Dashboard!
[[Breaking Update: They elected a new pope, and he is an American, but it's not Scott Stapp, so it seems not all of the Bishops on the Papal Conclave are readers of my Blog. Sorry Scott, you'll get 'em next time]]
In 1990 my parents took my sister and myself with them to Disneyland in Florida. I was 14, my sister 10, and we'd just spent the last 3 years of our lives jetting around following my father's career in the embassy game. Our tour was up, and we would be heading back the the middle of England and less than a year later, my father would be off to be part of Operation Desert Storm for 18 months. I still remember stepping off the plane in Orlando to be greeted by a wave of red hot oppressive humidity the likes I had never experienced before. I remember being puzzled by the vastness and emptiness of it (we were staying in some holiday park a car ride from Mickey's House and pretty far out from the actual city of Orlando); to me, America was a land of cramped urbanisation, and the contrast with the grassy, empty verges of central Florida was stark. We'd packed light, with my parents planning to take advantage of a relatively strong pound-to-dollar exchange rate at the time to buy my sister and I a bunch of cheap clothes while we were there. This is how, on our first full day in Florida, instead of spending it at the Disney park we were expecting, my sister and I were somehow trapped doing clothes shopping in a strip mall somewhere.
We'd had breakfast at some small roadside diner, and we trudged around the clearance clothing store with my Mum badgering me to try on a variety of jeans and trousers and shirts; our cart was loaded. But this was Florida, scorching, August summer Florida, and we needed clothes for the holiday too, so I was left to browse the racks of T-Shirts to pick some out for myself. Amongst the items of clothing that left that store with us that morning was a medium sized black Ride The Lightning T-shirt, album art printed across the front of a plain black shirt, which I was very excited about.
The timeline here is fuzzy. I've spent parts of this afternoon where I should perhaps have been working trying to figure out if I knew who Metallica were before I made that fateful purchase. Metallica were four albums deep into their career by then, with ...and Justice For All coming out in 1988; I had spent much of the years between 1987 and 1999 watching MTV, back when it actually just showed music videos. I can't believe that fourteen year old me would pick out a Metallica TShirt without knowing who they were, but as I've mentioned before, many of my younger selves choices are a mystery to me now, so it might well have been. Regardless, the Ride The Lighting shirt came back to England with me, and became a staple of my wardrobe.
It must have been three years later when the incident happened. I'd worn the Ride The Lighting shirt to school - our secondary school (high school for you foreigns) was not big on either school uniforms or discipline. We were a rough school for working class kids with a cohort of teachers who were either bright eyed and thought they could make a difference (Computer Sciences teacher Mr Kirby, Chemistry teacher Mr Snee) or cynical relics of the 1970s and 80s who had gone past caring and just let us do what we wanted if they acknowledged us at all (Mr Rowan, also for Chemistry**). I had an OK time at secondary school - I mean, I was a nerd, but I had a pretty reasonable group of nerd friends and even those who's instinct might have been to bully me for being different - I had come back from several years overseas with a strong American accent, as well as being lanky, wearing terrible glasses, and having incredibly nerdy curly hair and gap teeth - soon found that I met their attempts to mock me with a kind of stunned confusion and disregard which made me no fun to pick on. What I was not expecting was for young cleancut jerk David Bowley to try and gatekeep me out of the metal scene. Somewhere on the playground we were gathered, and Bowley shouts over at me, pointing at the shirt. "Why are you wearing that? I bet you don't even like Metallica". I told him that I did, and he hit me with the "Ok, name another one of their albums then" challenge. In truth, between the purchasing of the Tshirt and that point, I'd listened to a lot of Heavy Metal; if the original purchase had been made in the dark, it had at some point spurred me to follow through on the message I sent while wearing it. I had tapes of Metallica and Megadeth and Slayer and Iron Maiden and Van Halen scattered around my bedroom, along with my R.E.M. tapes and early grunge albums. It should have been easy. With total confidence, I said something to the effect of, "oh, that's easy...Powerslave"
Not, it turns out, a Metallica album
What I didn't except at the time was that this faux pas, my confusion of a mid-80's Iron Maiden album with a mid-80's Metallica album would become a running joke for the entirety of my adult life. I have friends I know still, friends who might even be reading this right now who are considering messaging me something to the effect of "lol Powerslave by Metallica" because it's just been a part of the kind of shared historical ribbing that comes from spending 35 years hanging out with the same people. For the record, I think it's a lame burn and it's an entirely forgivable mistake and people who think otherwise are jerks.
So, why Metallica this week? Well, when I first came up with this dumb idea of trying to get to 1000 albums I made a list of every band I knew who had 10+ album discographies I could listen to, and Metallica were on that list. Also, in part, because we went to see the classical concert last week, and while it bears no real resemblance at all to classical music, I do have a great deal of affection for the S&M (Symphony and Metallica, obviously) album, where a selection of Metallica songs are re-ochestrated to include, well, an orchestra, universally to their improvement in my opinion. As with the live Copland album from last week, I wrestled with myself a little about including it, but ended up with the justification that the songs on the album are different enough from their album versions, and that there are additional tracks on there which don't appear on other albums for me to count it. Also, it's my blog and my rules and literally no-one else cares. So, in order to justify listening to S&M, I did the whole discography. In hindsight, maybe not my best choice, but we will get to that.
