Weekend Reads (July 12): Ozzy Osbourne, Oasis, “The X-Files,” Superman, Michael Tait
Recommended weekend reading material for July 12, 2025.
Every week, I compile a list of articles in order to give subscribers like you something interesting and thought-provoking to read over the weekend.
Ozzy Osbourne performed his final solo show to a hometown crowd in Birmingham, England this past weekend. The heavy metal icon, who can no longer walk due to Parkinson’s disease, performed while seated on a black throne.
The Prince of Darkness, who rose from below the stage in a throne, kicked things off with “I Don’t Know,” and proceeded to perform his best known solo songs, including “Mr. Crowley,” “Suicide Solution,” “Mama I’m Coming Home,” and the set-closing “Crazy Train.”
Ozzy’s performance was preceded by tribute performances from a who’s who of heavy music, including Guns N’ Roses, Metallica, and Slayer. Following his solo set, Osbourne was joined by members of his former band Black Sabbath for their last ever performance, as well.
Related: All of Consequence’s coverage of Ozzy’s “Back to the Beginning” concert.
Also related: Keith Kahn-Harris reviews the Back to the Beginning concert. “Almost unbelievably, Ozzy managed not just to sing his way powerfully through a five song solo set, it may actually have been his finest ever performance… As someone whose father is the same age as Ozzy and is also suffering from Parkinson’s, the performance turned me to jelly.”
Writing for Pitchfork, Jazz Monroe reviews Oasis’ first show in 16 years.
By the end of the set, legion fans and critics — those there at the very beginning — will hail it as the best Oasis show since the mid-’90s. This is easy to believe. I was a bit too young for the first go-around, but witnessed firsthand the solo careers and the birth of the Oasis nostalgia complex. Tonight, the gravity of the occasion — perhaps the biggest reunion in our lifetime — makes the atmosphere combustible.
Composer Mark Snow, best known for creating the haunting and iconic X-Files theme, died earlier this month at the age of 78.
Born August 26, 1946 as Martin Fulterman, Snow began his career working with other composers to do background music for the 1975-1976 series The Rookies and 1976’s The Boy in the Plastic Bubble. Over the decades, his career spanned television (Blue Bloods, Pee-Wee’s Playhouse), film (Jake Speed, Disturbing Behavior), and even video games (Urban Assault, Syphon Filter: The Omega Strain). His genre-specific credits include DC shows Birds of Prey and the first six seasons of Smallville. His final project was the 2020 X-Men film New Mutants.
The X-Files theme was released as a single in 1996 and became a hit in the UK and France. It’s also been covered and remixed by a number of artists, including DJ Dado and P.M. Dawn.
When Primal Scream released their fifth album XTRMNTR 25 years ago, the world wasn’t ready for it, writes Jeff Terich. And the album’s blistering critiques of warmongers and oligarchs have only grown in relevance since 2000.
Though the relative calm of the ’90s, at least by the standards of where we are now, carried its own reasons for cynicism and anger — a bubbling unrest that came to a boil at the WTO protests in Seattle — Nostradamus himself likely couldn’t have seen the level of ruin this planet has brought upon itself in the 21st century. But from the outset of XTRMNTR’s first song, “Kill All Hippies,” with its windup of siren-like synth sounds, strings that act like harbingers of doom and a melody that nods to Labi Siffre’s “I Got The” (a year after Eminem mined the same song for “My Name Is”), Primal Scream offer a warning for something dark looming over the horizon. It sounds like war.
Songs like “Kill All Hippies” and “Swastika Eyes” still sound just raw and exhilarating as they did when I first heard them, over two decades ago.
Simon Coates identifies fifteen albums that defined and influenced IDM (“intelligent dance music”).
IDM is more of a philosophical approach than a sonic one. The eye-roll-inducing name signifies a bold approach to production, aiming to push the sonic boundaries of electronic music and capture the imagination of fans who prefer a pair of headphones and a seat on the sofa to crowded rooms and light shows.
More than thirty years on, the IDM identifier still exists as a way of characterizing music founded on pushing the limits of studio-based experimentation. It is a movement that has spawned a whole gamut of subgenres, from click + cuts to glitch, breakcore, cybergrind, and beyond.
Coates’ list includes albums from The Future Sound of London, Aphex Twin, u-Ziq, and Autechre.
Hayes Madsen pays tribute to Final Fantasy IX and the instrumental role that one of its characters played in helping him get through a difficult childhood.
