I guess Wyman probably knows a higher percentage of Rock Hall voters than Kael knew voters in the presidential election, so his surprise (as an “industry guy”) doesn’t seem totally blinkered to me…
― rendered nugatory (morrisp), Thursday, 2 May 2024 15:53 (one month ago) link
like who really knows Ozzy Ozbourne, other than that Gravy Train song which only saw life due to its use in dog food commercials, he was always known as the guy who replaced Dio in Black Sabbath and recorded Load.
― ain't nothin but a brie thing, baby (Neanderthal), Thursday, 2 May 2024 16:00 (one month ago) link
Nah, this is complete idiocy on Wyman's part. The industry loves the Osbournes. Even beyond the sheer numbers Ozzy's put on the board for five decades-plus, Sharon is royalty: her father was Don Arden, a high-powered London music biz guy.
― Instead of create and send out, it pull back and consume (unperson), Thursday, 2 May 2024 16:03 (one month ago) link
Ozzy is practically his own economy in the metal scene
― ain't nothin but a brie thing, baby (Neanderthal), Thursday, 2 May 2024 16:05 (one month ago) link
Where does he rank Dave Matthews Band? (I found the article but there's a paywall...)
― rendered nugatory (morrisp), Thursday, 2 May 2024 16:06 (one month ago) link
yeah, what would he say?
― ain't nothin but a brie thing, baby (Neanderthal), Thursday, 2 May 2024 16:07 (one month ago) link
"In my many, many years as a writer and editor, nobody — nobody — has ever mentioned Osbourne’s solo work to me. No one’s wanted to review an album or cover a show. No one’s ever said, “Hey, you should hear this track on the new Ozzy album.” I don’t even remember ever reading a review of one of his albums or hearing one of his solo songs played on the radio, and of course none of his albums has ever turned up in the Pazz & Jop poll."
imagine being an alleged radio listener and never hearing any Ozzy solo
― omar little, Thursday, 2 May 2024 16:32 (one month ago) link
was Ozzy the guy that used to put on those DIY Ozzfest house shows?
― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Thursday, 2 May 2024 16:35 (one month ago) link
tbh the whole project of being a "rock critic" just seems embarrassing and pointless
― budo jeru, Thursday, 2 May 2024 16:42 (one month ago) link
as does the idea of the RnR HOF. idk
― budo jeru, Thursday, 2 May 2024 16:43 (one month ago) link
Ozzy is the only guy that was there when the Rock Radio chart started in 1980-81 who's still charting there today.
― an icon of a worried-looking, long-haired, bespectacled man (C. Grisso/McCain), Thursday, 2 May 2024 16:47 (one month ago) link
be easy on the guy, his mental wounds are still screaming and its driving him insane
― the defenestration of prog (voodoo chili), Thursday, 2 May 2024 16:53 (one month ago) link
xps That was a really weird take on Ozzy. Long before I knew anything about Black Sabbath (including who they were), I knew who Ozzy Osbourne was, and this was even before reality TV happened. He was that ubiquitous in the culture and no one in my household listened to metal or hard rock.
― birdistheword, Thursday, 2 May 2024 19:06 (one month ago) link
also lol at:
nwa at #239:
I know that Dre is one of music’s most important producers; he’s also a guy who beats up women.
chuck berry at #1:
As a person, he was less than ideal. But still: One of the most consequential American cultural figures of the 20th century.
― fact checking cuz, Thursday, 2 May 2024 19:11 (one month ago) link
Long before I knew anything about Black Sabbath (including who they were), I knew who Ozzy Osbourne was, and this was even before reality TV happened.
same, I know "of" Black Sabbath but they were Ozzy's old band to me, I didn't hear them until much later
― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Thursday, 2 May 2024 19:12 (one month ago) link
I didn't even know Ozzy was in Black Sabbath until I was a teen, as I was a late bloomer to all forms of heavy rock.
embarrassed to say I found out when I borrowed one of dad's old Sabbath records (who, btw, he didn't even like, so I never gave them back), and saw his name on it and said...what, the "Perry Mason" singer guy?
weird that was the first song I thought of, but it was in fact the first one of his I heard knowingly.
every time people talked about "Crazy Train" I couldn't figure out what song they were talking about, and kept mistakenly thinking it was "Have a Cigar" because the way Roger Waters sings 'gravy train' sounded like 'crazy train' to my terrible ears.
nobody would have believed 13-year old me and 43-year old me are related
― RICH BRIAN (Neanderthal), Thursday, 2 May 2024 19:19 (one month ago) link
This might've been my first real exposure to Ozzy - like I didn't know his music or what he even sounded like when he just talked until they did this post-9/11 bit on Conan:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9QoZgW-Qa0
― birdistheword, Thursday, 2 May 2024 19:27 (one month ago) link
the making breakfast scene on Decline of Western Civilization was definitely the origin of his transformation into America's loveably addled rock dad
― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Thursday, 2 May 2024 21:00 (one month ago) link
I think the first time I heard Crazy Train was when erstwhile ilxor hstencil performed it karaoke in like 2002.
― jaymc, Thursday, 2 May 2024 21:59 (one month ago) link
I was a kid at the time, but I remember when No More Tears came out and it was about as big on Rock Radio as contemporary releases like the Use Your Illusions, The Black Album, Nevermind, and Ten.
― an icon of a worried-looking, long-haired, bespectacled man (C. Grisso/McCain), Thursday, 2 May 2024 22:32 (one month ago) link
"Crazy Train," "No More Tears," and that Lita Ford duet were the only Ozzy songs I knew for a long time.
― the talented mr pimply (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, 2 May 2024 23:12 (one month ago) link
yeah, "No More Tears" earned massive MTV airplay during the Year of Nirvana.
