Text by: Eduardo Kennedy
A few weeks ago Tony Iommi gave an interview to Richie Faulkner of Judas Priest on Gibson's YouTube channel. Once again, Iommi compared Ozzy Osbourne to Dio and repeated what has become a real cliché for Black Sabbath : Ozzy follows the guitar riffs when creating melodic vocal lines, while Dio is more creative and elaborates vocal lines in harmony over the chords.
In fact, if we think about songs like "Iron Man" and "Die Young," that's exactly what's happening, but... has anyone done the math and seen if this is really a pattern in the vocals of these two great masters?
Well, Ozzy follows the guitar riffs in only 4 of the 68 songs he sang in Sabbath, which gives us 5.8% of vocal lines identical to T. Iommi's riff. The tracks are: "NIB", "Iron Man", "Electric Funeral" and "Into the Void" – this count includes all the original tracks, including the two released on Reunion , except for the instrumentals.
And Dio also follows T. Iommi's riffs in the song "Country Girl," making it 1 song out of the 36 original tracks he recorded with the band (considering the album The Devil You Know , released as Heaven and Hell , and the two bonus tracks from The Dio Years ). The percentage is 2.8% of Dio's songs with vocal lines identical to the riff.
The moral of the story is that Ozzy doesn't follow the riff in 94% of Sabbath's songs, and Dio doesn't follow the riff in 97% of his songs with the band. It's almost the same, isn't it?
Therefore, repeating what T. Iommi says about Ozzy and Dio is equivalent to spreading FAKE NEWS. (Laughs)
We might think of Ozzy from Black Sabbath as a singer who follows the guitar riffs precisely because of the success of tracks like "Iron Man" and "NIB"... but nobody remembers Dio's "Country Girl".
*This text was written by a Wikimate and does not necessarily represent the opinions of the site's authors.
