Working on a Miracle #7, The Power of Simple Words and Great Music
Ozzy Osbourne, Ed Sullivan, Newsletter Work, and a New T Playlist
“Global conflicts double over the past five years,” Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED), 2025
“You have no rights!” ICE agent to North Palm Beach teenager Kenny Laynez-Ambrosio, May 2, 2025
“Crazy, that’s how it goes, millions of people, living as foes/Maybe it’s not too late to learn how to love and forget how to hate,” Ozzy Osbourne, December 3, 1948—July 22, 2025
After foolishly refusing to open my heart to my little brother Kent’s “Blizzard of Ozz" as a teenager, I learned how wrong I was a thousand times over. A monster movie kid myself, who saw the movie “Black Sabbath” years before I heard the band (or knew I was hearing the band—my older brother James played those records), I didn’t quite know what to do with Ozzy’s or Black Sabbath’s or anyone else’s fusion of gothic horror and rock & roll. I didn’t quite know what to do with aesthetics that seemed campy. I earnestly kept my loves separate, and I missed a lot.
When Ozzy’s “Suicide Solution” came under attack just four years later, I recognized the insult to artist and fans in such accusations and how it paralleled the wrongheaded assumptions about horror I’d been familiar with since a very young age. I was in the brotherhood with little Joe Hill who gets his comic books thrown out at the beginning of “Creepshow” and the teenage stand-in for Dee Snider in “I Wanna Rock.” Returning to that music allowed me to really hear it, reminded me of the way Ozzy’s voice had touched me on songs like “Goodbye to Romance” and how I had fought being captivated by those powerhouse, shapeshifting riffs from Randy Rhoads under those “Crazy Train” lyrics, sounds and words more vital today than ever.
In the end, when I think of Ozzy, I think of love. When I interviewed him for the Kansas City Ozzfest in 1998, he dismissed genre labels by making all kinds of thoughtful points about the significance of growth and change. He explained how his jazz and blues band Earth transformed into Black Sabbath as experimentation, something that started as “sort of a spoof. But people responded to it, and it suited our music.” In the end, what Ozzy talked about most was his love of music, his fellow musicians, and his fans. “I’ve always said if my career starts to flounder, I’ll just hang it up. But the fans come back every time. It’s the greatest love affair I’ve had in my life, next to my kids and my wife.”
Black Sabbath playing the ever-timely “War Pigs,” 1970
Ruthie Foster playing “War Pigs,” 2017
“Heirs of a cold war, that’s what we’ve become/Inheriting troubles, I’m mentally numb,” Ozzy Osbourne, “Crazy Train,” 1980
“The fight for freedom today is the fight for the ideal of brotherhood,” Ed Sullivan, “Sunday Best,” 2025
“It’s about loyalty to the human condition.” Harry Belafonte, “Sunday Best,” 2025
That “cold war” line from “Crazy Train” makes me think of Sacha Jenkins’ new Ed Sullivan documentary on Netflix “Sunday Best.” A virulent anti-communist, Sullivan reflects on his hatred of anything except “good, old-fashioned Americanism.” One of the show’s most fascinating stories revolves around how Sullivan’s point of view shifted, if only slightly.
The documentary doesn’t really capture the overall old-fashioned, white Northern emphasis of Sullivan’s Sunday night talent review, but that’s not what it’s after. Topo Gigio only shows up once, and the list of white performers featured comes down to Elvis Presley, a quick shot of the Rolling Stones, The Beatles, and Tony Martin singing with Nat King Cole. These choices are appropriate because the show’s focus is on Sullivan’s role bringing Black artists into American living rooms. Even these white artists fit—Presley representing a Southerner CBS didn’t want to acknowledge existed, the Stones initially a British blues cover band, and the Beatles (who released three Motown covers before Little Stevie Wonder’s May appearance on the show) helping along the show’s embrace of Berry Gordy’s groundbreaking Detroit record label.
While it would be great to see more of each performance, the music is used effectively.
James Brown sings “Prisoner of Love” over Sullivan in his original job as a sports reporter calling out New York University for its decision to bench their Black quarterback Dave Myers in a game against Georgia. As Brown sings about his helplessness in the face of love, Sullivan’s 1929 column declares, "What a shameful state of affairs this is — Myers risking his neck for a school that will turn around and bench him because the University of Georgia asks that the color line be drawn."
Miriam Makeba sings “Pata Pata” in the Xhosa language while a voiceover of Harry Belafonte explains how the relationship that led to that performance happened. In 1953, at the height of the McCarthy era, Sullivan had heard rumors about Belafonte’s politics and wanted to meet the singer before allowing a scheduled appearance. Belafonte denied nothing about his sympathies, but he compared the fight of Black Americans to that of the Irish fighting the British and made a connection that opened the door to a warm relationship between the two.
“He had a humanist side to him. In our relationship, I tapped into that,” Belafonte explains in the documentary. And something Sullivan says early on speaks to how we get past our prejudices (including those cold war obstacles Ozzy sang about): “In every day and age and particularly right now, the power of simple words is of tremendous importance to the ideological clash.” Simple words and truth as opposed to assumptions repeatedly served Sullivan well. When he was told again and again that Southerners would turn off his show if it featured Black artists, Sullivan knew people might perform certain ways in public, “but people in the privacy of their own home are gonna do what they think.”
Watching “Sunday Best,” it’s no question how many hearts and minds were won by the performances here, by Belafonte and Makeba, by Ray Charles and Billy Preston, James Brown, Sammy Davis, Jr., Bo Diddley, Mahalia Jackson, The Jackson Five, William “Bojangles” Robinson, Nina Simone, The Supremes, Sly and the Family Stone, The Temptations, Ike and Tina Turner, Jackie Wilson, and Little Stevie Wonder. That’s the power of great music, especially coming from the very best musical performers.
