Was Ozzy Osbourne the first doomer?

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• Ozzy Osbourne dead at 76

  The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee was instrumental in the creation of heavy metal. Read more.

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Hand of doom

No one ever went broke betting on things getting worse.

The dreams of utopians can lead to incredible advances, but entropy is not on their side. Besides, everybody has their own problems, and future generations will lack the necessary context to know how good they have it.

Looking around at the grim towers and grey skies of Birmingham at the end of the ‘60s, it’s easy to see how Ozzy Osbourne could think he was in the end times. Osbourne, who passed away on Tuesday at the age of 76, channeled the feeling into a series of songs about warlocks and the military industrial complex, setting them over an apocalyptic mix of Tony Iommi’s sludgy guitars, Geezer Butler’s driving bass and Bill Ward’s punishing drums to invent the genre that came to be known as heavy metal.

Giving songs like the haunting “Black Sabbath” or the iconic “Iron Man” a spin in the wake of Osbourne’s death, you might find his outlook oddly familiar. The advent of the endless scroll has also brought about a popular endless pessimism called “doomerism,” This trap for the too-online is centered around the idea that things can never, and will never, get any better.

It’s a sort of modern Malthusian belief that’s bolstered by our tendency to reward cynicism as the “smart” take. It was born on the internet, where it's supercharged by a self-bolstering algorithm. A quick look around the world — what with its genocides, game show presidents and warming oceans — makes it easy to see how someone could fall into the snare of anthrofatalism.

Osbourne distilled core philosophy down to its essence decades before it had a name on “Paranoid”: “I tell you to enjoy life, I wish I could, but it’s too late.”

But Ozzy was no doomer. Even as he cranked out music that sounded like the universe tearing itself apart, Osbourne couldn’t actually have believed that this was the end. There would be no need to keep carrying out the rituals of music creation, no need to cut the unbearable weight of Sabbath with those beautiful, soaring vocals, if he thought it was all for naught.

The distorted, plodding Brummie blues that the Prince of Darkness helped bring into the world was so obviously new and so endlessly exciting that even its industrial-scale moping can’t quite make it a bummer listen. Hearing Sabbath’s riffs for the first time makes you wish for the world to go on, if only to have your mind blown again in a similar way.

Videos of early live performances show the band getting entirely caught up in the occult magic of cocreation. Ozzy’s easy to spot. He’s out front and dancing, whipping his hair around before smiling into the mic as he wails a line about the evils of men and the soul-sucking muck of the world.

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