When Zakk Wylde released Ozzy’s Song this week as part of Black Label Society’s new album Engines of Demolition, it landed the way these things usually land: as an obvious gesture, a sincere one, and a reminder that tribute songs are one of the hardest things to get right in all of popular music.

Wylde wrote the music before Ozzy Osbourne died. He wrote the lyrics after. He used a Les Paul guitar from his first writing sessions with Osbourne roughly forty years ago. The intentionality is evident, the love is evident, and the song is a perfectly adequate piece of heavy rock that captures something of the sound they made together without quite capturing the man. That is the usual result. It is almost always the usual result.

The problem with tribute songs is structural. A tribute song needs to do two contradictory things simultaneously: it needs to speak to the person being honored in a way that feels specific and earned, and it needs to communicate that specificity to listeners who may not share the same intimacy with the subject. When it fails, it tends to fail in one of two directions. Either it is so general that it could be about anyone, or it is so personal that it communicates nothing to anyone outside the immediate circle of grief.

The ones that work tend to do something unexpected. Elton John and Bernie Taupin’s Candle in the Wind works not because it describes Marilyn Monroe accurately, which it largely does not, but because it captures a feeling about fame and early death that extends beyond its subject. The song is about an experience of celebrity, and the subject is a vehicle for that examination. This is, ironically, a slightly unfaithful approach that produces a more powerful result than a more faithful one would.

Prince’s Sometimes It Snows in April, written for Christopher Tracy in the film Under the Cherry Moon, is arguably the greatest tribute song ever recorded, and it works because it is not really about the character. It is about grief itself, about the impossibility of accepting that someone is simply gone. The personal detail is specific enough to feel real and universal enough to absorb anyone the listener has lost.

The Beastie Boys’ three-hour documentary tribute to Adam Yauch, which included a reissue and stage tribute, sidestepped the tribute song problem by refusing to make one. They let the existing work speak and surrounded it with memory. That is a different approach entirely, and it is probably the more honest one, because the truth is that a song written for someone you love is almost never as good as the songs you made together with them.

This is the thing that is rarely said about tribute songs: they are not primarily for the person being honored. They cannot be. That person is gone. They are for the writer, who needs to do something with the grief, and for the audience, who needs something to hold. These are legitimate purposes. But they are different from capturing a life, which is what the genre implicitly promises and almost never delivers.

Wylde’s song is honest about what it is. He said in an interview that he wrote the lyrics sitting alone in his house after returning from Ozzy’s burial, just thinking about his friend. That is the song’s origin, and that is what the song actually is: a man sitting alone with his grief and putting it somewhere. That is worth something. It is not the same thing as a portrait. Both things can be true at once.

The tribute song keeps being made because the alternative is silence, and silence is unbearable when someone important is gone. The best artists make the silence audible instead. The others make noise in the right direction. In the end, the gesture matters even when the execution falls short, which means the genre will continue as long as people keep losing people, which is to say forever.