D.M: "Number of the Beast." "Screaming for Vengeance." "Hellbilly Deluxe." "Among the Living." "Rust in Peace." "Holy Diver." "Danzig." "Reign in Blood." "Battle of Los Angeles." "Don't Break the Oath." "Demanufacture." "River Runs Red." "Nihil." "No More Tears."
That list could run on ad nauseum, but the point is this: not one person reading this doesn't know those albums. They're the formative, permanent pillars upon which the entire history of the metal genre rests. Each is a timeless, instantly recognizable classic, above reproach, beyond criticism, transcendent and untouchable. Yet, there's an album that sits atop them all, an album deserving of its own introspective conversation, for its musical value, for its omnipresence, and depending on who you talk to, for what it sacrificed to get to that point.
We're talking about an album that has sold over 30 million copies worldwide, which puts it in the lofty company of Led Zeppelin's "IV," The Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," and the original motion picture soundtrack to "Grease."
Metallica's self-titled record, more commonly known as The Black Album.
Look, let's be real here. Love it or hate it, and there are plenty of people who do both, The Black Album is likely the most important album in the history of metal. While there were other records that established a beachhead for metal to make inroads in popular music, this 1991 release, which elongated its popularity with no less than six radio singles, outshone the entire grunge movement and made it possible for a metal band to sit at the table with the superstars of pop that dominated the airwaves. There's no other album in the history of the genre, no matter how lofty, that boasts those same accolades.
Metallica completely reinvented themselves for the record, teaming with producer Bob Rock and leaving behind the bloated, thrash dirges of "...And Justice for All." Instead, they gave the world an album of twelve accessible, easily digestible rock-and-metal anthems that had been produced to a high mirror shine. The public devoured it, with the album debuting at #1 on the US charts, and going on to sell more than 16 million copies in the United States alone. And that's not to say that it's the best metal record ever written, merely the most successful.
All that success came with its own price, as scads of metal purists declared the band had sold out and betrayed their fans and their image. A select group of fans turned their backs on the band that had carried all their hopes as the vanguard of the genre, refusing to ever acknowledge Metallica or their past greatness ever again. Ties were severed as the band sipped champagne from gold chalices.
I've said many times in different columns that I believe there are only two bands who can rightfully lay a claim to sit upon the throne of metal - Black Sabbath and Metallica. They are the eternal titans, the two bands who the story can't be told without. The Black Album, more than any other single thing, is what gives Metallica the ability to reach to that lofty height. Even the prolonged popularity and creativity of Iron Maiden can't propel them to that level of fundamental importance of the genre.
When I think of The Black Album, probably contrary to the memory of most, I think first of Jason Newsted's impressive, smoothly deep intro to "The God That Failed." Both because it is the first song I learned to completion on bass, and also because it is one of the rare moments in the history of Metallica where the bass player was not buried so deep in the mix as to be lost. Still, when I think of it, my heads starts to nod involuntarily and my fingers pluck the air. Whether through a breakthrough in songwriting style, or through some Faustian bargain the likes of which we'll never know, that kind of mnemonic recall represents the staying power of the simple riffs of a catchy album. "Ride the Lightning" will probably always be my favorite Metallica album, but even those well-worn and comfortable songs don't rattle around in my brain like the singles of The Black Album.
As such, that's why we're here - to discuss the anniversary of a record that has yet to be matched in the annals of metal's history. What does The Black Album mean to you, and what comes to mind first when you think of it?
CHRIS C: The first thing that comes to mind when I think of The Black Album is thinking I was going to break my neck. Let me explain that, because it ties in with what you were saying about the album's unique power. In the early ‘90s, I had a neighbor with one of those oversize trampolines. There would usually be an album playing as we bounced around, and as I was figuring out whether or not I could pull off a backflip (eventually, yes), The Black Album was one of the handful of albums we listened to most often.
