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Even though many people would consider the two to be distinct from each other in terms of style, there’s a significant overlap between the ethos of both Geddy Lee and Ozzy Osbourne.
While Lee’s position as the bassist and vocalist of Canadian progressive rock titans Rush has him firmly placed in one camp, Osbourne is hailed more as the godfather of heavy metal for how he and Black Sabbath managed to lay down the foundations for the entire genre. However, that doesn’t mean that the two were polar opposites.
Progressive rock and heavy metal have always enjoyed a number of similarities, with both aiming to push rock in more bold and adventurous directions, and even though one might consider prog to be the more ‘high-brow’ of the two, the fact that heavy metal acts have always had a tendency to play around with elaborate song structures, lofty concepts and complex time signatures means that there are more things in common than a lot of people may care to admit.
However, because of this overlap, it can sometimes be difficult to determine what ought to be categorised as one or the other, and while some people will attest that assigning a particular nomenclature to a band or album is nothing more than arbitrary, others find it to be a necessary way to distinguish between styles and highlight what aspects of a particular sound they like.
Because Rush and Black Sabbath are closer together on the spectrum than one may think, there are lots of acts that both consider to be major influences for them, or who at least acted as contemporaries of theirs.
One such example is Led Zeppelin, a band that traversed the thin line separating prog, metal and hard rock throughout their career, making detours through folk and blues along the way. Both Lee and Osbourne have expressed a love for the British group in the past, and there’s one album in particular that they both feel highlights their brilliance and flexibility in terms of being able to straddle multiple genres at once.
Speaking to Classic Rock in 2021, Lee asserted that Led Zeppelin IV is perhaps the finest of their records, and while he claimed that the term ‘heavy metal’ didn’t exactly fit them because of their shapeshifting tendencies, he can’t possibly find fault in the record. “They used influences, and they took chances that other heavy metal bands just would not conceive of,” he argued. “It is the combination of the way Jimmy’s acoustic guitar is used and the presence of that blues background. It gives their music much more depth than your average heavy metal band.”
On the other hand, Osbourne expressed his love of Led Zeppelin IV during a 2017 interview with Rolling Stone, where he claimed, “I’ve always been a huge Led Zeppelin fan. All of their studio albums are classics, but this is one of my all-time favourites.”
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that both artists are massive fans of the band, and it’s especially unsurprising that their favourite record is perhaps their most ambitious and sprawling effort. While it’s tough to determine whether it ought to be classed as prog, metal or rock, there’s only really one label that matters – it’s simply a masterpiece.
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