The Complicated Legacy of Complicated Legacies
Malcolm-Jamal Warner, Ozzy Osbourne, and Hulk Hogan & why some legacies aren't complicated at all
Remember 2016? It felt like everybody died that year. Maybe it felt that way because Twitter was really Twitter back then, and many of us were still in the halcyon days of social media. Maybe it was just the way birth rates rise and fall over the years, and that was a year when, statistically, lots of people’s numbers came up. Maybe we all just noticed these deaths, because we needed a distraction from the election year and the fact Donald Trump wasn’t as going away as quickly as we hoped he would.
We lost a truly diverse array of people who defined American culture, world history, Hollywood, sports, music, and more. It both seemed random in its variation and somehow very selective in making sure some of everybody got got. It was like a Thanos snap.
In no particular order, in 2016 we lost…
Garry Shandling, Alan Rickman, Craig Sager, Gwen Ifill, Sharon Jones, Anton Yelchin, Zsa Zsa Gabor, John Glenn, George Michael, Gene Wilder, Fidel Castro, Elie Wiesel, Muhammad Ali, Antonin Scalia, Glenn Frey, Pearl Washington, Chyna, Carrie Fisher & HER MOM Debbie Reynolds, Alan Thicke, Leonard Cohen, Janet Reno, Leon Russell, Florence Henderson, Paul Kanter, Grant Tinker, Anna Dewdney, Bill Nunn, Jose Fernandez, Arnold Palmer, Gloria Naylor, Rudy Van Gelder, Toots Theilemans, Arthur Hiller, John McLaughlin, Kenny Baker, Michael Cimino, Nate Thurmond, Dennis Green, Pat Summitt, Bernie Worrell, Scotty Moore, Ralph Stanley, Gordie Howe, John Bradshaw, Morley Safer, Merle Haggard, Anne Jackson, Nancy Reagan, Rob Ford, Maurice White, C. D. Wright, Dario Fo, Dan Haggerty, Harper Lee, David Bowie, Prince, & Frank Sinatra… Jr.
To be fair, this is not a complete list. Not even close.
2016 was so rough that it even killed actor Abe Vigoda, a man who actually had a career resurgence because people often thought he had died when he had not.
Well, last week felt like a week from 2016. Malcolm-Jamal Warner, Ozzy Osbourne, and Hulk Hogan died. Each of them have icon status in their own right. After a long career in showbiz, Malcolm-Jamal will always be known as Black America’s TV brother because of his role as Theo on The Cosby Show. Ozzy Osbourne and his band Black Sabbath either invented heavy metal music or were the first to perfect it. Then Ozzy and his family gave us one of the greatest reality shows of all time–yes, that is the faintest of praise–The Osbournes. And Hulk Hogan was professional wrestling’s first crossover megastar. Each of their deaths happened in different ways that lead to different types of mourning.
Ozzy’s health had been declining for years due to Parkinson’s. It is clear that he and his family knew the end was near, so they planned a final concert for him, packed with rockstars to honor him. He died only a couple weeks later at the age of 76.
Malcolm-Jamal Warner drowned while he was on vacation in Costa Rica. It was as tragic a death as you could imagine for a man who seemed full of life and determined to continue making a positive impact on the world. He was 54. He was an actor, musician, and poet. Most importantly, he was a husband and a dad.
Hulk Hogan died of cardiac arrest about a month after he had major surgery on his spine. He was 71. I didn’t realize that he was that old because he has kind of looked the same for the last 30 years, his skin tanned to the point of looking like leather, his muscles working hard to look muscle-y, and the hair on his head holding on for dear life. Now, before you say, “Kamau, he just died. Those aren’t nice things to say.” Hold on. I’ll say worse.