That I can tell such a story is why we're talking about this album. At the time, I didn't know the first thing about metal, and neither did my neighbor. What we knew was "Enter Sandman" and "Sad But True" were all over the airwaves, and we liked what we heard. Metallica was able to infiltrate the mainstream by not being stubborn, by realizing that having more people listening to your music doesn't say anything about your character. In a scene where so many were obsessed with maintaining their image and their 'cred', Metallica wanted to be the biggest band in the world, or at least get their music to as many people as they could. Somehow, the latter of those claims rang heretical to some of the metal scene.
What The Black Album means to me is an entire side of my musical personality. I trace back my fandom of heavier rock and metal to a particular episode where I sat in on a friend's college radio show and heard a song that changed everything. That isn't a false memory, but I was primed to get there because of Metallica. Those times absorbing the music in the background tied the neurons together I would need later on. Even the act of having a copy on my shelf for the last twenty-five years or more made metal a possibility even when I wasn't actively thinking about it.
So if I wouldn't be who I am without Metallica, I can look back now and say it was only possible with The Black Album. "Master Of Puppets" would not have had the same effect, because whether you like Bob Rock or not, and we'll get around to discussing him later on, it was with this album that the keys to songwriting were discovered. And that's what I think about first and foremost now when it comes to the album; would metal have ever developed the kind of songwriting I enjoy most if not for Bob Rock being able to guide Metallica to where they wanted to go?
I've said before, and I've heard the same sentiment from more knowledgeable people, that it's harder to write a simple and memorable song than it is to write something complicated. For as exciting as metal was in the 80s, we weren't seeing a lot of great songs, from a compositional standpoint, that is to say. For as much as I love "Angel Of Death" or "Raining Blood", it's not as if you could sit down and casually play a Slayer song. You could with most of the songs on The Black Album.
Metallica set the standard for metal success, but also metal songwriting, and metal production as well. The Black Album is the blueprint by which the entire genre elevated itself, and it's still being used in all three settings as the standard we judge everything by. Think about that. Black Sabbath is no longer the standard of heavy. Slayer is no longer the standard of extreme. But The Black Album is still the standard of metal speaking to the masses. That's impressive. Whether or not it should be those things is what we have to figure out.
D.M: A brief sidebar, if you'll allow it, since you mentioned your transformative experience with the trampoline and The Black Album - I was recently in a conversation where someone was asking me what musicians influenced my musical tastes and formed the basis of my music fandom today, and my interlocutor started laughing when I said MC Hammer - but it's true! Without "Please Hammer Don't Hurt 'em" and "Too Legit To Quit," I don't know how or when or in what condition I would have been introduced into rap, and established that it was an art form I like.
Anyway...
On top of everything you've pointed out above, a lot of which we'll dissect in greater detail, particularly the production, there are two other points which feel notable to me and suitable to the conversation.
First off, and maybe the production is part of this - but I have always found it fascinating that The Black Album managed to outshine all of its contemporary releases - with the exception of perhaps Nirvana's "Nevermind," which has also sold roughly thirty million copies. Even with that, The Black Album boasted more radio singles than any album of the era I can think of, with the exception of Soundgarden's "Superunknown," and what makes that even more remarkable is that that latter album came two years later, and The Black Album was still going strong in radio play. It almost seems like Metallica's release happened in a parallel reality to the dominance of the grunge era - the two are almost never mentioned in the same breath, and yet while the grunge era is the ultimate musical impression of the early part of the '90s, Metallica ran counter to all of that. Their album thrived on glossy production and clean guitars and slick presentation...not a stitch of flannel in sight.
Now sure, it's easy enough to point to Public Enemy or Madonna or, well, MC Hammer as other artists who found great success in the grunge era, and many of them have greater staying power than the flame of grunge, which burned brightly but quickly. But what makes Metallica's record stand out from that pack is that it happened in, for all intents and purposes, the same genre as Nirvana and Soundgarden and Alice in Chains, and just kept setting the pace among them all.