Fortunately for me, and for the sake of my structuring of this article, Metallica themselves have conveniently divided their career into three distinct eras which stand apart from each other. Take my hand, dear reader, we're off to never-never land.
1983-1990 - Metal Metallica
People have been known to accuse me of having an overblown vocabulary and I don't deny those charges. I've always loved words and meanings, and I've never understood peoples disinclination to learn more ways of expressing themselves. A lot of that comes from reading, almost ceaselessly, as a teen - novels, nerdy RPG rulebooks, computer game manuals, and critically, lyric sheets. Nothing was more important for me as a teen than to not only know the songs I was listening to, but the words they were saying. I had a small Collins English dictionary with a blue plastic cover in the drawer of my nightstand, and I'd sit and listen to bands sing songs with words I'd never heard before, and rush to my tiny reference tome to figure out what exactly they were singing about.
Early Metallica made me look up a lot of words. I would sit and listen to my cassette copies of Master of Puppets and Ride The Lightning and ...and Justice For All (I didn't own Kill 'Em All until much later and I really only included it in this category out of convenience. Debut Metallica is very 80s hair metal, close to Winger and Motley Crue than you would ever believe, and really only Seek and Destroy from that album sounds anything like a Metallica song to me) and marvel at lyrics like "Fire / is the outcome of hypocrisy / darkest potency" before making a note to look up what hypocrisy and potency mean.
Once Metallica found their combination - wailing guitars, rattling drums, and James Hetfield growling literary references over the top of it - they honed it to perfection over the course of three albums. Ride The Lightning feels like the real debut album, but the middle section of the album delivering For Whom The Bell Tolls, Fade To Black (the first sign of where the second evolution of their musical sound would go once we hit the 90s) and Trapped Under Ice might be the best 1-2-3 punch on any of these three albums. Master of Puppets (and specifically the title track) led to what I assume was an uncomfortable conversation with my father when, on talking about music I was listening to, told him I didn't understand why anyone would 'chop their breakfast on a mirror' and it was many years after that before I figured out what they were talking about. ...and Justice For All taught me about the Vietnam war, and climate change - I think there's an idea that metal bands are all right wing grunting assholes, but between signing about environmental apocalypse, landmine atrocities, and half of their songs being about HP Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos told me there was not much difference between the things they thought about and the things I did.
And in case its not clear, early Metallica songs generally kick ass. I recognise that art is subjective and reactions are different but there's something about the build and the pure propulsive energy contained in these songs that makes me want to throw myself through a plate glass window. They're an injection of pure id, 40cc of undirected impetus straight to the heart. When I want to get pumped up to do something, there's an 80's Metallica song that will get me in the right headspace. By the time 1990 rolled around, they were maybe the most well known metal band in the world.
Then they released Enter Sandman.
1991-2000 - Dad Rock Metallica I've talked very briefly about their self-titled album, known as the Black Album because it was impossible to do anything in parody*** without it unironically becoming true a few years later even back then, but I'd never really experienced anything like it. The idea that Metallica would have a number one single, that people who weren't RPG nerds who mistook an Iron Maiden album for one of their albums would wear their merch, sing their songs, proclaim themselves Metallica fans without even knowing the literary basis for the song The Call of Ktulu was baffling to me. It still mostly sounded like Metallica as well, though undoubtedly with every sharp metal edge smoothed over and sanded down with studio production to make it ideal for the radio.
God I love a good chart
Metallica outsold the previous 3 albums combined. It went sixteen times Platinum. In an era where a best selling record was how you become financially successful, Metallica had hit the jackpot. Everyone I knew had this album, and I'm not exaggerating. As an album its incredibly listenable, innately morish like great popcorn, but still has that growl and drive (toned down as to not upset anyone) that makes it distinctly Metallica. Here was a crossroads; the Metal fans, the purists, they saw this album as a selling out, and hoped what would follow would be a return to something close to Master of Puppets and ...And Justice For All. God money had spoken though, and those times were gone forever.
Load, and its companion ReLoad, in reality a double album released with an 18 month gap because why not, tried to again catch lightning in a bottle. "Sure, we just made the most successful metal album of all time", they thought, "it can't be that hard to do that again if we just do kind of the same thing, right?" I've made my peace now with these albums, but as a Metallica Originalist, I spent a long time thinking of these albums as the sellout albums, the weak, dollar chasing, commercial radio albums. There's an element of truth to it, but I got over myself eventually and appreciated this was a band that was just moving to a different musical form. I accepted it from Radiohead, from REM, why should I not afford Metallica the same courtesy? In large part, it was repeatedly listening to S&M, a concept I found interesting enough to devote multiple hours to, which turned me around on a lot of those songs. The S&M versions of The Memory Remains and Fuel, and Bleeding Me are the ones I default to in my head to this day, the definitive recordings; but they got under my skin enough for me to go back to Load and ReLoad years later and enjoy them for what they were.
