Fight Fire with Fire

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"Fight Fire with Fire"

Song by Metallica
from the album Ride the Lightning
Released	November 16, 1984
Recorded	Sweet Silence Studios Copenhagen, Denmark, 1984
Genre	Thrash metal
Length	4:45
Label	Elektra Records
Writer(s)	James Hetfield Cliff Burton Lars Ulrich
Producer(s)	Metallica, Flemming Rasmussen , Mark Whitaker
Ride the Lightning track listing
"Fight Fire with Fire" "Ride the Lightning" "For Whom the Bell Tolls" "Fade to Black" "Trapped Under Ice" "Escape" "Creeping Death" "The Call of Ktulu"

"Fight Fire with Fire" is the opening track of Metallica's sophomore album, Ride the Lightning.

1 Overview
2 Theme
3 Credits
4 References

[edit] Overview

It is the first Metallica song to start with an acoustic guitar intro, which fades out into the normal thrash metal guitar style (with distortion). Four minutes, forty-six seconds in length, the song deals with the issue of death, as does most of the album.The song ended with a "diving bomb" technique from a tremolo bar of an electric guitar followed by sound of a bomb explosion.Vocalist James Hetfield sings most of the song with a lower tone of vocals. In the other songs on Ride the Lightning, he uses the same "high-pitched scream" that characterized the band's previous album, Kill 'Em All.

[edit] Theme

The lyrics are about nuclear warfare or nuclear holocaust, as seen in such lyrics as "Blow the universe into nothingness/Nuclear warfare shall lay us to rest". It deals with the counterblow of a nuclear war, which would cause the end of the world (i.e. Armageddon). It is also interesting to note that this song was written during the cold war in which a nuclear war often seemed imminent between the USA and the former Soviet Union.