On Sunday night, the MTV Video Music Awards staged a tribute to the late Ozzy Osbourne, with the young British rocker type Yungblud joining Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler and Joe Perry and Extreme’s Nuno Bettencourt to perform a medley of Osbourne’s songs. Lots of people wasn’t into it. One of those people was the Darkness guitarist Dan Hawkins. In an Instagram post that went viral, Hawkins called the performers and possibly the audience and network executives “a bunch of bellends.” Now, Hawkins’ brother and bandmate Justin, lead singer for the Darkness, has put together a YouTube video explaining why people might thing that Yungblud specifically is a bit of a bellend — or, as he terms it, a “poser.”

These days, Justin Hawkins has a fun sideline as a YouTuber. In a video that he posted from an Allentown, Pennsylvania hotel room yesterday, Hawkins breaks down not just the VMA performance but Yungblud’s demeanor on the red carpet beforehand, pointing out all the ways that he imitates people like Ozzy Osbourne and Jim Morrison. Hawkins does all this while wearing leather pants, boots, jewelry, and no shirt — the exact same stuff that Yungblud had on. The irony to the whole video, which Hawkins only glancingly acknowledges, is that plenty of people would’ve accused him of doing the same TV-friendly classic rock gestures a couple of decades ago.

After going through a bunch of video and including some footage of Yungblud’s Disney Channel past, Hawkins explains the root of the poser allegations:

I think that what irks musicians of a certain age is the fact that Yungblud seems to be, seems to have positioned himself — it feels cynical to some people, I think — not to say I feel this way, but it feels like he’s cynically positioned himself as the natural heir to the Ozzy legacy, having had nothing to do with the really, really important stuff here. So I think people don’t understand how he’s ended up there. He’s clearly come from stage school…

All of this posturing is Jim Morrison meets the bloke from Stone Temple Pilots meets everybody else who’s ever owned a pair of leather trousers and gone like that [strikes Jesus Christ pose]. It’s really 101 School Of Rock stuff. He’s just the latest in a long line of, I’m sorry to say it, posers.

Hawkins also compares Yungblud to David Hasselhoff: “It’s like a television personality doing rock ‘n’ roll.” And he mentions that this MTV tribute is the rare moment when people are actually paying attention to rock ‘n’ roll music: “For seven minutes, the world is looking at rock, and this is what we’re giving them.” I would argue that Hawkins overestimates the cultural reach of an Ozzy Osbourne tribute at the 2025 MTV Video Music Awards, and his musical values are not my musical values, but it’s fun to watch him break it all down. You can do that below.

Also, one thing that Scott would like me to mention is abs.

some abs pic.twitter.com/OJ3YOsel8G

— Stereogum (@stereogum) September 10, 2025