But it’s the emphasis on plain talk here, from Ozzy and Ed, that sticks with me. That’s my role in the call and response relationship I have with music. My first published music writing was for a music newsletter conceived of by a sportswriter turned music journalist, Lee Ballinger, and the music journalist who showed me when I was just a kid what music writing might mean, Dave Marsh. It was called Rock & Roll Confidential when it started in 1983 but became Rock & Rap Confidential within the first decade because of the unique significance of this new quality in the music.
Over the years, new needs created new kinds of newsletters. Before I left Stillwater, Oklahoma for Kansas City, I had mocked up a newsletter called the Red Dirt Runner to tie together the fight for social justice in my area with a new sense of self for Oklahoma music. I made my first KC friends working together on a newsletter called A Sign of the Times. Other newsletters for other needs would follow—Rockitics News for George Biswell’s veteran-focused show on community radio station KKFI, the Music Alliance Newsletter to focus on the need for unity among musicians and fans in my area, the New Class News to focus on the needs of those being forced out of production by automation, particularly the homeless. Now, I’m working on this Miracle newsletter, an extension of the same strategy under new conditions, always asking the same question, how do we talk about solving our real problems together in an age of Top-Down divide and conquer politics.
We can solve the problems we face, I know, but we are up against pervasive propaganda wielded by those in power who would rather let thousands more die before I write my next newsletter than talk honestly about why the power structure is keeping us from doing what needs to be done.
After all, our social support systems have been weak and under attack throughout my life, but today they are being actively dismantled. When people in power talk about deporting workers and turning recipients of Medicaid into contract labor, we need to talk about what the world could look like if everyday people had real power. People who understand they have more in common than divides them. People who know how to talk plain talk with respect for one another’s humanity and potential. People like you and me.
After all, when we get down to it, the technology that is changing everything could be used for one another’s benefit. We should question any assumptions that keep us from taking care of one another and the planet we share.
Seizure of Medicaid Personal Data—
Ag Secretary Suggests Medicaid Recipients Replace Immigrant Labor—
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/09/trump-agriculture-medicaid-migrant-farm-workers
And just as in Ed Sullivan’s day, sports continue to be a bellwether:
"We are heartbroken by the fear and uncertainty many in our Los Angeles community are feeling right now…. At Angel City, we believe in the power of belonging. We know that our city is stronger because of its diversity and the people and families who shape it, love it, and call it home." Angel City Football Club, June 7, 2025
“More than 2,700 people have been arrested during the raids and more than two-thirds of those detained had never previously been convicted of a crime,” Los Angeles Times, July 22, 2025
Let’s end with another quote from Sarah Kendzior and another playlist from my daughter T.
“In 2019, I had written another book, set for publication in 2020, “Hiding in Plain Sight,” in which I exposed several decades of transnational organized crime, the political and media elites who abetted it, and the deteriorating conditions that fostered this catastrophe and exacerbated it in turn.
“I had hoped that my documentation of national crises would help people solve them. But in the end, I did not deliver much beyond the truth, an increasingly useless currency in the land of the conned and complicit. It’s a currency I cling to anyway because truth cannot be stolen. Hidden, but never stolen. Like buried evidence. It works its way out of the earth.” – “They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent,” Sarah Kendzior, 2022
T’s New Playlist: Chant! Chant! Chant! Blog
“All These Things That I’ve Done,” The Killers, August 2004
Over shimmering guitars, splashing cymbals and a thumping backbeat, lead vocalist Brandon Flowers pleads for redemption even though he knows he’ll never be particularly deserving. In some ways, to my ears, this is an echo of the open hand rock and roll has extended since Elvis first sang, “That’s Alright Mama.”
“Pretty Girls Don’t Cry,” Anna Akana, July 2019
Old school party rap over a slamming beat, swelling synth and guitar underpinning the refrain, Akana (who I first knew for her role as a talking head on “Blumhouse’s Compendium of Horror”) insists on making a broken-hearted rap as upbeat and irreverent as possible. Party sounds in the background, voices dishing back and forth, and laughter that won’t stop at the end all work to maintain the illusion of a sympathetic sleepover to wash away the pain.
“Could Have Been Me,” The Struts, August 2015
An arena rocker that rifles through a litany of rock and roll dreams to live life to its fullest, most important the embrace of “love and pain” and “pride and shame,” the yin and yang of life. Built over relentless banging keyboard and hard tides of guitar and drum, this third anthem ends in a house-rocking crowd chant to—if I may mix cliches that bind our musical history together—seize the day and damn the torpedoes.
“This Hell,” Rina Sawayama, June 2022
A truly remarkable synthesis of pop motifs. Sidewinder synth with splashes of echoed percussion underpin the opening pop narrative which then shifts to a chiming refrain that acts as a sort of inner-verse bridge. Sawayama’s voice rises toward a celebratory chorus almost anyone yearns for in 2025, “This hell is better with you.” The perfect climax to this set.
“More than a Feeling,” Boston, September 1976
What’s remarkable about this old song (all the older when you recall that Tom Scholz, the whiz kid behind Boston, began composing the song in the 60s) is that it is ostensibly a song about heart ache but what it’s really about is the beauty in that heart ache and in the music that comes out of such feelings. With a refrain built around essentially the same rhythm as “Louie Louie” before and “Smells Like Teen Spirit” after, “More than a Feeling” underscores the unifying power of music at its most fundamental level. It creates a space where we can all stand together and celebrate, despite or because of what we’ve done wrong, all the ways our hearts have been broken, and whatever anyone else thinks of us. “You are accepted” is always the fundamental message of such rallying cries.
Imagine where we might go from there.
Now, a little treat before we get at it—
“More than a Feeling” on “The Middle,” 2015