I might not have realized it at the time, but Vivi’s story resonated with me on a level deeper than I could have imagined. When I was ten, my divorced parents were in the thick of an awful custody battle. During that time I had to see countless therapists and child advocates, and afterwards, one of my parents would grill me on everything I said to make sure I didn’t make them look bad. It’s fair to say I was a tool in my parents’ battle at that point — in a twisted way, I was being used to prove which one was in the right. It was at that same time I started to question my sexuality, something exceedingly difficult in the face of a family that had always taught me to “be a man.”
In short, I didn’t have any place I belonged, and felt like I had to hide my true self with everyone. As the years have gone on and I’ve replayed Final Fantasy 9 over a dozen times, I’ve started to see the duality between my experiences and Vivi’s — the struggle of accepting who you are, even when those around you won’t.
Russell Moore explains why Superman still matters after all these years.
The idea of Superman as the idealization of strength and power would make sense. His name, after all, comes from Friedrich Nietzsche and his idea of the Übermensch in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. But if Nietzschean power were what we longed for, then there would be other characters more powerful than Superman to stand in for hope. The atomic symbol of Watchmen’s Doctor Manhattan, for example, would be far more appropriate than the S-shaped logo of the House of El.
No, what we love about Superman is not his power so much as his vulnerability. In this, playwright David Mamet was right when he wrote in the 1980s that the real draw of Superman is not flight or x-ray vision but kryptonite. “Kryptonite is all that remains of his childhood home,” Mamet wrote. “It is the remnants of that destroyed childhood home, and the fear of those remnants, which rule Superman’s life.”
Luke Plunkett has a simple question: What will it take to get you off Twitter?
I refuse to believe there is anything you are getting there, whether it be social or professional, that is worth the constant exposure to and indirect support of an outwardly fascist social media platform. Like, read the paragraph above this one back to yourself, and tell me honestly if it’s worth all of that just so you can continue to try to post some anime memes or catch some sports highlights or talk to the other three people you're still talking to who haven't deleted their account or moved to Bluesky because “I’m just tired of making new social media accounts, man.”
Related: Earlier this week, Grok — X’s own AI chatbot — started spewing anti-Jewish conspiracies and pro-Hitler messages. “At the very least, this fiasco should increase our skepticism of AI, especially when it exists at the whims of a man like Elon Musk. AI is constantly shoved down our throats as a Good Thing. But when it can so easily be made to conflate ‘truth-seeking’ with flagrant Nazism, that should be a pretty big red flag that it’s not to be trusted. Nor are the people who profit from it.”
Ryan Dombal explains why music publication Hearing Things no longer subscribes to Spotify.
Our values as a publication — pro-worker, pro-artist, pro-active listening, anti-villainous corporations — did not align with many of Spotify’s actions and policies. At the same time, more people listen to music on Spotify than any other platform, and we wanted to make any playlists we put together as accessible as possible. So we reluctantly started paying for a Hearing Things Spotify account. But a couple of days ago, we canceled that paid subscription, and we will no longer be making playlists on Spotify or linking to the platform. It feels great.
The Department of Homeland Security recently used a Thomas Kinkade painting in one of their posts. Billed as “The Painter of Light,” Kinkade was famous for his sentimental paintings of traditional American scenes. But such sentimentality can easily be put to ominous use, writes Karen Swallow Prior.
The painting, like most of Kinkade’s art, is warm and sweet — as American as apple pie. Set on a rain-glazed morning on a small-town street lined by a white picket fence and 1950s automobiles, the focal point of the scene is an American flag. It rises up toward rosy morning skies as schoolchildren file toward their school past a church and surrounding homes —all with windows glowing with golden light from within.
In other times, this image and this message would be innocuous. A department of homeland security, like such departments anywhere, is expected to “protect the homeland” and to advocate doing so. But like everything these days, the most innocent-seeming messages seem to come with implications of a larger, darker theme. In the current context, “protecting the homeland” is laden with politics, posturing, cruel abuses and cases that have gone all the way to the Supreme Court and are yet being played out.
Over on Christ and Pop Culture, I wrote about the sexual assault allegations facing Michael Tait (Newsboys, DC Talk), the dark side of the Christian music industry, and the dangers of mixing fame and ministry.
Fame and money, however, are powerfully corrupting influences, and perhaps especially so for Christians. Mixing celebrity and wealth with ministry is a very fraught and dangerous combination. We’ve seen this play out in situations with abusive pastors and worship leaders who enjoyed a certain level of fame and status (e.g., Bill Hybels, Robert Morris, Ravi Zacharias). It’s not hard to see that same dynamic at work in the Tait situation, as well.
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[T]his dynamic sadly makes it all too easy for rock stars like Tait — for all of its faith trappings, the Christian music industry does, indeed, have rock stars — to do terrible things and get away with them for far too long.
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