And then they went quiet. In many ways I thought S&M would be their swan song; I heard rumours of disquiet in the band, then bassist Jason Newstead quit. I thought they were done. Oh, if wishing made it so.
2001-Present Sad Rock Metallica
I wonder if anyone regrets letting a documentarian film and release the absolute nadir of Metallica's career while also making all the founding members look like unhinged manchildren, like being in a band is the least fun thing you can imagine, and incidentally manage to also capture two of the stupidest musical decisions in history which both appear on the same album****. The documentary Some Kind Of Monster (which you can watch in full on YouTube here, and is an interesting 2h20m watch if you are interested in the music biz) captures the exact moment Metallica ran out of usable road. Without direction or idea, and battling their own inner turmoil while trying to replace their bassist of ten years, St. Anger arrives into their discography with the enthusiasm and energy of a lead weight, which ironically is also what drummer Lars Ulrich decided to replace his snare drum with for the entire recording making the album both tedious AND sonically unpleasant. There's nothing I can say here which YouTube video essayist ToddInTheShadows did not say better in his breakdown of the album (which you can find here), so go and watch that.
The reaction to St. Anger online was so universally negative (at this point I was fully plugged into the early internet messageboards, and dunking on St Anger entertained the entire internet for like two months) that I had to listen to it myself just because I couldn't believe the hype. It's really dismal, and listening to it again for this was a miserable experience. It has not aged well, not matured like fine wine. It's as turgid and plodding as it was back in 2003. Everyone is allowed a bad album, right? The next one has to be better.
The first thing I heard about Death Magnetic was that the version of the album which was released in full as playable songs for Guitar Hero had better sound quality and mixing than the released studio album. Somehow, this is true, to the point where to this day people on the internet are asking if there's a download of the Guitar Hero track rips they can listen to. As part of the Loudness War, the production team on Death Magnetic just broke the compression dials off at maximum on the mixing desk and went to the pub. The entire studio production sounds like the slightly melodic sounds of an air conditioning unit breaking down. Apparently, the unmastered stems were given to video game studio Neversoft so they could be broken apart for multiple players in the game, and as such, did not get the sledgehammer mixing the retail version did. My understanding is that most of the versions available on digital streaming platforms have been corrected to some extent, but that was pretty much the end of my interest in Metallica. I'd already been tricked into listening to one bad album by them, I wasn't going to be fooled again. I listened to it today and it's very whatever. I'm not going to say all their songs sound the same now, but I am going to both think it, and imply it very strongly in this sentence.
Hardwired...to Self Destruct and 72 Seasons both suffered from the same first impression, though I have to admit I found my head bobbing along to some of the songs on Hardwired... Retreating back to their Black/Load/Reload formula of radio friendly hard rock was the obvious play, and while none of it made me want to jump through windows, it passed the time. Then I listened to 72 Seasons and stupidly for some reason I googled what the album title was all about to learn the theme of this album is about the first 18 years of your life and how it forms you.
James Hetfield, you are 61 years old. I came eight years late to your music and I haven't been close to 18 for a long time. You simply cannot be singing songs about the formational trauma of adolescence. The year you turned 18, Ronald Reagan hadn't even been elected yet; Voyager 1 was just approaching Jupiter. You cannot in any way make music that means anything to 18 year olds now. You would be far better served writing songs about why you're annoyed because you can't stay in bed past 7.30am any more because your back hurts when you wake up - and least you could be sure what remaining fans are listening to your new music can relate.
And while I am complaining.
Why are all these albums 75 minutes long?! We may not have any remaining ideas or anything of relevance to say, but lets make sure we take a full hour and a quarter to say it. Listening to these last 4 albums gave me a headache so bad that I went to bed early last night and slept for 12 hours just to try and wash the taste out of my brain.
Like R.E.M., I can't blame them for wanting to keep creating, keep writing new music. After 40 years in the business, I wouldn't know what to do with myself either. I just don't have it in me to keep watching them try desperately to write The Unforgiven one last time****.
* Annoyingly, this is a song title but never actually appears in the Less Than Jake song. It's appropriate and I make the rules so who cares.
** For Chemistry we had 3 hours a week of practical lessons with Mr Snee, and 1 hour of theory with Mr Rowan which I would universally just not go to, electing instead to walk to a nearby video rental shop and play Streetfighter II Turbo on their lone arcade cabinet. One year my parents attended parents evening, and Mr Rowan was representing the Chemistry department, and he apparently told them that he didn't think I was in his class.
*** In case you haven't seen 'This Is Spinal Tap', know that it is required viewing, and this scene is what I was referencing
**** The decision to make Lars drum kit sound like someone throwing tin cans at a rusty bin lid is well known, but Metallica also thought that the guitar solos by legendary guitar wizard Kirk Hammett were 'cliche' so forbade him from putting any on the record. The frayed ends of sanity.
***** Because THEY'VE ALREADY RECORDED IT TWICE MORE since Metallica, with the creatively named Unforgiven II and Unforgiven III appearing ReLoad and Death Magnetic respectively.
