METALLICA IN ALL THEIR CONSTIPATED GLORY

Ted Burke
Ted Burke
Sep 1, 2018 · 6 min read
Metallica are the sole reason why everything has gotten
so damned sad.

Metallica are the sole reason why everything has gotten
so damned sad.

Somewhere in their headbanging journey a bevy of smart rock critics seeking a token metal band to extol as encapsulating the rebel virtues of the music picked up on these plodding purveyors of car wreck chord changes and have argued in earnest that their by-number anger and angst is of greater merit than the inchoate whining and flailing it actually is. If they have captured the feeling of a generation, then it a mind-dead generation they represent; their music is a catalog of things most of us grow out of. They haven’t a memorable riff, not a quotable line to shout in the car on the way to work, not a grunt nor a scream nor a rim shot that would agitate the nervous system to a creative frenzy. Metallica is the music of stalled traffic, tons of machinery grinding gears, moving nowhere. We’re left to ask when will the drugs wear off the Hall of Fame’s nominating board and they realize their terrible slight of motor city punk pioneers the MC5 and Iggy and the Stooges? Those are two bands who created a sound it took the rest of American and British bands for over a decade to catch up with. Please, some sane choices for who deserves the pantheon for this insane music.

Let’s tell the truth about these guys: metal has been boring as soggy granola for decades, but Metallica’s music, unvarying as tract housing, has lowered the bar to the point that the band name is fated to become a synonym for torpor, ennui, skull-crushing lassitude.T his steel tempered barrage is the audio equivalent of the hooked leather tassels some varieties of religious extremists flagellate themselves for sins they’ve yet to commit against their humorless god. How do you like your punishment? Faster, heavier, angrier, meaner, edgier? Sell your house, burn your car seats and cancel your dinner reservations because Metallica is going to chain to the wall of the first cave they come across where they intend to throw every hard note and quicksilver scale in their arsenal at you. That’s what they wanted to be when they appeared so many distant days back when, but they got to the convention right as they concluding gavel was pounded and the other bands were either gearing up other musical approaches or seeking other employment. They’ve always tried too hard, and have fairly much given off a corporate feel to their music. Let’s compare them to a Ford Truck: BIG, LOUD, POWERFUL, and utterly characterless. Metallica has done little more than making the reigning cliches and tropes of metal louder, bigger, stupider. This is the music for those who cannot wait to have what dead registers of hearing they have left made erased like chalk drawings. Soon, the sound ceases to be what this band is about; it becomes the vibration, the rattling of the teeth, the spinning senses, incipient nausea that follows a good pummeling. Listening to Metallica is the next best thing to an anxiety attack, and for many who crave this ceaseless noise, fast and beset with routine tempo shifts, ostinato screams of wounded and placeless rage and throat-cancer vocals, this is the closest they get in a week to feeling as if they have a life worth showing up for.I pity such folks, but there are limits, especially on a day I counted on sleeping in on the first day off in three weeks of being nice to cretins, simps and various other illiterates who want to argue their taste in stores where I work. They should vanish, go away, stop at once rather than continue the sluggish tragedy that is the sum of their continuing existence, as well as the unerasable fact of their loathsome, drooling legacy. After that, we take hammers to the cell phones

Well, they did, they inducted the mechanical thrashers Metallica into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame while my hometown boys, Iggy and the Stooges and the sainted MC5 have yet to be given a serious consideration. As with anything else that begins as a good idea and then lasts a number of years beyond its relevance, the RRHOF seems to have ossified on all the clichés that have ever been written to sell rock and roll as a rebel’s art. Sell indeed; Metallica seemed to have done nothing more with their recorded output except take the ideas of other bands and make them faster, louder, something like a cross between Deep Purple, Lou Reed and Yes in the ways the respective elements of chronic riffing, lower-rung rage and self-loathing, and over busily arrangements and rapid time signatures have been forced together in a shotgun wedding of stale ideas. Of course, we should think them elevated and serious; I find them patently ridiculous. Metallica is perfectly ordinary, and no amount of close inspection to their lyrics or their solos will make these fellas any less pretentious and annoyingly self-important. For guitar work, I’ll take anything from Joe Pass, John McLaughlin or Steve Morse over the ostinato-glutted hysteria these guys offer up as expressive breaks in their lumbering arrangements. I will dedicate some time to listening to better music, thank you.

I very much doubt that more orchestration or operatic readings of already histrionic material would change my opinion of Metallica’s directionless frenzy. What they do, though, is little more than a synchronized slamming of car doors, and beyond representing all the unspent adrenaline and immature anger that is the province of male brains that haven’t reached full maturity, there is nothing beyond their volume and their alacrity. It’s a good thing you like the Stooges, but really, they were way ahead of the curve. The Stooges, the MC5, and the Velvet Underground invented punk rock, and all things being equal, these bands are infinitely more interesting than the dunderhead pud-pounding of Metallica and the subculture they claim to represent.

The fact remains, the Stooges and the MC5 (along with the Velvet Underground) created the punk rock aesthetic and formed the first genuinely alternative rock to what the record companies were marketing. Even in an era, the Sixties, whose survivors pride themselves on their musical inclusiveness, the above three bands were the ones you didn’t invite your party; they were anti-consensus, anti-good time, and performed a music that stripped itself of any attempts to be “poetic” or socially redeeming. Instead, their vocabularies were stripped to the bone, expressing the untreatable pain that stabbed you in the heart as the world contradicted itself. Stooges, MC5, Velvets, all were bands that had nothing invested in affirming an audience’s idea of itself. Their fatalism was natural, not acquired, and this is the reason, I think their respective albums still sound fresh and bracing some forty years later. Defenders of Metallica, sure enough, will attack the lack of professional musicianship on the part of the three bands, and emphasize Metallica’s technical prowess on their instruments. This misses the point, and I suspect these guys would make ideal Olympic Event Judges, where speed, accuracy, and agility are everything. This isn’t the case with rock and roll.

If you’re going to insist that technical expertise makes for better rock and roll, you’ve got a severely limited idea of what rock and roll should be. It’s a primitive music in essence, and I think it more intriguing and worth dwelling on Iggy’s idea of sub-literate anger and joy to be more visceral and convincing than the muscle-car slamming of Metallica’s impotent, aged, dented hide. Really, Metallica is Arena Rock, as corporate as Journey ever was. They really and truly suck the Big One, long deep and hard.

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