Now to do that, and this brings me to my second point, Metallica re-invented themselves, and while we'll spend a lot of time talking about the musical end of that, there was a thematic element to that as well. Thrash had come of age in many ways as protest music during the Cold War era, and by the time The Black Album is released in August of 1991, the Berlin Wall had already come down and the end of the Soviet Union was imminent.
So suddenly, the entire genre found itself missing a huge piece of its formative identity (except for Slayer, who had always done things by their own rules, and thus stuck to their thematic guns,) and in response to that, Metallica releases an album which artistically questions the end of their world as they knew it and also, probably accidentally, set the tone for the entire genre for the next three decades. Nearly every song on The Black Album, except for the catchy but somewhat clunky "Don't Tread on Me," is about the journey of the individual, and their place in new, unfamiliar surroundings. A world they don't yet understand. Grunge had some of this, too, but was focused more on the suppressed rage of a generation raised under the thumb of nuclear threat and the legacy of the Vietnam Conflict. Metallica was bothering to ask the follow up question - "what do we do now?"
Since this time, the common themes of heavy music have turned inward, becoming more an examination of the inner workings of the mind and mental faculty, but it was Metallica who first focused on the plight of the individual at all. Looking at the purely metal releases around the same time, The Black Album is the only one to really do so. Not "Seasons In The Abyss," not "King of the Kill," not even "Cowboys From Hell."
And so beyond just the musical shift and production legacy of The Black Album, it broke ground in ways that I don't think people even realized at the time.
CHRIS C: The stories of how we wind up where we are, listening to what we listen to, can be fascinating. If we didn't have the radio on at a certain moment in time, or if we didn't see a friend use a lyric as an AIM away message (dating ourselves here), or we didn't randomly read a certain review, what would we be listening to? Those all pointed me in directions.
I think Metallica avoided the grunge period because they were running on a parallel track. They were absolutely not a grunge band, but you could listen to "Sad But True" back-to-back with "Man In The Box", and they went together. Though they weren't wearing flannel or being dour in the same way, Metallica's ‘90s records were still tapping into the same sensibility. That actually ties into where you ended up. That sensibility comes from Metallica's first-person writing. If grunge was largely thought of as the sound of personal misery, Metallica was also writing about the personal experience. They were less miserable, and looking more for the way to get out of those downward spirals (pun only partially intended), but the zeitgeist of the day absolutely carried through. A lot of the country was looking for the answer of what came after the turmoil of the 80s, as we entered the relative peace and prosperity of the 90s, and that's what both grunge and Metallica were trying to answer.
It may have been unintentional, but it speaks to how Metallica was always smarter than other metal bands. Go all the way back to the beginning, and look at the decisions that were made. They dumped Dave Mustaine, a smart decision. They didn't force the issue to call the album "Metal Up Your Ass", a smart decision. They re-wrote "The Mechanix" into the deeper and more sophisticated "The Four Horsemen", a brilliant decision. For a band that was called 'Alcoholica', they were cagey and wily beyond their metal image. They have a song titled after the monster from HP Lovecraft's pulp horror fiction, after all. You had metal bands still trying to write about partying, and others writing about wanting to punch people, while Metallica realized neither of those was ever going to age well with their audience.
Their reinventions were also a byproduct of their intelligence. Ok, "St Anger" wasn't, but we'll ignore that one. Their other shifts, whether minor or major, were always in search of what else they could add to their repertoire. After they made "Master Of Puppets", which was pretty much the same album as "Ride The Lightning", they knew the audience would get bored if they kept doing that. After "And Justice For All", they were smart enough to know there was nowhere else for them to take their music to metal extremes, and they also knew they had maximized their audience with that sound. They saw things first that other bands would need to see Metallica do to understand.
Which brings me to The Black Album itself, and Bob Rock's influence. Let's get this out of the way early; Bob Rock didn't ruin Metallica. They were going down that route anyway, and all Bob did was show them how to do it in a way that didn't suck. We've talked about
songwriting before, and Metallica is a great illustration of my larger point; writing a concise song that speaks to people is far harder than writing a progressive song with no hook. Some of the stuff on "Justice", when the songs are riff after riff after riff, are actually easy to write. What is hard is to write that one riff that needs no others, or that vocal line the casual fan will remember even when they weren't paying full attention. Bob Rock helped point them in that direction.
