Talk:Metallica/Archive 1

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Archive 1
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That last edit by 24.210.223.22 was me. Edited so long I got logged out :-) -- Wapcaplet 02:22 17 Jul 2003 (UTC)

The edit previous to my latest mentioned uncertainty about where to include his/her new content. The Clear Channel thing seems to me to be one example of interesting tidbits/factoids about Metallica that might best be grouped under a "Miscellaneous Information" section. In other words, nothing significant ultimately came of Clear Channel's decision and it had no meaningful impact on the band's larger story (other than the fact that a few Metallica tunes may not have been played for a few days).I've created the section and moved the Clear Channel thing there. Does the new organization work? Pillsbur 02:23, May 4, 2004 (UTC)


Contents

'Tallica's new Bass Player

Does anyone have a clue who might become Metallica's new bass player??? - WojPob

They should get Geddy Lee from Rush. Now that would rock. Oh, please.

Metallica's new bass player is Robert Trujillo.

Napster & Metallica

I think the section on the Napster controversy could be cleaned up and expanded considerably. It doesn't read very well right now. It needs more about their stated reasons for attacking Napster, and the cause (which was a demo of "I Disappear" appearing on Napster before they had even finished producing it). Some more detail on the backlash would be good too. Wogan 9 Jan '04

"Metallica and Napster agreed to an out-of-court settlement" - any more info on this, please? At least an external link. Thanks. Helix84 00:32, 3 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I think it is really interesting to see the shift in Metallica's image since the whole Napster VsMetallica controversy erupted. Metallica was always known as a band of the people -- a band that grew in popularity by touring a lot and connecting directly with the fans, with very little record company or MTV corporate support of any kind.

Now, they are viewed as some kind of corporate shills.

WojPob's theory is: something went wrong after they collectively cut their hair (which started to look a bit Mullet-like). Then they released /Load, which in the view of a lot of fans was a "weird" album. Then, less than a year later came /Reload, which was released much too quickly and obviously needed some more studio work. They still have the talent - maybe they're just too old now???

Have they made it to the second stage of rock and roll band age:

  • Youthful energy - usually the best music produced here
  • Protecting and slowly increasing ones audience - rehash / semi-lame new music created
  • Slowing the shrink rate of the audience - obviously lame music created / multiple repackaging of greatist hits
  • Having a very small audience - new, still lame music created once every 5 years
  • Geezer rock former superstar status - no audience - only media fluff pieces - make the rounds at guest appearance shows - no new material - please, be charitable, become a recluse on a remote South Pacific island.

"Selling Out" accusations predated Black album.

Metallica was accused of "Selling Out" by some fans when they signed to Elektra records and left Metal Blade. The main article should either be updated to reflect this, or the part about "first" being accused of selling out should be removed.

I think there were already accused with their second album and "Fade to Black"... Xorx77 13:09, 20 Jun 2004 (UTC)
The fact is that Metallica grew in directions some fans didnt like. Why is it that every time a band moves away from the original fan base they've "sold out"? Maybe they just changed and the fans stagnated.
Imagine you're a fan who grows up on Metallica and sees the band as the hardest and heaviest band in the world that's not at all like Nirvana or Green Day who are much more commercially acceptable. (Think about it - Metallica had insane popularity BEFORE releasing Kill 'Em All...) And all of a sudden the band you kept sacred in your back pocket and idolized, is on TV, on radio and all the dorks in school you hate start wearing the same T-shirts as you and try to treat you as friend but you know they just don't get it the same way you do because you're in the hardcore of the movement... It's like, Metallica pioneered Thrash Metal among with Megadeth, Testament, Slayer and Anthrax. It's a fact. They're whole existence was based on going against whatever was popular at the time musically AND visually. Face it: now they're basically "blending" in. There was a story once about someone who liked a particular type of food a lot and on his birthday his mother wanted to be nice and made it special and added whatever type of spicing and all that to make it extra. After eating the dinner, the guy just said "It was nice, except for that spicing." ... Moral of the story is, some people like things the way they are, unchanged. Mind you, I'm not saying no bands should innovate. All the aforementioned bands progressed in their sound and music during the years. But they're all the same bands who started decades ago, and their fans know that. I'm not saying that Metallica did wrong by going "alternative" or "popular", but in that case, the fan reaction is understandable. // Gargaj 12:20, 2005 July 15 (UTC)
The sell-out accusations actually predates the "Kill 'em all" album, some of their fans who knew them from the demo scene thought the sound was to polished. Metallica also said that they would never make a music video so apparently they were sensitive to those kind of accusations (something that makes them similiar to some punk bands I guess). --Sus scrofa 11:51, 24 August 2005 (UTC)

Album labels

I changed the label from Vertigo to Elektra for many of the records. It looks like Vertigo is the UK label, however being an Amesrican band it seem though this should list the American labels. Dze27 05:52, Aug 16, 2004 (UTC)

"Politics"

User:63.189.168.253 deleted this entire section for NPOV reasons. It had been earlier marked for cleanup, and I agree that it doesn't belong without some heavy editing (parts of it resemble original research), but there's some good stuff in here, and I'd hate to see it lost forever in the edit history. Can somebody go through here with a hacksaw and chop it into shape?

