When the Key Club in West Hollywood closed its doors in December 2009, the eight-legged party beast Steel Panther had to find a new hair rock habitat for their weekly shows. At first, it was a relief when Michael Starr and crew cock-strutted a few blocks down Sunset to the House of Whites Blues: admission got cheaper, the room bigger, and sound better. But, for the sleaze of hair rock, a music venue/shopping mall/tourist trap isn’t the preferred setting. So sometime around March, I started to long for a return to the safety of a drug-friendly sweat hole with dark corners and unpolice-able bathrooms. After all, the Key Club was once the site of Ben Gazzari’s eponymous rock club, where the sleaze don once proudly showcased his barely-legal harem and, for VIPs, his somewhat prescient home video skills; meanwhile, HoB has a freakin’ gift shop.

You’d want maximum possible sleaze, too, once you survey the crowd. It’s mostly tourists (literally and figuratively), but filled out with solitary guys like me, unaccompanied and dead serious, fidgeting through extended bouts of boob-flashing  (our sighs seem to say “Just show ‘em already and let’s get on with the Whitesnake covers!”) and secretaries-gone-wild sing-alongs (not to be a sandy vagina, but I submit that “Don’t Stop Believin’” is not hair rock). Our visual mating call is a non-ironic hair metal shirt and a general vibe of impatience for the super hits.

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The Osbournes wasn’t just a hit; it was a genuine pop-culture phenomenon. Suddenly my grandmother knew who The Osbournes were. There’s little doubt that it made Ozzy, Sharon and the gang a whole lot richer, too, ’cause suddenly they were all celebrities who could milk their various whatevers for money.

Unfortunately, the family’s follow-up, a variety show called Osbournes: Reloaded was canceled after a single episode aired. Bmouth says that there were an additional five in the can, but, nope, the ratings on the debut were so bad that Fox opted to just cut their losses and not even try to make some of the production costs back.

So, of course, some rocket scientist in Hollywood is gonna give the family – or at least a portion of it – another chance, with a show called Osbourne Family Values. The series will not feature bands from the Family Values tours but, rather, will be about Sharon and Kelly as they “talk to mothers and daughters who are having problems,” according to the post-menopausal Osbourne.

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”The most beautiful words in the English language aren’t ‘I love you’ but ‘It’s benign.’ ”
-Deconstructing Harry

The Osbournes: Reloaded variety show got cancelled after like half an episode, Sharon literally can’t give away tickets to Ozzfest anymore, and the only times the singer makes headlines anymore are when he’s suing someone or getting a new guitarist. Why the fucking fuck would anyone want to get into the Ozzy business right now?

Ask MTV. According to Dan Rodriguez at Metal Insider, their famed reality show, The Osbournes, is coming back, “this time focusing mostly on Kelly and her bizarre, 19 year-old, Powder-esque shithead of a fiancee.”

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Generally speaking, all evidence suggests that Sharon Osbourne is a real bitch. This is not news. So when I saw the headline SHARON OSBOURNE Goes Off On Reporter on Blabbermouth, I kind of naturally assumed that some reporter had asked Sharon an honest question that had in some way suggested something insulting, and Sharon, not being the kind of person who likes it when someone speaks truth to power, flipped her shit.

Turns out that’s not really what happened at all; in fact, it would seem that Sharon is, for once, the good guy in this particular fracas.

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