Bob Rock also gave Metallica the sound that would define the 90s, and is still felt today. I will let you handle that issue first, if you would like to, but I will tee it up by saying this; after hearing the remastered version of "Enter Sandman" that was previewed from the anniversary edition of the album, the sound is actually incredibly dated. I hadn't noticed it as much before, but hearing the new master just once showed me just how much I don't like how a lot of The Black Album actually sounds, despite its legendary reputation.
D.M: I'm glad you brought up the sound of the '90s, because that dovetails nicely into something that I think hovers over this entire conversation. Metallica's idiomatic shift to a new sound in 1991 was, as you demonstrated, a necessary part of their continued evolution and viability, but it also was representative of their intelligence about the emerging sounds of the decade in front of them.
What people always recall about the abrupt transition to the explosive, emotive fury of grunge is that it overthrew what had been the previously unassailable fortress of hair metal, which had dominated the airways since the end of what would become known as the classic rock era. Grunge perhaps deserves the lion's share of the credit for hair metal's demise, but beneath the waves, Metallica deserves some credit for, in all, likelihood, seeing the cracks that had already formed in the foundation.
Seen in individual moments, David Geffen would bring Nirvana over from Sup Pop Records and force the evolution of 'alternative' radio in 1991, but four years prior to that, he had already seen the kernel of what was to come when he brought the world Guns 'n' Roses' "Appetite for Destruction." GnR still obviously possessed some of the glam of their forebears, but the sound and the attitude was new and brash and different. Two years later, out of that same Los Angeles blast furnace, Nine Inch Nails puts out "Pretty Hate Machine," and successfully moves electronic music away from the shadow of disco and available to a new, harder audience. Then, a year after NIN, Pantera, also in a reinvention, comes out with "Cowboys from Hell." Those are hardly the only three albums that are germane to this conversation, but you see what I'm getting at. The musical landscape was already starting to shift before grunge and before The Black Album, but where Metallica was brilliant was in recognizing and capitalizing on it.
And yes, I recognize that the term "capitalizing" is a charged word when talking about Metallica.
I am going to admit something that no music journalist, even if I can barely lay claim to that term, should ever admit, which is that I've never been someone who can make great distinctions in album sound beyond "this sounds great" and "this sounds awful." I have always sort of assumed, with the exception of old punk records that all sound like they were recorded in the back of a garbage truck, that the sound of an album reflected the intent of the artist. So, I've never had a particular issue with The Black Album on that regard, although I recognize that it is a totally separate sound from everything Metallica had done before. I am willing to admit the duality that I think to some regard I treat Metallica as two different bands, with The Black Album as the debut of Metallica 2.0, and also that I idly wonder what The Black Album would sound like, and how it would have been received, if everything about the songwriting were the same, but the guitar tone had been more representative of the one from "Kill 'em All."
Can we talk about "Enter Sandman" for a second? What made that the most famous single from the album? I took an informal poll of co-workers a couple years back, and what I found, perhaps predictably, was that people who did not identify as metal fans, but liked Metallica, all picked "Enter Sandman" as their favorite song, while the metal fans almost always picked something from either "Master of Puppets" or "Ride the Lightning." (There was one metal fan whose favorite Metallica song was from "Death Magnetic," which I applauded as a bold choice, as that album is underrated in Metallica circles overall.)
Now, some of this probably comes from oversaturation, but if I am listening to The Black Album, I rarely get through the whole thing of "Enter Sandman." I mean, the intro is cool, but the actual meat of the song is merely okay to me. If you were asking me to rate the songs on the record, I would have it as the seventh best song on the album, just below "Holier Than Thou" and ahead of "Of Wolf and Man."
