Ozzy is so fucking annoying. "Go fucking wild! Go crazy! I can't hear you! Come on! Go Wild! Come on!!!!!" Shut up you braindead zombie, we're trying to listen to Tony and Geezer jam.

First of all, may I remind you all that this revisionist angle is sadly nothing new? Ozzy & co have been actively pushing a shady, greedy "Ozzy = Sabbath" agenda for many years, now, regularly pulling off their trademark combination of dick moves, dick moves, and dick moves; and it worked rather frighteningly well for them so far.

BAND ACTIVITY & STATUS
It's been 17 years since the last official Sabbath studio album. Prior to that, the band's longest hiatus period had been 3-4* years in the mid-80s (* depending on how official one views 'Seventh Star'), and that was when the band had actually split up and then reformed with a brand-new line-up around Tony. The current situation presents a sharp contrast with that: the band has been officially active yet not releasing anything official for 15 years. During that time, all four original members have been officially a part of this so-called active Sabbath, even though nothing substantial happened at all under that name since they once more associated themselves with Ozzy. They recorded a couple of bonus tracks in 1997, they played a precious few shows over the years, and all under Ozzy's thumbs (notably sucking Ozzy's dick by accepting to play at a venue called OzzFest several times) and... that is that.

WEBSITE
Meanwhile, Ozzy's people put up an official website "for the band" at blacksabbath.com in late 1998 (to the best of my recollection, Tony had not bothered having an official Sabbath site prior to that). That website, from the little research I did, was vastly inactive and on "coming soon" status, with pictures or (sic) flash animations of the 70s line-up for about 10 years. Then in mid-2007, a new site emerged that was apparently very close to the rushed, user-unfriendly piece of shit we're currently graced with, judging from this discussion between users of the unofficial black-sabbath fansite back then. Somewhere around 2009, the domain name was conceded 50/50 to Tony and... Ozzy; to this day all info pertaining to this website's ownership is "BS Production Ltd as the designated registrant of A F Iommi and J M Osbourne". That's right: BS Production. None of that is new, let alone directly linked to the recent conflict with Bill Ward: the Discography page that includes only the albums featuring Ozzy and the 'Reunion' live/compilation, the title bar that boldly reads "The Official Black Sabbath Website", and the History page which delivers the following Ozzy-biased propaganda... Sadly it's all been there for some time now (and yes, shitty though this site may be, we could have noticed and should have been shocked by the implications way earlier).



Yop. According to the official band's official website's official history... even a milestone of heavy metal's history such as 'Heaven and Hell' by Dio Sabbath is for die-hard fans only. Not only that, but it doesn't have shit on Ozzy's Real Sabbath to a point where it can be stated as historical fact. Cool story, bro.

LEGAL BS
May I remind you that upon its third reformation, the Dio Sabbath line-up did not use the Heaven & Hell moniker for fun, and had instead started out using their actual name, that being Black Sabbath, before Ozzy's legal threats/insinuations/biatches pushed them to hide under a second-rate tongue-in-cheek moniker instead? This was exclusively for legal reasons, no matter what BS was told back then: the original line-up was about as active as a rotting corpse at the time. Not so long after that, Ozzy actually sued Tony to try and steal the band's name from him, only to backpedal shortly after Dio's death if I recall (we had a thread here and were all equally shocked at the time). As for Bill Ward, it would appear he and the rest of the band have been on a sure,-old-friend,-your-lawyer-can-talk-to-mine! basis for at leat 2-3 years. The whole soap drama of the past few months over Ward's inclusion or lack thereof seems to be largely a consequence of that. I'm not quite sure who/what started it, but there's seldom any coming back from a "my people will be in touch with your people" scenario. To even think that the guys can all present themselves as a band with this type of skeletons in the closet is a bit baffling, to be honest.

So yeah, letting Ozzy back in in the first place was a terrible, tragic mistake.

great post. it is very sick that ozzy and co have basically tried to erase the whole history of sabbath minus the history with ozzy. i mean they have tshirts of heaven and hell and mob rules album covers that have the name heaven and hell as the band instead of black sabbath. heaven and hell and mob rules were landmark albums, not just albums for hardcore sabbath fans, many sabbath fans including myself found black sabbath through the dio years

Sure they have a right on deciding what happens with the website, but my guess is that they don't care.