― the talented mr pimply (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, 2 May 2024 23:13 (one month ago) link
pretty legendary performance of No More Tears on the Live and Loud video too that I think got play on MTV
― RICH BRIAN (Neanderthal), Thursday, 2 May 2024 23:15 (one month ago) link
It's funny to hear people a little younger than me talk about Ozzy or Sabbath. I became aware of Sabbath not long before "Neon Knights" came out, definitely knew of Ozzy and mistakenly assumed it was him singing on that. Vividly remember when Randy Rhoads died because it happened in Florida where I lived and iirc Ozzy's next show was supposed to be in Miami.
― Josefa, Thursday, 2 May 2024 23:32 (one month ago) link
Yep!
"Close My Eyes Forever" is Ozzy's only AT40 hit in America btw
― the talented mr pimply (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, 2 May 2024 23:33 (one month ago) link
Not true! "Mama, I'm Coming Home" hit #28. (Lemmy was probably exaggerating, but he said he made more money from writing the lyrics to that song than he did from anything Motörhead-related.)
― Instead of create and send out, it pull back and consume (unperson), Friday, 3 May 2024 00:00 (one month ago) link
Oh, missed it.
― the talented mr pimply (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, 3 May 2024 00:04 (one month ago) link
9-year-old me obsessively listening to pop radio was a huge “Mama, I’m Coming Home” fan and never heard “No More Tears” that I can recall until listening to it right now. Doesn’t sound familiar though it certainly would fit right in with Use Your Illusion’s songs
― Lavator Shemmelpennick, Friday, 3 May 2024 13:09 (one month ago) link
was very hard to divest that song from Johnson and Johnson products
― RICH BRIAN (Neanderthal), Friday, 3 May 2024 13:13 (one month ago) link
No More Tears was definitely everywhere for a really long time after it was released, it was one of the inner circle staples of hard rock radio. And unlike a lot of tracks which received considerable airplay in that genre at the time, it's still does really sound good.
I did scan through Wyman's list, and the guy is a pretty lousy writer based on that. Even when I agree with the most superficial points he's making, he offers nothing of interest to back any of it up.
― omar little, Friday, 3 May 2024 15:19 (one month ago) link
"In my many, many years as a writer and editor, nobody — nobody — has ever mentioned Osbourne’s solo work to me.
because you are a herb and people do not wanna hang with you and know they'd be wasting their breath
no use for this guy
― J Edgar Noothgrush (Joan Crawford Loves Chachi), Friday, 3 May 2024 16:30 (one month ago) link
There's no getting around the dubious concept of a rank listicle, but to Wyman's credit, he does make something out of it - forget the inductee assessments, the meat of that thing is really the ridiculous history behind the Hall of Fame that's detailed in piecemeal. Just an excerpt drawn from a handful of entries:
Joe Hagan says the hall of fame was first conceived by a cable entrepreneur, Bruce Brandwen, who outlined the basic structure of the hall, proposed an annual TV show, and enlisted Ahmet Ertegun...Ertegun and Jann Wenner conspired together to wait out the five-year contract Brandwen had, and then took the organization over. Wenner later dismissed Brandwen as part of “a bunch of hucksters.” The inevitable lawsuit was settled out of court. Bruce Conforth, the hall’s first curator, told me that an early benefit concert featuring the Who and billed as a benefit for the hall actually raised money to pay off that settlement...
From the start, Conforth says, said, his work was hampered by a division between the Cleveland folks, who’d put up the money and had the best interests of Cleveland and the hall’s success in mind, and the New York people, most of whom didn’t want the hall in Cleveland in the first place. “The people from New York thought their shit didn’t stink,” Conforth says. “They were rich New York elite artsy-fartsy hip people who knew what was going on. They figured the Cleveland people were a bunch of rubes who couldn’t tell the time of day. The Cleveland people hated the New York people because they didn’t give the Cleveland people any respect and were always telling Cleveland people what to do, even though the Cleveland folks came up with all the money. The two boards really, really hated each other.”
I asked Conforth for an example of how the Cleveland–New York division manifested itself. He said that one day shortly after he started work he was abruptly summoned to meet with Wenner, so he dutifully boarded a plane to New York. “It was an official audience,” Conforth says drily. “It was at the new Rolling Stone’s offices [on Sixth Avenue]. Jann’s office was in the corner; it has glass windows on two sides; quite large, but sparsely decorated, with a huge desk in the corner. I was allowed to enter the inner sanctum. There’s Jann, barefoot. He sits down behind this huge desk, puts his bare feet upon the desk, looks at me, pulls out a cigarette, lights it, and says, ‘Now do you see where the real power lies?’”
Conforth, the curator, is a highly entertaining interview. He was a scholar who’d done his dissertation at Indiana on the San Francisco scene. He turned out not to be a good fit for the hall. One mistake he made, he allows, is requesting to work in Cleveland, which he thought made sense at the time but led to many of his decisions being overruled from New York. Even two decades later he remains amused at his tenure. It was plain from the start, he says, what the hall of fame’s mission was: “Here’s another way we get to masturbate in public and show the world how great we are.” The difficulties he had working for Wenner & Co. were such an open secret by the time he left that he received a call from the producers of the Oprah Winfrey Show. They wanted him to appear for a segment on “When Dream Jobs Become a Nightmare.”
― birdistheword, Saturday, 4 May 2024 07:30 (one month ago) link
only besting his placing for Stevie Nicks at 255, echoes Pauline Kael's infamously blinkered "Nixon couldn't have won, no one I know voted for him" remark.
Point of order: she never said that. Neither did Susan Sontag, whom that quote is also sometimes attributed to.
― Daniel_Rf, Saturday, 4 May 2024 07:55 (one month ago) link