And since that begs the question:
1 - Wherever I May Roam
2 - Through the Never
3 - The God That Failed
4 - Sad But true
5 - The Struggle Within
6 - Holier Than Thou
7 - Enter Sandman
8 - Of Wolf and Man
9 - Don't Tread on Me
--end of the songs I actually like --
10 - My Friend of Misery
11 - Nothing Else Matters
12 - The Unforgiven
So, anyway - you're a songwriter. What makes "Enter Sandman" work?
CHRIS C: You're absolutely right that while "Smells Like Teen Spirit" was the moment when the water finally came over the deck and sank hair metal, the boat started going down when "Appetite For Destruction" hit. It's hard to believe now, given how little anyone has paid any attention or care to Guns in thirty years, but they were arguably the biggest band in the world from their breakout until Slash left. You can't have a band be that big, that ubiquitous, and not have an impact on the larger music scene. I'm not saying Nirvana wouldn't have broken through the way they did if Guns N Roses hadn't come first, but they made it far easier. We were already primed to accept a grittier, more 'real' version of rock n roll. It's actually a bit of a surprise that happened, since with the Cold War ending, you would think we would be in a happier place, and looking for music more like the hair metal that was being replaced. But things were reversed from expectations, maybe because we have a nagging thought in our head we're not supposed to feel that good, so we tried to keep ourselves on an even keel, first with happier music when things looked bad, and then with more angry music when things were better. That's an intriguing idea.
I'm not exactly an audiophile either, but I've played around with recording enough to pick up a bit of an ear for certain things. My ear can't tell you what key a song is in for the life of me, but I can hear the tricks of the trade of production pretty clearly (I can also say virtually all CGI in movies still looks fake). I totally get why The Black Album has been treated as a benchmark in production circles. It does sound great when you compare it to a lot of the records that were coming out at the time. Metal production during the ‘80s was, let's be frank, lousy. Between the adjustment period to CDs, and the underground nature of the music, metal albums from that time mostly sound thin and brittle. The Black Album was a massive sound if you played it back-to-back with anything of the time.
Sound is definitely important. Why did "Reign In Blood" break Slayer out? Was it really worlds better than "Hell Awaits"? Probably not, but just listen to that record. The production of the record stripped away the reverb, and put everything right in your face. In a different way, The Black Album did the same thing. It took Metallica's sound and presented to you on record the scope of an arena show. They sounded like superstars, which helps us to think of them that way. It's no surprise that the biggest records of all time are almost always expertly produced. The Black Album was, "Back In Black" sounds phenomenal, "Nevermind" is the most polished thing Nirvana ever did, "Appetite For Destruction" also sounds great. We might not always be able to put our finger on it as easily as, say, when Baroness releases two albums so garbled they become unlistenable, but there is a subliminal draw to great production that leads us to consider those albums better.
To answer your question more directly, if The Black Album had the raw production of Metallica's early days, there's no way we would be sitting here having this conversation. The album still would have sold, and it would have had a few hits on it, but they would never have been so massive, because the mainstream audience that made Metallica the biggest band going wouldn't have been as interested in repeatedly listening to an abrasive record. Hell, even I never listen to "Kill Em All", because I find it too unpleasant to bother with. Sneaky amazing production; Black Sabbath's "Heaven & Hell". Listen to how clear and balanced that record sounds, and realize it came out eleven years before what we're talking about. Damn.
Why "Enter Sandman" is THE hit song is an easy one to answer. It comes down to two main things (there's also the nursery rhyme bit already being in a lot of people's heads, but that's minor); hummability and the hook. Let's start with the latter. The chorus of the song is so simple, it's easy for people to sing along with. You can hear it once or twice and get it, and then everyone at a show can raise their voice and sing along with Hetfield when it's the right time. That kind of interactivity is important. The hardcore fans do it with "Master Of Puppets", but a lot of those earlier songs are far harder to sing in unison, and require more listening to fully grasp. You can go to a karaoke bar and sing "Enter Sandman". You can't really do that with "One".
