Occasionally, something happens in the pop culture sphere that motivates Dave to stay up long into the night expounding his semi-autobiographical opinion in a blank word document.
Since the leaking of Metallica’s new album Death Magnetic has a predictable impact on the torrent community (it goes something like: “download it even if you don’t want to hear it because they took on Napster way back when”), Dave’s maniacal thoughts will be published in full….below the cut…beware the pure hatred!
Oh, the sweet irony.
Beyond the angle that one of the most publicly vocal bands against file-sharing is now having their files shared just for the fuck of it by torrent freaks worldwide, this has made me realize something else: My entire opinion of Metallica has been tainted so severely, that I cannot have an opinion about the new album.
I’ve tried.
Logic would tell me that it sucks. That’s how I hear it.
If James Hetfield was even an iota of self-deprecating (We suuuuuuck-ah!), I might not hear it as immediately horrible, and it’s that Metallica seems to be completely serious about releasing another album that sets my neurosis-engorged brain to turning.
I was a huge Metallica fan in middle and high school. They were my introduction to metal, in a certain way. I was listening to Metallica when I went to France, and in France I discovered the first KoRn album, and that got me into Nu Metal, which lead to Metallica and Tool superfandom.
Without trying to sell you on the excuses I whisper to myself late at night to justify this period, I really liked metal. Slipknot, System of a Down, and to a minor degree Stained, since a third alliterative band was needed.
Now, when I hear Stained, I think of visiting my ex-girlfriend Alix when she worked at some sort of store that made smoothies. Stained comes with a taste. Linkin Park comes with an olfactory memory; some guy sparking a joint during their set at Denver’s original Mile High Stadium when Alix and I went to our first Ozzfest. Our FIRST Ozzfest.
Metallica was my first concert. I attended it in the 8th Grade with Tai and his father Pat, our chaperone. It was at a venue called Fiddler’s Green, where the general admission was a hill the stages and seating were built around. The grass had long been trampled, and we picked a spot to generally mill around before Alice and Chains opened. A guy who looked like Stanta Claus, if St. Nick was a biker during the off-season, slapped Pat on the back and said: “Never too old for Metallica.” I was psyched to be there, because it meant I wasn’t at football practice with my coach Mr. Payne (not making that name up!), who probably hated Metallica. We had brought along two other guys: Ning and Greg. Greg was also on the football team with me, and might have even worn his jersey to the show until he bought a concert ticket (I might have romanticized this moment and altered my memory). Ning got sucked into a nearby mosh pit during the show, and Pat had to go in and fish him out, because he was a small Asian youth sucked into a his first pit. That’s the kind of guy Ning was.
I liked Metallica so much that I enjoyed both Load AND ReLoad on their own merits. I liked Metallica so much, I coughed up money online to get CD-Rs of burned material. I had to pay one guy twice because the first CD-R had failed in the burning process, as the technology was apt to do at the time. I liked Metallica so much, they were the first band whose logo adorned more than one of my t-shirts. I liked Metallica so much that I had their VHS box-set of tour videos. I liked Metallica so much, I own the Cunning Stunts DVD. Do you even know what that is and what it means about a person?
I mentioned the CD-Rs. Part of the upcoming total-betrayal-by-a-band-I-loved-and-further-disillusions is the specific time period that I was a high school student. Being a high school student is basically my excuse. I’d venture to guess that everyone experiences the existential pressures that come along with high school. You’re not thinking about it directly. When you’re thinking about what you’re going to do after school, what you are really thinking is: “I see myself acting a certain way, and it’s changing. Am I becoming the adult I’m going to be, or am I being someone else so other people will think I’m cool?” Some people answer that question for themselves very early on in high school. Lucky them.
Around this time, I started being in bands, I started listening to more music and – most importantly – I started using technology to make all these things easier. Record on a pirated ACID PRO copy, burn onto CDs, pass around songs, share albums with each other. Napster was big at the time. I think the first CD I saw downloaded from Napster and burnt onto a CD-R was Garbage Version 2.0 at my friend Ty’s house with his friend Matt’s portable CD burner. I can’t imagine it didn’t take all day to acquire the files from the service, transfer files that were reduced to a now-unthinkably-low bit rate, and burn the bastard at something like 2X speed. It was brilliance. More importantly, it was rewarding. This sort of file-sharing has stuck with me to this day, which is why I download entire discographies of people like Lil Wayne or The Mars Volta and just delete what I don’t love, just poking around to hear new things. The technology had a lasting impact that changed the way music worked forever.
