Today, Ozzy Osbourne passed away, and with him a piece of rock history that will never return.
As a "technologist", I can't help but smile bitterly when I read on Wikipedia: "On July 22, 2025, Osbourne died at the age of 76." That distant past, updated in real time, captures the paradoxical speed of our digital age: while we're still processing the news, history has already been written, archived, catalogued. The present becomes the past in a click.
But Ozzy was the antithesis of this technological coldness. He was flesh, blood, sweat, and screams. He was the primordial chaos that no algorithm will ever be able to codify. For over fifty years, he embodied the purest rebellion, the kind that comes from the gut, not the keyboard.
From the factories of Birmingham to stages around the world, from Black Sabbath to his solo antics, to that final, moving concert on July 5th, seated on a throne, his voice broken but still indomitable, Ozzy has always shouted his truth without filters.
While Wikipedia updates verb tenses and digital archives fill up with obituaries, somewhere in the world there's still a kid who hears "Paranoid" or "Crazy Train" for the first time and feels that same anger well up inside him, that same desire to scream against the world.
This is Ozzy's immortality: not in databases, but in every guitar that plays louder, in every voice that screams louder, in every heart that beats faster.
Thank you, Prince of Darkness. Your distant past is our eternal present.
Rest in Peace, Ozzy
December 3, 1948 – July 22, 2025