Culture Critics

On July 5, a couple of days after I saw Spinal Tap II: The End Continues, Black Sabbath played its final show, at Villa Park, in Birmingham, England.

- By James Parker

This Was Spinal

Tap One more smell of the glove

Not only are these two phenomena related; they seem to have been impishly synchronized: Just when the troupe behind Rob Reiner's This Is Spinal Tap, the mockumentary that satirically exploded the genre of heavy metal, reunited after four decades for a sequel, the band that invented heavy metal called it quits.

And then, two weeks later, Ozzy died: Ozzy Osbourne, Sabbath's front man, who at Villa Park had sung sitting down, enthroned on what looked like a satanic office chair, heroically managing a host of ailments (including Parkinson's disease). No one was more metal than Ozzy. At the same time, no one in metal was funnier, more in touch with his own bathos, more post-Spinal Tap, in a sense, than Ozzy, especially in his shambling-paterfamilias incarnation on MTV's reality show The Osbournes. At Villa Park, his frailty was epic, defiant, even as his bandmates labored drastically to summon the power of 50 years earlier. Still, Sabbath sounded amazing, the band's distinctive vibe of limitless cosmic encumbrance, of Man squirming under the thumb of Fate, God, madness—the essential heavy-metal vision—somehow magnified by the venerable wobbliness of its playing.