Ozzy Osbourne’s Global Farewell Tour: The Bat-Biter Becomes the World’s Exit Music
Ozzy Osbourne’s Farewell: How a Brummie Bat-Biter Became the Planet’s Shared Alarm Bell
By Our Man in the Departure Lounge, somewhere over the Mid-Atlantic
The news that John “Ozzy” Osbourne has announced his “final” world tour—again—was greeted in Beijing boardrooms, São Paulo favelas and Finnish reindeer stations with the same weary shrug we reserve for asteroid warnings or another Musk product launch. After all, the man has been dying onstage since 1970; the only surprise is that the planet may expire first. Yet beneath the leather-and-glitter nostalgia lies a darker, funnier truth: Ozzy isn’t just a rocker; he’s a global carbon-dated canary, chirping that the whole 20th-century party is now on palliative care.
Start with the visas. To limp through his No More Tours 3 itinerary, Osbourne’s passport will require more stamps than a UN peacekeeping battalion. Crew members from 17 nations—among them a Ukrainian pyro tech who learned explosives in Donbas and a Peruvian rigger who once smuggled llamas—must secure entry waivers from countries that can’t agree on climate targets but miraculously align on letting the Prince of Darkness shriek “War Pigs” inside their football stadiums. If only carbon emissions came with a catchy riff and a merchandising deal.
Financially, the spectacle is a petri dish of late-capitalist absurdity. Ticket prices in Buenos Aires start at 40 percent of the monthly minimum wage, prompting the government to declare the show a “national cultural interest,” thereby subsidizing a British millionaire’s pension plan while the IMF tightens the fiscal thumbscrews. Meanwhile, in Dubai, platinum packages include a backstage “sobriety coach”—a concept as futile as a moderation tutor at a Bacchanalia—sold to oil executives who’ve flown in on private jets shaped like credit cards. Somewhere, a Scandinavian teenager calculates that one Ozzy stadium night equals the annual energy budget of her eco-village, then shrugs and streams “Paranoid” anyway. Who says cognitive dissonance can’t have a soundtrack?
Health-wise, Osbourne’s medical chart reads like a WHO bulletin from a post-apocalyptic future: Parkinson’s, staph infections, broken neck vertebrae held together by the same titanium Russia uses for tank armor. And still he travels, a pharmaceutical Noah’s Ark, proving that while vaccines may not cross every border, opiates certainly do. Doctors in four countries have certified him unfit to cross a hallway, yet insurers underwrite him crossing continents because, frankly, the world prefers its metaphors onstage with fireworks. If Ozzy can tour while technically a walking hospice, then maybe, the subconscious reasoning goes, we can all outrun ecological collapse by simply turning the amps up to eleven.
Culturally, his lyrics have become the unofficial fine print of globalization. “Generals gathered in their masses”—played in Warsaw minutes from a NATO missile battery—sound less like doom metal and more like LinkedIn. The same set list echoes across Mexican cartel territory where local bands cover “Iron Man” with accordion flourishes, proving that militarized despair is the one export America never slaps tariffs on. Even Tehran’s underground metal scene, risking lashes to blast Black Sabbath, treats Ozzy as a dissident poet; apparently, when the ayatollahs banned Satan, they didn’t anticipate a Brummie accent.
And so, as the curtain prepares to drop—possibly on Ozzy, possibly on us—his farewell becomes a mirror no airport scanner can avoid. We are all roadies now, lugging baggage we can’t declare, praying the next border stays open long enough to sell a T-shirt. The bat he once bit was dead the moment it hit the stage; we just didn’t know we were auditioning for the same role.
When the final chord feedback fades somewhere near the International Date Line, Ozzy will shuffle off to whatever tax haven doubles as Valhalla. The rest of us will queue for departures, boarding passes wilting in our sweaty palms, humming a riff we pretend is escapism rather than the exit music for a century that partied like there was no tomorrow—and, increasingly, looks like it might be right. Rock ’n’ roll was always billed as rebellion; turns out it was just the rehearsal for retreat.