The original "Politics" section (to which I wrote the extremely long thing posted below) was far too simplistic and I thought that if someone really wanted a Metallica Politics section they needed to see how complicated such a concept really is. When it was removed a while ago I didn't mind because I don't think such a thing really works as a separate section in the main Metallica article anyway. It's just too messy of a subject. However, parts of the content could be ported to other sub-articles on Metallica though (specific albums, for instance).
Pillsbur 18:47, Jan 17, 2005 (UTC)
Throughout the 1980s and early 90s much of the critical discussion and interest in Metallica revolved around the band's combination of structurally complex music with lyrics that appeared to be more "intelligent" than most other metal groups. Largely absent from the band's music were lyrics about Satan or sex. Indeed, Metallica's overall aesthetic during the late 80s was labeled by one journalist as "thinking man's metal" and much of the band's output from those years (in particular the ...And Justice For All album) was therefore read as "political." Such a reading was also possible because the specific topics of critique present in Metallica's lyrics meshed with the generally leftist slant found in other rock lyrics also thought to represent "political" statements. Lyrics such as those in "Disposable Heroes," which rail against the plight of ordinary soldiers ordered "back to the front" in the service of more powerful and influential members of society, or "...And Justice For All," which decries the tight connection between wealth, justice, and power, are part of a history of so-called "political" music that reaches back many decades in popular music. While the band's source for the song "One" was Dalton Trumbo's anti-war novel Johnny Got His Gun (1939), both the song and video resist ultimately making a judgement for or against war. Like "Disposable Heroes," Metallica focuses intently on an individual experience of war in "One," but without the thinly veiled condemnation of large-scale manipulation detectable in "Disposable Heroes." In general, because the lyrical content seemed to touch on left-leaning concerns could the music be considered political; had the content seemed to come from the right it would have been understood (and perhaps derided) as propaganda.
Indeed, questions of propaganda arise in the lyrics to "Don't Tread On Me" highlight just how slippery and unnuanced the label "political" is. "Don't Tread On Me" appears on The Black Album, and on the surface it seems to repudiate any sense of Metallica having been disposed toward left-leaning politics. "Don't Tread On Me" represents a clear statement of American national pride. The lyrics draw on phrases and imagery first mentioned in the early days of the American Revolutionary War through an anonymous 1775 essay (now identified as having been written by Benjamin Franklin) musing on the symbolism of the rattlesnake that adorned a militia flag seen in Philadelphia. Phrases from the essay, such as "never begins an attack," "once engaged, never surrenders," and "emblem of vigilance" are lifted directly into the lyrics of "Don't Tread On Me." Patrick Henry's famous "Liberty or death" also makes an appearance in the song (it's the song's first lyric in fact). Indeed, the phrase "Don't Tread on Me," along with the famous coiled rattlesnake, was an important symbol of American resolve during the Revolutionary War, and is particularly identified with the Culpeper Flag used by Virginia militiamen. These militaristic images, coupled with the song's quotation of the "America" theme from Bernstein's West Side Story, give "Don't Tread On Me" an unabashedly nationalist sensibility. Moreover, the general foregrounding of militaristic prowess and national pride in the song swims against the normal criteria of political popular music so that, like celebrations of white racial pride, it was quickly understood as stemming from a generally right-wing sentiment. Finally, the release of The Black Album soon after the Persian Gulf War (a war many Americans felt had at last removed the Vietnam War's specter of military failure) led many rock critics to hear the rightist imagery in "Don't Tread On Me" as mindless and jingoistic propaganda following a war in which the American homeland and its citizens were never threatened.
Importantly, the members of Metallica worked very hard to dissuade commentators from assuming the band's pointed critiques of various aspects of American society amounted to an activist's desire to become directly engaged in political action. In other words, according to Hetfield and Ulrich the songs most easily read in terms of left-leaning political statements were never intended to also represent ringing endorsements for social change. This is an important distinction in comparison to the aesthetics of other popular music groups at the time, such as U2, R.E.M., or Public Enemy for whom some sort of conspicuous praxis was an important part of the critique. Thus, while "Ride the Lightning" may have explored the thoughts and emotions of one sentenced to die by electrocution, the song was not meant to participate in the broader debates regarding Capital punishment. Instead, as discussed in the ...And Justice For All article, Ulrich and Hetfield framed their lyrical critiques as the products of merely being "interested" in a certain topic, without appearing to tell others how to act. Still, an ideology of "interest" is something of a political statement by itself, and the desire not to be pigeonholed points dramatically to the band's overarching concern with a kind of Libertarian personal independence and self-reliance. "Eye of the Beholder" (from ...And Justice For All) would seem to be one of the band's most direct takes on this subject, with its blunt statements on personal freedom that pepper each verse. At the same time, the freedom that lies at the heart of the lyrical message is constantly under threat from entrenched cultural interests (the inspiration for the lyrics seems to have been Hetfield's reaction to the indecency trial of Jello Biafra in 1986). However, for all the emphasis on personal freedom, Hetfield resisted making "Eye of the Beholder" into an anthem of greater empowerment: the song's chorus music (perhaps the archetypal place for such statements in popular music) simply oscillates between two pitches with no goal-oriented direction with which to solidify a definitive message about freedom. This leads many to believe that Hetfield is a [Libertarian]
Any discussion of music and politics in Metallica must also take into account the way "political" lyrics largely disappeared from Hetfield's lyrics after ...And Justice For All. Moreover, the general shift in Hetfield's lyrical subjects away from the politics of society and toward a psychology of himself was accompanied by the gradual reshaping of the band's public image and the ascendancy of the individual band members' personalities into that image. Of course, the individual personalities had always been present, but during the 80s critics and journalists had little interest in recognizing the differences. As such, any political leanings in Hetfield's lyrics from those years were ballooned into representing the views of all four members. Especially after The Black Album and throughout the rest of the 1990s Hetfield and Ulrich developed radically different social networks outside of Metallica, as Hetfield began asserting a down-to-earth working class identity (marked by hotrods, Harley-Davidsons, and tattoos) while Ulrich moved more in more within the "glitterati" of Hollywood and New York (Ulrich began to be known as a serious modern art collector in these years). These divisions, combined with Hammett's interest in Eastern philosophies and vegetarianism, make it difficult to discuss the politics of "Metallica," because the individual members have so developed public images outside of the band. Indeed, for the first two decades of its existence, any discussion of the Metallica's "politics" is really a discussion of the song lyrics, and because of that political readings of the lyrics are in some way traceable back to Hetfield alone. While Ulrich certainly spoke to critics and journalists about the meaning of certain lyrics, there is still the issue of Ulrich interpreting Hetfield's lyrics. The missing views of Hammett, Newsted, and even Cliff Burton are also important. It's certainly reasonable to collapse all of those views into a monolithic understanding of "Metallica's" politics, but it's also dangerous to assume that Hetfield's lyrics represent some sort of agreed-upon and unified front put forth by the members of the band.

