What I mean is: does he mumble on purpose? Or did he have some kind of medical condition that was recently cured? I could just barely understand what he said on the Osbornes. He was nearly totally incoherent in that cell phone commercial. But now on the new World Of Warcraft commercial he sounds nearly totally normal. What the Heck?
He recently admitted that he was drunk for pretty much every episode of The Osbourne’s. Could have had a lot to do with it.
I definitely noticed a big difference and could understand him a lot better on that cell phone commercial. My husband is a big Ozzy fan and thinks that the cell phone commercial was faked to be that way to poke fun of himself.
I understood the mumbling on the cell phone commercial to be self-parody, if we’re talking about the one where he’s discussing personal assistants. He only mumbles part of the time in that and speaks clearly in the balance.
Ozzy’s done more drugs than everyone on the SDMB put together. He’s licked up Motley Crue’s piss. He’s decapitated animals with his teeth. He’s drank the “Mystery Bucket.” He’s, in other words, certifiably deranged but he’s smart enough to understand that but doesn’t seem smart enough to stop destroying himself. So, I’ll go with “part act, part really fucked up and sad.”
You never heard him on Howard Stern. “garble garble Hellycopter”
Some of it was drink, some of it was a court-ordered anti-psychotic, as I recall.
And yet, I recall a cut from the show in which he sounded perfectly normal, for a guy from Birmingham (ie: pretty damn incoherent, but you could get the gist) between takes. When the camera was officially on, then not even God Himself could figure out what he said.
I believe you. Cite?
I’m genuinely interested to read this.
I met him on the No More Tears tour before the show. Hell of a nice guy but he was just about impossible to understand. At that time he was doing enough drugs to kill half the state.
Slee
I have seen a lot of interviews with him over the years and his enunciation varies in proportion to how many chemicals he has in his system.
The Samsung commercials are hilarious. You can tell he was acting in those because his speech was screwed up in a totally different way than when he is high. It sounds like he works in a word something like “bollocks” in one of them. (An English Doper can correct me if I am wrong on the spelling of the word used by the English Doper ;o)
Did you see the one where he is using the navigation feature on his phone and is shocked to find the bathroom in his house?
Nitpick: It was only the piss of Nikki Sixx. And his own.
Best nitpick ever. Take that Vince Neil’s piss.
I seem to remember an interview (Behind the Music, maybe?) that I saw years ago where he discussed having a stutter and he attributed that to part of the reason why you can’t understand him some of the time.
After that, I noticed times when he’d stutter and other times he’d just mumble.
Oddly enough, I could understand him most of the time…
I’ve always understood Ozzy to be a bit unbalanced naturally, but made worse with substance abuse.
Across a number of books, articles and documentaries (including Behind the Music if that counts as a “documentary” ;))
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When he was a kid in Birmingham, he drank a ton, huffed inhalants including, according to Ozzy, car exhaust. He walked around with a shoe on a leash and claimed it was a pet. Certainly…a bit eccentric. Tommy Iommi has said that he thought Ozzy was a whackjob and was a younger kid whom he bullied in school because Ozzy was bizarre - but Iommi decided to give Ozzy a shot in the band because he was a decent singer and owned his own PA - very rare back then.
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While in the Sabs, he was florid in his substance abuse and apparently it increased his eccentricities, to say the least. This extended to his Blizzard of Ozz stage, as has been documented in the thread already (take that, Vince Neil’s piss! snort). Stuff like biting the heads off birds and bats and such - those are part PR - he purposely bit the head off the bird in a misguided attempt to coolly shock his label, but instead grossed them out. The bat was a mistake on stage (according to Ozzy) - he thought it was fake at the time it was thrown on stage.
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According to rock critic Jim DeRogatis, Ozzy pours water on himself onstage to cover up his lack of bladder control…
All of this is a way of saying I don’t know if Ozzy has ever been anything but an eccentric, but the years of drug abuse and life on the road have clearly not been kind. There is something to be said for playing it up for PR, but I have no problem believing that if you stripped away any PR component, underneath you’d still find an incoherent nutjob - albeit one who loves his wife and children and who will do what it takes to make a buck…
In his most recent interview on Howard Stern, Ozzy displayed remarkably normal enunciation. He said that he had recently found a new doctor who had slowly weaned him off of all of the prescribed medicines he had been taking. So he was claiming that the speech problems were the side-effects of overprescribed, unnecessary, legitimate medication.
Granted, he’s no Lord Olivier now, but he definitely got a lot of the marbles out of his mouth.