Ozzy Osbourne puts an animated spin on a hilarious episode from his time in Black Sabbath in the video for “It’s a Raid.” The song is the closing number of Osbourne’s most recent solo album, Ordinary Man.
A cartoon video for the track, which also features Post Malone, finds the Prince of Darkness and the rapper going back to the Bel-Air mansion where Sabbath recorded their soon-to-be-reissued 1972 classic, Vol. 4. Back in the Seventies, Osbourne mistakenly pressed a button he thought activated the air conditioning. It turned out it was a silent alarm that summoned the police, prompting the Sabs to panic and dump all of their drugs — a fact they bemoaned after telling the cops that all was well. In the clip for “It’s a Raid,” Osbourne and Post Malone end up leading the cops through the streets of Los Angeles.
“Andrew [Watt, producer] thought it was a funny story and said, ‘We’ve got to write a song about it,’” Osbourne tells Rolling Stone. “We were just jamming around, like, ‘It’s a raaaaaaid!’”
Osbourne addressed the new clip in a statement. “A couple of years ago I didn’t even know who Post Malone was,” Osbourne said. “Since then we’ve worked together on two studio tracks and have performed together twice. Understandably Covid-19 made it difficult to get together to shoot a music video for ‘It’s a Raid’ so we opted for this wildly imagined animated video for the final single from the Ordinary Man album.”
The singer is currently working on a new album with Watt. “There’s some songs on there that are like eight or nine minutes long that are these really crazy journeys,” the producer recently told Guitar World. He also hinted at some of the special guests who could be on the record: “I started doing a bunch of basic tracks with [Red Hot Chili Peppers’] Chad [Smith] and [Metallica’s] Robert Trujillo, who used to play in Ozzy’s band. And [Foo Fighters’] Taylor Hawkins also came in and played a bunch on the record as well, which adds a different flair — it kind of harkened back to Ozzy’s Eighties era, in a great way. And I think it’s so cool for a rock fan to be able to listen to half an album with Chad Smith on drums, and then you flip it over and you get to hear Taylor Hawkins.”
