’t listen to it in the middle of work as well - it just puts me to sleep. And over the course of time, she started referring to Iron Man as “has he”, from “has he lost his mind”. The rockabye baby version (above) became “baby has he”. It helped that now the name of the song rhymed with the name of the singer (Ozzy)!

While she still likes the song, I’m starting to wonder if there is some version of “introducing metal too early to your kid”. Recently on my YouTube Music, I found a playlist she had created. It is full of Taylor Swift and Imagine Dragons. So it goes.

The Son Also Rises

(no, don’t read the book of that name by Gregory Clark. It is extremely dry and unreadable)

When my son was born in 2023, I didn’t bother with the pleasantries of “baby has he”. It was the full Black Sabbath version from day one. Again he seemed to like it, though he expressed strong disapproval for any song by Pink Floyd - they would startle him from his sleep. So I had to create a new “Billy’s Lullabies” playlist (exists on both Apple Music and Youtube Music now; I don’t use Spotify).

He is addicted to the song. Whenever I switch on TV, he starts screaming asking for “has he” (inheriting his sister’s nomenclature for the song). It is this specific version from The End that he wants to watch:

Every evening he needs to watch this on loop (though over the last 3-4 days we’ve been trying to control his screen time in the evenings). Several times. If I get bored and switch the song, he gets annoyed. It HAS to be this song. On loop.

Even other versions of Iron Man don’t satisfy him. It has to be this edition.

Whenever he watches this video, in the middle of it, he starts saying “jota”, which is “baby Kannada” for “I bow to the lord” (or some such).

(as an aside, when he says “Jota”, I get triggered now, since I start thinking about Diogo Jota, and start feeling sad)

Anyway, that my son says Jota for Iron Man must indicate that there is something godly about the video.

One hypothesis we have is all the fire burning in the background on stage - that it reminds our son of temples (which he hasn’t been to that much) and so he says Jota.

The other explanation is that he thinks Ozzy is God.

In which case, I leave you with this:

Ozzy entered my life fairly late, pretty much in 2016 when my daughter was born, but has left an indelible impact. For many years, his singing was responsible for putting my daughter to bed, and now he performs the same role for my son. And thanks to all his recordings and videos, he will continue to play this, and other roles!

Finally, what a badass way to go - three weeks after an elaborate final concert that raised ~$200,000 for charity, in which so many bands played for half a day!