Meet the Osbournes’ Other Daughter, Synth-Pop Artist ARO
Aimée Osbourne can’t get the glitter off her face. It’s a cool spring day, and she has just returned to the swank Tribeca hotel where she’s staying, ordered a vodka-soda and settled into a seat in the lobby. The singer, who is surprisingly tall, somewhat soft-spoken and always affable, had been at a photo shoot, where a stylist had treated her eyes with glittery makeup and, try as she has to remove it, it seems to be there for good. “You cannot get rid of it,” she says with a laugh, her British accent belying her now deep-set Los Angeles roots. Such are the troubles of her new life.
Years after she turned down taking part in The Osbournes – the epochal reality-TV show that catapulted the rest of her family to instant fame – Ozzy and Sharon’s eldest daughter, now age 31, has begun taking the first real steps toward a music career of her own. This past March, she released a surrealistic music video for her shimmery, avant-pop song “Raining Gold,” which has racked up close to 2 million YouTube views in two months, and now she’s planning on putting out an EP this summer under the name ARO. She’s also been playing out more frequently.
Public life, Osbourne reports, has been treating her well, following years of people misinterpreting her reclusiveness. “It’s ridiculous,” she says, opening her eyes wide to emphasize her point. “I’ll go and walk the dog with my mom and [people look at me] like, ‘The mental patient got permission to leave and is having tea with her mother.'” She laughs.
Now that she’s been more actively promoting her music career, the way strangers treat her has begun to change. “A lot of people have come up to me at different times and been like, ‘Oh, you’re nice. I thought you must’ve been, like, a hermit or, like, something is wrong with you,'” she says with a laugh. “I’m like, ‘No, well, maybe, but it’s not that bad.’ It’s nice to feel like I’m not always being given side eyes like, ‘There’s the hidden one that doesn’t like to talk to anyone.'”
Osbourne was born in September 1983, two months before her father donned wolf-like makeup to support his Bark at the Moon album. “She was such an innocent little thing, when you looked at her you just couldn’t help breaking into a huge smile,” Ozzy wrote in his 2009 autobiography. She spent her first year on the road with her dad and mom and, other than including a few anecdotes in his book, Ozzy wrote that he respects how Aimee “likes to be anonymous.” When the family decided to do The Osbournes, which premiered in 2001, Aimee chose not to participate. “I want to be a singer, and I felt if I’d stayed with The Osbournes and done the whole thing I would have been typecast right away,” she told the U.K.’s Independent in 2008, echoing a similar sentiment she expressed to Barbara Walters in 2002.