How freakin’ stupid is this article on Ozzy in Salon? Man, what bullshit.

Let’s get a few things straight…. Ozzy hasn’t changed. The world has changed around him. He was never cool. I got beaten up for liking him in high school. I’m not kidding you. I have a crooked nose from one of those fights.

His music hasn’t changed. It’s wouldn’t be considered pop fifteen years ago. Dare ya to get recordings from 94 WYSP from back then and compare it to today’s. They would never even play Motley Crue, let alone Ozzy. Never man.

Oh, how people forget.

Anyone remember ‘You Can’t Kill Rock n’ Roll’? Ballad. ‘Killer of Giants’? Ballad. ‘Revelation Mother Earth’? Ballad. Shit… he sung ballads with Black Sabbath too. There’s nothing new to Ozzy.

What is new, and truely disconcerting, is that the world has shifted.

You now have a generation in charge that grew up on the Stones. On the Beetles. On the Who. On Black Sabbath, Led Zepplin, Kiss, and Aerosmith.

Howard Stern. Yes. Howard Stern.

That generation took charge in the nineties. Bill Clinton and now George Dubya.

His new music is actually little different from what he was playing back in the early eighties! I’d say it’e even louder. But what we consider “underground”, has changed.

The “underground” of metal must continuously get louder, faster, nastier, in somehope of being different from what has come before.

In order for Ozzy to be underground today – he’d have to be more controvercial then Marilyn Manson. And that’s hard to imagine really.

I used to get beaten up for Metallica too.

Then something funny happened.

“One” by Metallica made the mainstream setlist of radios.

The next album would popularlize them with the exact same crowd that used to put the fans of metal down. And so came the nineties.

Man it sucked. Metal became to be looked at as more and more, the defacto standard of mainstream rock. It lost what made it special. Suddenly, you could hear Ozzy on the radio! Like – ten years after the fact! I remember staring at the radio and wondering what the hell was going on when I heard a new single by Ozzy on the radio. Man that was freaky.

Metal was taken over by preppies and jocks. The whatever bands. Limp Bizkit. Crap. The climax of which was Woodstock 99.

At least the nineties had grunge. A metal offshoot that didn’t like to mention it’s heritage. Much cooler to say that Neil Young was an influence then Guns N’ Roses ya know. But grunge spoke with one, long, depressing voice. It never let it’s tounge get in it’s cheek. It never realized it was only rock n’ roll. It took itself too seriously as a genre and burnt out.

Is he cashing in? Certainly! But can you blame him? What’s occuring now is actually kind of refreshing. The grandfather of metal is getting his due. But I do want it to go away.

Makes me feel old.

This interesting article at NewsForge covers mp3.washingtonpost.com and mp3.boston.com. Two awesome sites that make sense for newspapers and for local musicians. Here goes the SlashDot thread covering the story.