Because Metallica couldn’t kill that. They were able to shut Napster down, ultimately failing because they didn’t realize they were in the middle of an industry-wide shift. And they looked like greasy, greedy fools to everyone out there, especially the fans who knew that Metallica only started getting gigs when they encouraged copies of their tape – titled Metal Up Your Ass – to circulate in the California underground tape trade.
Metallica then joined Michael Jackson in the pool of artists whose songs are interrupted with: “This is still awesome even though [he might molest children/they love money more than their fans].” when they are played during parties.
When Metallica released a live album with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, titled S&M, the real fans kind of forgave them. Metallica looked to be over, they were rounding the career-horn, mining their material. Then Jason Newsted quit and I shut the lid; they might have been assholes, but their catalog was still solid, totally enjoyable (Master of Puppets? Still awesome.).
But they didn’t stay dead. Like really greedy zombies, they released St. Anger. They took Ozzy Osbourne’s bassist (and Ozzy got Jason Newstead in an ironic twist), did a live show in San Quentin and must have been partially deaf if they thought a snare drum should sound like an anvil for a whole goddamned album.
For the brief, financially woeful period I was sharing a bed with Nate Patterson, he woke me up with St. Anger only once. The first thing I saw on some weekday morning was Nate standing over me, over-enthusiastically head-banging with his tongue out (and flapping) while thrusting the rock hand signal in the general vicinity of my face. Nate also woke me up with music from the WarCraftII PC Game, Hanson and a Slipknot track that is only screaming and distortion. Just to give you an idea of how much of a joke St. Anger was.
And for those of us not ready to hate Metallica just because they made a bad album, Metallica released a documentary called Some Kind Of Monster about the making of St. Anger. Any respect I had for the men making the music that was, for so long, the soundtrack to my life was sucked out of me as if the movie was a Dementor from Harry Potter. Any good feelings I had about Metallica were forcibly pulled out of me and all I had were the sad, greasy feelings that I had been fooled by alcoholic complainers (James), spoiled whiners (Lars) and passive girly/robot men (Kirk) [to degrees, all descriptions overlap beyond the specified member]. Watching them all argue over lyrics they were writing together, or watching Kirk record his guitars and then leave James and Lars to argue over the stupidest alpha-male bullshit made me think that they had drunkenly stumbled their way into awesome metal music. They seemed, both on screen and on the album, like they were just throwing their musical feces against the wall, hoping to pile on enough logs to resemble the Mona Lisa if it was painted with shit by Jackson Pollack.
I’ve listened to most of the their new album, Death Magnetic, and I can’t not hate it. I hate them and I hate that they just kind of hope shit works out. I think Coldplay is (in the least offensive way ever, but just as a term in the common vernacular – and I know I shouldn’t even propagate the usage, but it’s so fitting) gay every time I read about them arguing over the track listing for their newest whatever release. But it’s a process that at least outwardly looks like a collaboration between musicians, showmen and businessmen, not some sort of I-Was-A-Teenage-Rockstar daycare: Metallica.
Their newest crime that motivated me to write the above mind-vomit? They’ve titled one of their tracks “The Unforgiven III” for reasons unknown. I suspect that they thought this would trick us into thinking: “This is like old Metallica,” which is their push for this album. But they left out the rising horn introduction that opened both “The Unforgiven” on the classic Black Album and “The Unforgiven II,” which itself was trying to send the “classic” message during their reinvention on Load and ReLoad, but at least they used the damn intro! This one’s bridge is literally: “Forgive me/Forgive-me-nots.”
I mean? Am I older and realizing it was always like this or does this suck more than usual?
That’s the quandary. What’s not is that the boys of Metallica remain The Unforgiven IV.
That’s how I’d end this piece if I was Dan Rather.