When I was a kid, Hulk Hogan was one of those cultural figures you had to reckon with even if you didn’t like wrestling. In the early-to-mid-’80s, America did a much better job at being a monoculture. There was no Internet. There was barely cable. Most everything had to fit into the three major networks, PBS, and the one or two UHF stations that came in clear enough to your TV. So some Saturday nights, I would turn on NBC to watch Saturday Night Live, and instead NBC would have on WWF wrestling. Because at that hour there was nothing else on that was worth watching, I would watch wrestling. That’s why I have a working knowledge of Hulk Hogan, Macho Man Randy Savage & Elizabeth, King Kong Bundy, Jake the Snake Roberts, the Honky Tonk Man, Ricky the Dragon Steamboat (he was Asian), the British Bulldog (He was British), the Iron Sheik (he was Iranian), Rowdy Roddy Piper, the Junkyard Dog, the Ultimate Warrior, the Million Dollar Man & Virgil, Andre the Giant, and more. All because NBC didn’t just show a rerun of SNL. You could say that my knowledge of Hulk Hogan is like my knowledge of Pete Davidson’s dating life; it was forced on me.
The one thing that the Hulk, Ozzy, and Malcolm have in common in death is the phrase “complicated legacy.”
To be fair Malcolm-Jamal Warner bears ZERO responsibility for the complications that he is is associated with. He was a child. That complicated legacy is Bill Cosby’s, not Malcolm’s. But tragically, it does make celebrating (and showing clips of) Malcolm’s best known work, The Cosby Show, loaded to say the least. I feel sorry for Malcolm, the same way I feel sorry for so many people who had nothing to do with Cosby’s crimes but who are forever attached to him. To me, though, Malcolm’s legacy is not complicated. His loss is devastating. He died as he was still creating his legacy.
Ozzy Osbourne wasn’t just a rockstar. He was a ROCKSTAR! Ozzy was one of the people–along with Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin, Jim Morrison of The Doors, and Jimi Hendrix–who invented the whole idea of the modern rockstar. A rockstar is a rebel, a law breaker, a trouble maker, a sexual deviant, a substance abuser, a vandal, and weirdly also a teddy bear. Your legacy can’t help but be complicated when your Wikipedia page has one of those “Controversies” sections. I was also surprised by the number of people who referred to Ozzy as a “Zionist” under a post I put on Instagram. I had no idea that Ozzy and his wife Sharon were such staunch advocates for Israel, even in the face of Israel’s genocide on Gaza. The story of Ozzy biting the head of a bat seems positively quaint in comparison. (Although, Ozzy’s “Controversies” section has more than a few things that are certain to get PETA’s vegan knickers in a twist.) I can totally understand how one person is focused on the beauty and power of his trailblazing music and how another person is focused on his politics. Because of the Internet we know much more now about everybody than we used to. That is why it is so easy for legacies to get complicated. In the ‘70s and ‘80s Ozzy was often accused of being a satanist, while he was apparently praying to the Church of England before his concerts. We had no idea. Today, we know a lot, so I can understand why my IG post making a silly joke about Andrew Yang’s stunning lack of Ozzy Osbourne knowledge would start some fights!
Andrew. Yang. Called. Ozzy. A. True. American. Original. 😬*
Obviously, nobody’s perfect—not even Andrew Yang—but Hulk Hogan seemed to go out of his way to be as imperfect as possible. While he was telling the kids of America to, “say your prayers and eat your vitamins,” he was ushering in the steroid era of professional wrestling. He lied about taking steroids for years, and eventually he only admitted to taking them when, during a court case, he was given immunity from prosecution. In his later years, Hulk Hogan was known for telling even bigger and more obvious lies, the most ridiculous one being that he was offered the job of playing bass in Metallica.
“I certainly have no recollection of doing anything with 'Hulk Hogan'." - Lars Ulrich, a couple weeks after that
The best way to describe Hulk Hogan is to simply say he was from Florida. Hulk Hogan was the Florida Man’s Florida Man.
Hulk Hogan is a classic Florida menace. Hulk Hogan is to the Florida Man what Michael Jordan is to the basketball player. They are both far and away better than the field.
Hulk Hogan is so Florida that his sex tape features racial slurs.
Hulk Hogan is so Florida that he once choked out comedian Richard Belzer live on TV and then dropped him on the floor once Belzer passed out.
Hulk Hogan is so Florida that he ratted out his fellow wrestlers to the boss when he found out that they were trying to unionize. This is possibly part of the reason Hogan was never really well liked by his fellow wrestlers.
