Ozzy Osbourne is a Money-Grubbing Whore

Let me begin by saying that I love Ozzy Osbourne. I am a big fan of Black Sabbath when Ozzy was the singer and a big fan of a lot of Ozzy's solo career. A lot of Ozzy's solo career, not all of it. The fact of the matter is that Ozzy's albums often had a lot of filler on them. I am hard-pressed to think of one album I enjoyed all the way through. Ozzy has released a lot of Greatest Hits collections as well. These are normally pretty decent, although the songs that will be included are often fairly obvious. The Prince of Darkness box set for instance has all of the classic songs from Ozzy's solo work. It also features some rare and previously unreleased material as well. This is where things start to get a little fuzzy and Ozzy's money-grubbing whore side starts to show through.

Disc 1 features Ozzy's big hits from Blizzard of Ozz through Bark at the Moon. Again, many of the song choices are obvious although the Ozzman uses live songs for some of the tracks. I do not know how to feel about this. On the one hand, it is nice to hear a different version, but on the other, most of these live versions were available on the live album Tribute: Randy Rhoads, which kind of makes their inclusion less significant. Randy Rhoads was a great guitar player though and hearing his solos live is a treat. Only the live version of "Bark at the Moon" was not released on a previous album, instead it can be found as the b-side to the UK So Tired single. If none of the versions are previously unreleased versions, the producers would have been better served using the original songs. That being said, this is where most of Ozzy's best material is, so it is the disc I listen to most often of the four.

Disc 2 takes the listener from The Ultimate Sin through Down to Earth in similar fashion as Disc 1. The first three tracks are songs that originally appeared on The Ultimate Sin, however each one is a live version only shown on The Ultimate Ozzy video. This is more like it. These tracks do not appear on other recorded albums. Also, Ozzy rarely performs tracks from this album live anymore, which is a shame because there was some killer material on the album. Four of the five songs off of No More Tears are demo versions that can only be found on The No More Tears Demo Sessions. This is an extremely rare demo collection and again is a nice touch, although most of the songs do not sound much different than the eventual recorded output, some of the arrangements are slightly different. "Won't Be Coming Home" is the most unusual track from this set as it eventually became "S.I.N.". "Perry Mason" appeared on the first Ozzfest collection, then we have some more rare recordings of other songs from live albums and a couple of unreleased demo versions. Obviously the way to get people to invest their money into buying a box set like this is to offer them something different, something they may not already own. The second disc does a much better job of doing that than the first disc.

Disc 3 features a lot of the collaborations and various artist compilations and this is where Ozzy sacrifices a lot of metal credibility with some of these match-ups. The first two tracks appeared on the Nativity in Black tribute albums to Black Sabbath and feature Ozzy with Therapy? and Primus respectively covering classic Sabbath tracks. These are fairly faithful versions of the original songs and are not offensive. Ozzy then covers "Purple Haze" which he promptly butchers. After that we get his collaboration with Type O Negative which is an okay but not overly impressive track off of the Howard Stern movie. I would have liked to hear more of a duet with Peter Steele, but whatever. Then the whole thing goes to hell for a few songs. I'm not sure which genius decided it was a good idea to put collaborations with Was (Not Was), Miss Piggy, Crystal Method, 'Ol Dirty Bastard, DMX, the Wu Tang Clan, and Dweezil Zappa, but he should lose his job promptly. The Was (Not Was) track is particularly awful as it features Ozzy attempting to rap. Apparently Ozzy will do anything for a buck, including sell out his credibility to appear with artists he has no business working with. "Psycho Man", one of the original songs on the Black Sabbath Reunion album almost makes the disc listenable and the collaborations with Infectious Grooves and Lemmy are decent but forgettable.

Disc 4 was originally the whole reason to buy the box set as most of these were previously unreleased covers. However, they were all released on the Under Cover album which came out later in the year making their desirability limited. This is interesting though to hear some of the songs that influenced Ozzy. I have often wondered what he listened to, although I did know he listened to The Beatles a lot. This disc gave me a better understanding of where Ozzy came from. I do not know the original songs well enough to comment on how good a job Ozzy did with them so I will save that.

The most interesting aspect of this box set is the packaging. There was a lot of time spent in collecting together photos of Ozzy live and in photo shoots covering his entire solo career. Also Ozzy gives some brief insight into each of the songs at the beginning of the booklet. It's funny to see him mention being too wasted to remember what happened in several spots.

Altogether, this is obviously a cash grab. Ozzy is making money off of this box set featuring tracks released multiple times. The few rarities really do not make the box set worth the money. If one already owns all of the albums, then this collection is not a great buy, it is only for the hardcore completist or someone who does not already own everything.