THE VIDEO Ozzy Osbourne, "Crazy Babies," No Rest for the Wicked, 1989, Epic
SAMPLE LYRIC "Nobody's gonna change them, change them / they've gone over the to-o-op / nobody's gonna tame them, tame them / they're never gonnaaaa sto-o-op"
THE VERDICT This is seriously such a weird song, even for Ozzy. Admittedly, No Rest for the Wicked is far from my favorite Ozzy album. I know I am already in the extreme minority by being a Jake E. Lee partisan, but whatever, I am.
In any event though, "Crazy Babies" is somehow like the cornerstone of this album — the cover art even comes from the video.
That said, I'm not sure why this song was even a single (not that I really like any of the singles from this album).
Still, the song and video are really the shape of things to come for Ozzy. "Crazy Babies" is much closer to how Ozzy's going to sound from here on out. I feel like it's the bridge from "Breaking All the Rules" (which sounds for all intents and purposes like it came from The Ultimate Sin) into the Zakk Wylde era. Indeed, this is one of our first glimpses of Zakk — it's before he's gotten super-hot, he's kind of got weird bangs, but still, there he is.
I don't know if this video is necessarily indicative of future Ozzy videos, but it does give us a preview of what are upcoming trends in heavy metal videos. One, we've got the use of this sort of Yves Klein blue backdrop (here with black and white in front of it). Give it a year or two, and this is going to start to show up everywhere, from Queensryche's "Silent Lucidity" to Alice Cooper's "Poison" to Ozzy's own "No More Tears."
In the performance stuff , this is also our first metal video glimpse of this shaky/shadowy camera technique (I wish I knew the word for it!) that we associate most prominently with Metallica's "Enter Sandman." You know, where you sort of see several images at once, almost like a bunch of still frames with a bit of a lag, so you see several at once. It's a camera technique I associate way more with thrash metal, but here it is with Ozzy.
Last, there's the grainy black and white footage. This isn't entirely new, but it's worth pointing out, since you usually only see it used to convey as sense of being "backstage" or "behind the scenes," a la the grainy black and white in "Sweet Child O' Mine" or "Wanted: Dead or Alive." Dang, these guys don't often come up with new visual tropes, do they!
It's also our first peek at the Olsen twins' grown-up style. No, just kidding, it's not Mary-Kate and Ashley. But for real, don't the two main girls in the video (not the creeper with the heavy bangs, but the other two) seriously look like MK and A?
I mean, not so much how they looked at the time, but if you just knew what the Olsen twins look like now, wouldn't you assume when they were younger they'd have looked like this? Long, dirty hair, giant anime-style eyes, grungy, shapeless clothes? I mean these are all those girls' current signatures!
How they came up with the concept for this video — shaky cam of Ozzy and the band mixed with the faux Olsen twins cozying up to a giant snake — we'll never know. And then it winds up as the album art! I mean I guess their other option was the creepy mask from "Miracle Man," so.
Still, based on that video, I'm surprised we didn't wind up with some kind of faux-church or stained glass type motif on the cover instead of Ozzy sitting around with some creepy little girls. Or yeah, like Ozzy with a bunch of pigs. Or just pigs in church. Whatever, it just seems like "Miracle Man" has more happening that seems album-cover-ish than this clip does.
What this song is even about, we'll never know. I mean the constant repetition of "nobody gonna change them, change them" in a song about babies. I know, I know — I'm sure "babies" is more just a turn of phrase here than like, literal infants. But I'm sorry, that makes it sound like they are just walking around with fully-loaded diapers! Gee-ross. Ozzy, what were you thinking?
Then again, that's basically what I was thinking when I picked to do this video now. I guess I've finally hit that age where I suddenly go from knowing like, one person my age with a kid to knowing, well, pretty much everyone but me.
Well, not everyone, but a lot — it's now been like two years since I could say no one I knew was currently pregnant, and this spring in particular there has been a bumper crop of babies among my friends.
So this video is dedicated to the very recently born Charlotte and Emme, the slightly less recently born Max and Tabitha, and the any-day-now baby-to-be Sam! Hopefully somebody is going to change you, change you, at least in the diaper department.