When a tribute is meant to honor a legacy, the execution matters as much as the intent. Recently, Justin Hawkins of The Darkness stepped in to expand on his brother Dan Hawkins’ harsh criticism of the Ozzy Osbourne tribute at the MTV VMAs. His comments were as sharp as they were candid, particularly when it came to Yungblud.
“There has been some discussion this week regarding my brother’s comments on the Ozzy tribute and Yungblud at the VMAs. Was it really necessary to refer to anyone as a ‘Bellend’? Let me try to explain,” he said (as transcribed by Ultimate Guitar).
According to Hawkins, the spectacle around the tribute stretched beyond the performance itself.
“The tribute to Ozzy extends to what he was doing on the red carpet. So the minute he got there, he was like ‘OK, this is for Ozzy.’ One difference, though, Ozzy was fucking hilarious, he really was funny.”
Hawkins then raised a point about generational frustrations in the music world: “I suppose one of the things that irks musicians of a certain age is to watch Ozzy invent heavy metal, then turn into this household name with the television series and his decades of being brilliant, and then you kind of think, ‘What the f*ck does all those decades of having this incredible legacy got to do with Yungblud?'”
The issue, he explained, wasn’t just the performance, but what it seemed to represent: “I feel like what irks musicians of a certain age is the fact that Yungblud seems to have positioned himself as a natural heir to the Ozzy legacy, having nothing to do with the really important stuff.”
Hawkins didn’t hold back when describing what he saw as inauthentic theatrics: “All of this posturing is Jim Morrison meets the bloke from Stone Temple Pilots meets everybody else who’s ever owned a pair of leather trousers. It’s 101 School of Rock stuff, you know? It’s the latest in a long line of – I’m sorry to say it – poseurs… For seven minutes, the world is looking at rock, and this is what we’ve given them.”
Still, amid the criticisms, Hawkins praised one performer: Nuno Bettencourt, saying his playing was so good that his fingers are “the eighth to eighteenth wonders of the world.”
But the spotlight quickly turned back to Yungblud, whose presence Hawkins likened to imitation rather than artistry.
“It’s like you’ve watched a movie about rock and metal, it’s like what a male stripper would do. It doesn’t ring authentic. It’s rock’n’roll, but not as we know it. It kind of has this Disney veneer over the top of it, like it’s rock ‘n’ roll seen through an Instagram filter of some sort. That’s what makes it galling to the people who have tweeted their disdain.”
He even compared the spectacle to a certain television icon: “It’s actually like watching David Hasselhoff, who I think is one of the greats… So when I say that, it’s not actually an insult. I just mean that it’s like rock’n’roll done by somebody who, perhaps, was famous for driving a talking car and felt reassured by wearing little red shorts and looking after you at the beach. It’s like a television personality doing rock’n’roll.”