But the biggest factor is the riff. It's weird to hear me saying that, since I'm a vocals guy, but it's true. That riff is one of the handful of greatest in metal history, because it simultaneously hits on the two things that it needs to do; be hummable and establish a groove. The most iconic riffs of all time have those qualities to them. They are usually simple, and they have an internal melody you can hum to yourself, or to a friend when you're trying to remember where it came from. You can sing the riff from "Enter Sandman", you can sing the riff from "Sad But True", you can sing the riff from "Wherever I May Roam". As much as I too like "Through The Never", you can't really sing that riff. Nor can you really sing "Holier Than Though" or "Don't Tread On Me". It's not a surprise at all why the big singles were what they were. Most listeners don't have either the knowledge or the attention to digest complicated musical structures, so anything with too many notes or too much speed goes over their heads. "Enter Sandman" has a simple hook to the riff, and it also has a groove. You can sing it at the same time you band your head to it. That makes it the perfect riff to lure in people who aren't already into metal. There's a reason they basically re-wrote the song again as "King Nothing". It worked.
I won't bother ranking the entire album, but I'll more or less agree with your list there. I'll have "Enter Sandman" much higher, but I'm in total agreement "Wherever I May Roam" is the best song here. That reminds me I don't think I ever learned how to play that riff, which I'll have to correct.
So now I'll ask the big question; Would Metallica have been better off in your esteem, not in commercial success, if The Black Album had never happened? If Metallica 2.0 never existed (I would say there's also Metallica 3.0 - the current day where they have given up on being forward thinking, and are happy to try and recapture their old spirit), would you like them more or less? My answer is simple, and you already know it, so I won't draw things out. I'm not much of a fan of the first four records, even if I can appreciate "Ride The Lightning" and "Master Of Puppets" for their greatness. I'm also not much of a fan of "Load" and "Reload" outside of the singles, so Metallica is mostly The Black Album for me.
D.M: A brief, meaningless aside, as we start to turn this to a conclusion. I don't think I have ever been to a gentleman's club (not that I've been to a lot, but I've been to my share of bachelor parties,) without hearing "Sad But True." Which is weird, right? I mean, sure it's got a grindy rhythm and heavy downbeat that lends itself to that...activity, but it's not the kind of song you'd normally associate with...that. I'm going to stop talking about this now.
The more I read your argument, the more I think that part of the reason I like "Through the Never" so much could be because it's the track on The Black Album that sounds most like Metallica 1.0. Which leads me to a larger personal point, and this is where my personal tastes and objective analysis divide, which is that I think my lines of Metallica's different eras are probably drawn differently than the general populace. I understand that intellectually, the first four albums mark one phase, then the next four a second, and he last two a third. For me though, because of the age I am, The Black Album was my introduction to Metallica, so I generally mark off the first five as a single era. Plus, it feels disingenuous to associate The Black Album with "St. Anger" in any capacity, for reasons that aren't entirely clear other than that the latter album was an abomination.
And so long as we're here discussing counter-intuitive points, if you were to ask me to make a list of which five Metallica albums were the best, I would have an easy five...but not the same ones as conventional wisdom would suggest. For me, "Justice" was never the achievement that others see it as - it has great moments, but it over all too thin and too wandering to hold my patience. So, take the first three, then The Black Album, and then "Death Magnetic," and now you have something. The last of those is an important piece of the puzzle which is too often discarded. The return to previous form, but combined with the catchy ethos and success of the 2.0 years, combined in some ways to provide us with a version of the band we've never heard before, backed by the peerless directive hand of Rick Rubin.
