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The wizard was Oz

The problem with not knowing things is not that people will call you names or not invite you to interesting parties, but that you will miss so much worth understanding. And by not knowing I don’t mean you have not been advised of the invention of a new kind of toaster oven or telescope, but that kind of lazy yet wilful unknowing that roughly translates to not caring. Too much is happening in the world right now. Too much for me to make sense of most of it. I’m starting to fear I don’t know where I end and everyone else begins. Also, Ozzy Osbourne died. We were not close. I have never been especially attached to Black Sabbath, but I find myself quite emotional about the absolute, definite, no-more-reinventions end of their frontman. And that’s when I started thinking about how much we reduce to nonsense all the things we don’t understand. The legendary Prince of Darkness was everything parents of teenagers feared. Whether you were there at the beginning in the 70s, caught the wave in the 80s, or respecting the foundation of the genre by the 90s and 2000s, if you had parents who were not themselves metalheads, chances are they didn’t like it. More importantly, they didn’t understand it. The glammed-up, hammed-up image we have of Ozzy in his day was the work of wonderful marketing. He soaked up the industrial fumes of Birmingham – dark, bleak, grim – and created a world that reflected exactly that. If this was what people thought they were and insisted on creating a frame around the image, then they’d play the picture. Understanding (in multiple senses of the word) is not the world’s strength. When I was growing up – anywhere from eight to 18 – we had a family friend who was steeped in the dark sounds. He wore black more than not. His hair was a marvel of disarray and (I suspect) product. I think they train makeup artists now to apply eyeliner the way he did effortlessly. And like the music idols he was channelling, it was a package. No matter how diabolical the posters in his bedroom, he did not belong to a satanic prayer group. If he had a migraine, it was not a result of a curse. In no way did he need to be exorcised or see as many religious counsellors as his parents paraded through their home. As far as I know, they never asked him what it was about this dark and stormy music that called to him. And I think there are several interesting answers. Maybe it spoke to an unfathomable turmoil inside him. Maybe it was purely aesthetic. Maybe, like so many people I know to this day, he wanted to scream because that seems the only sensible reaction to the world. Instead of trying to understand, his parents simply accepted the rhetoric of the day. Your son is possessed. He serves Beelzebub. That music will induce suicide. Or homicide. It will definitely settle upon a-cide. And thence to prison. And if he escaped state prison, he’d be forever locked in the one in his head. All because of a kind of music that sounded like thunder, machines, fast cars and a universal howl into a chasm. But I’ll tell you this: that boy was wonderful. He was protective, generous and respectful. He offered a sort of kindness rare in the young. Ozzy was a candidate for posters against alcohol, drugs and attacks on birds and bats. Those charges stick. (Speaking of the bat-head-biting, the singer got himself to the nearest anti-rabies shot as soon as he could.) I’ve never understood why people believe music can cause the demise of their young but think nothing of what they encounter in movies and at school. Once, rap was bad and only for gangsters. Dancehall was for people of loose morals. The earliest iterations of plain old rock and roll were called “devil music.” So now I’m thinking it’s not all been about understanding, but also an oversimplified aversion to anything new. In Children of the Grave: “Children of tomorrow live in the tears that fall today. Will the sun rise up tomorrow bringing peace in any way?” This is so Bob Marley or every folk singer who pre-dated Elvis, and no one says a bad word about them. Packaging and black leather may help to sell out concerts, but it’s not all there is. Inside it, there are musicians of enormous talent. And love. The post The wizard was Oz appeared first on Trinidad and Tobago Newsday.