Hulk Hogan is so Florida that after his sex tape was leaked by gossip website Gawker, Hulk allowed J. D. Vance’s daddy Peter Thiel to fund his lawsuit against Gawker. I understand being mad that recordings of you sex-ing and racial-slurring were out in the public, but Peter Thiel is truly awful. I wouldn’t want Peter Thiel to be involved in passing me the salt.
Hulk Hogan is so Florida that he campaigned for Donald Trump in 2024.
Hulk Hogan is so Florida that that even his core audience, wrestling fans, booed him mercilessly earlier this year, in his last public appearance.
(Get in on the Florida bit in the comments. Hulk Hogan is so Florida that . . .)
Listen to that sound. Those are the boos of the people who are supposed to like him the most. Hulk Hogan’s legacy isn’t complicated. Hulk Hogan was a professional wrestling icon who was gross in nearly every other way. Yes, he did a lot of Make-A-Wish Foundation visits. Yes, he… actually that's all I got for the good stuff.
I say this now, because one day Donald Trump is going to die. I know. None of us wants to imagine that is true. But when he does, there is inevitably going to be someone (probably many someones) who will try to tell us that his legacy is complicated. I just want you to get your back strong enough and stiff enough now to resist the urge to go along with that.
Donald Trump is an adjudicated rapist who was at one point good friends with Jeffrey Epstein. Jeffrey Epstein’s right hand woman, Ghislaine Maxwell, is serving time in federal prison for sex trafficking minors for Jeffrey Epstein, who AGAIN was good friends with Donald Trump. The human centipede is eating its own butt.
We have to get over the idea that life is an unsolvable math equation. Using the phrase “complicated legacy” is often just a way to say, "I don't want to pick a side.” In many ways not picking a side is what got America to the place we are in. Are we for righteousness and justice? Or are we for close enough and maybe in a few years it will be better? It shouldn’t be that complicated.
Who’s With Me?
*Please don’t defend this. I beg of you.
I had a great conversation with Mahmoud Khalil.
As you may know, Mahmoud Khalil was represented by ACLU lawyers, so I was thrilled to be able to have him as a guest on the ACLU’s podcast At Liberty! We talked about his “kidnapping” (his words), his wife Noor’s activism, his life as a reluctant celebrity, and fatherhood. Also my oldest daughter was there to witness it. A truly beautiful day.
Me and THE GREAT Andy Borowitz
Andy Borowitz is known for a lot of things: co-creating The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, his legendary satirical op-ed The Borowitz Report, and now a bestselling Substack author. Normally he paywalls his podcasts, but this one with me he his giving away. Go listen and let him know what you think.
WKB Recommends!
Did You Know That We Don’t Really Know How Jeffrey Epstein made his money?
Like we know he had a lot of money at the time of his death, nearly 600 million dollars. And we know he was “in business” and “in relationship” with incredibly wealthy people, but we don’t know why anyone would have paid him that much money for the job he said he was doing (financial advisor? investments manager? financier?).
Also, did you know that Jeffrey Epstein was a college dropout with no education to do the jobs that he claimed he was being paid to do?
Also, did you know that for nearly two years Jeffrey Epstein was a math teacher at an exclusive private Manhattan K-12 school even though he had ZERO credentials?
I learned all that in YouTuber Patrick Boyle’s latest video Epstein’s Wealth! I have followed Patrick for a while now. He makes incredibly well researched, charming, and entertaining videos about the bad side of big business. Maybe it is his British accent, but I can watch him breakdown complicated financial situations and feel like we are in it together. I highly recommend this video.
My Who’s With Me? Fall Tour is coming up!
September 20, Carmel, CA
November 7, Tulsa, OK
November 8, Oklahoma City, OK
November 20-22, Louisville, KY
Hulk Hogan is so Florida that his mustache looks like an extra mullet
Wow! Thank you! I am nearly 72 years old. I loved early Ozzy and Black Sabbath, Robert Plant and Led Zeppelin, Jim Morrison and The Doors and JIMI. And Janis Joplin! And still do! Malcom was a delight to watch. I am sad about his death, too. Hulk Hogan was a misogynistic racist who was just a gross human being. This whole thing about "I don't wanna pick sides" is telltale just like "I don't care or follow politics" smack of privilege. Cheeses.