Aging British rocker Ozzy Osbourne has said that he forbade Kanye West from using a Black Sabbath sample, calling the controversial rapper an “anti-Semite.” West, who now goes by the name Ye, recently apologized to the Jewish community for a series of offensive comments.
In an all-caps post on X (formerly Twitter) on Friday, Osbourne claimed that Ye “ASKED PERMISSION TO SAMPLE A SECTION OF A 1983 LIVE PERFORMANCE OF ‘IRON MAN’ FROM THE US FESTIVAL WITHOUT VOCALS & WAS REFUSED PERMISSION BECAUSE HE IS AN ANTISEMITE AND HAS CAUSED UNTOLD HEARTACHE TO MANY.”
Ye “WENT AHEAD AND USED THE SAMPLE ANYWAY AT HIS ALBUM LISTENING PARTY LAST NIGHT,” Osbourne continued, adding “I WANT NO ASSOCIATION WITH THIS MAN!”
Osbourne’s wife, Sharon, is Jewish. “Kanye f**ked with the wrong Jew this time,” she told TMZ on Friday, adding that she and Ozzy had sent a cease and desist letter to the rapper.
Released in 1970, ‘Iron Man’ was the British group’s most commercially successful song, with its powerful guitar riff helping to shape the sound of heavy metal for decades to come. Ye sampled the song on the track ‘Carnival’, which appears on his latest album, ‘Vultures’.
Ye debuted the album in Chicago on Thursday. A live stream of the event was cut off, however, after the 24-time Grammy Award winner exclaimed “I’m still crazy, bipolar, anti-Semite.”
Ye’s outburst marked a dramatic turnaround since December, when he deleted all of his Instagram posts except for a formal apology to “the Jewish community” written in Hebrew. In the statement, Ye expressed remorse for “any ‘unintended outburst’ caused by my words or actions,” adding that he was “committed to making amends and promoting unity.”
The rapper’s run-ins with the Jewish community began in 2022, when he was locked out of Instagram for announcing that he was going “death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE,” apparently a reference to ‘Defcon 3’ on the US military’s readiness scale. Ye then appeared on Infowars, telling host Alex Jones that he “likes Hitler” and blamed “the Jewish media” for tarnishing the reputation of the Nazis.
Amid a slew of similar outbursts, including a social media post depicting a Swastika intertwined with a Star of David, Ye had a lucrative sponsorship deal with Adidas canceled and found himself banned from most major social media platforms. His X account was reinstated last summer.