Anyway, none of that is what you asked - which is a two part question, since it links into the legacy of The Black Album, which can't be understated. And I'll actually deal with that part first. Metallica was solidified in the greater consciousness by The Black Album, perhaps the single most titanic rock album of the '90s, with only "Nevermind" even worthy of the conversation. It's also the album that cemented Metallica's place on one of the thrones of metal, with only Black Sabbath as their peer. Taking those two things into account, it's hard to argue that Metallica would have been better off if they had never made the decision to trend in a completely different direction following "...And Justice For All." But more than that, I don't know what heavy music would be like in the absence of that single, transcendent effort. Would we have been ready for Rage Against the Machine in 1992? Maybe - rap had made some other inroads in the metal community (Body Count comes to mind,) but again, it's possible The Black Album made us ready to accept new ideas we hadn't considered. Would Pantera have found equally soft footing for "Vulgar Display of Power"? Would the John Bush era of Anthrax have found any footing at all (who by the way, did exactly what Metallica did, but on a smaller scale, and they take no criticism for it.) Would Helmet have had a career? Even Soundgarden, titans of the grunge movement, probably owe some of the success of "Superunknown" to the accessibility of The Black Album. Even Godsmack, all those years later, borrowed some tenets of Metallica. And of course, they can't all be wins - is it possible that the reach of the album had such long consequences that it ultimately gave rise to the post-grunge alternative movement, and thus helped spawn both Creed and Nickelback? Sure, that's on the table. But legacy is about impact in all directions, not just those we find most palatable.
As for the second part of the question, as it pertains to the band itself, this feels like a permutation of a conversation that you and I have had before - that of creative energy and innovation. Let's say The Black Album never happened - what would the band have done? How many more thrash albums did they have in them? "Justice" had already swollen to the seams with something resembling thrash-prog, and on the heels of "Master of Puppets," the band was clearly headed in that direction already. Would fans have accepted another album in that same stripe? Even if they had, there's no way that it would have landed with the same impact and gravitas of the album they made instead. A change was in the wings if the band was to survive and continue - to some degree, whether or not that change made them commercially successful was secondary to the necessity of it happening. As we saw, in the gap between "Justice" and "Death Magnetic," it took twenty years for Metallica to rediscover that form.
As a closing thought, Henry Rollins once said of Sting that we could sell out a show wherever there was electricity, and he could plug in. Metallica is in that lofty stratum. And they are there because of The Black Album. Hard to argue that the band would be better off without it, despite the protestations of some of their hardcore fans who felt betrayed.
CHRIS C: The more I think about it too, the more I could also make the case Metallica never actually deviated into a Version 2.0. Here's what I mean; the same restless mindset of the first four records led to The Black Album, so that doesn't have to mark the start of a new phase. "Load" was actually more creative and experimental than we might remember, since no one still listens to it, so that doesn't have to be the time either. "Reload" is actually in the same spirit as how "Lightning" and "Puppets" are incredibly similar. So perhaps where we actually draw the line is with "Death Magnetic", where for the first time Metallica doesn't feel like they're moving forward. That record is certainly worthwhile, like you said, albeit in need of some serious editing. "All Nightmare Long" is one of their best songs, but has at least five too many sections in it.
I really don't think we would have been ready for all those other bands in the ‘90s without The Black Album. When "Enter Sandman" became such a hit, that was the first time metal in the mainstream was both popular and serious. Whether it was "Come On Feel The Noise", or "You've Got Another Thing Comin'", metal wasn't what metal would be until Metallica changed the mainstream view.
Without The Black Album, we get to the psychological divide yet again. Do we want more of the same, or do we want something familiar yet new? Metallica never would have grown into the behemoth they are if they kept being a thrash band. Like you said, there wasn't room to grow any further, and two or three more records of the same style would lead to diminishing returns. It always does. As much as Slayer fans take pride in how that band stayed in the same lane for their entire career, Slayer is less interesting for that very fact. You can have long conversations about each and every Metallica album, and they all have a story to tell. You can't do that with Slayer. There's nothing to say about any of the records after "Diabolus In Musica" that you can't say about the earlier records.... that isn't an insult.
So here's my closing thought; The Black Album has been controversial for thirty years, and that's part of the beauty of it. Perhaps the biggest sin music can commit is being boring, and Metallica has never been that. Whether you like The Black Album or not, everyone has an opinion, and it still remains one of the biggest cultural touchstones in metal. That is remarkable.
No comments:
Post a Comment