-leigh (φθόγγος) 22:58, Jan 15, 2005 (UTC)

Sample quality

I've downloaded the .ogg samples, and found the quality rather mixed (played with VLC on an Apple TiBook to headphones). "One" is nearly unrecognizable. "Nothing else matters" is kinda ok. "Seek and destroy" is bad, with the beats totally blanking the rest. "Enter Sandman" is recognizable, but very distorted, and so is "Fade to black". They all seem to have been recorded with with much to much gain, maybe in an attempt to make them sound "loud". Any help? --Stephan Schulz 17:42, 26 May 2005 (UTC)

  • Something's wrong on your setup - I listened to the "One" sample and I have no problem recognizing every single note played... // Gargaj 20:22, 2005 May 26 (UTC)
  • The quality is pretty noisey but listenable. Remember these are supposed to be samples. --Arm
  • I reckon I am the author of most of the samples. Yes, the quality was in fact lowered as these are supposed to be samples and I wanted them to be as legal as possible. So, I went to the Metallica official website and checked out the quality they used on their samples and tried to use a similar one and the same length. The quality is in fact slightly higher than their samples. Although I obviously can't have a NPOV on this matter, I must say the quality is pretty good for an overall appreciation/recognition of the sound. I applied no other effect whatsoever other than lowering the quality.

P.S.: Actually I obviously applied fade in/out. Cigsandalcohol 06:43, 21 July 2005 (UTC)

Grammys

They won seven Grammys, not six:

  • 1990: Best Metal Performance - "One"
  • 1991: Best Metal Performance - "Stone Cold Crazy"
  • 1992: Best Metal Performance With Vocal - Metallica
  • 1999: Best Metal Performance - "Better than You"
  • 2000: Best Hard Rock Performance - "Whiskey In The Jar"
  • 2001: Best Rock Instrumental Performance - "The Call Of Ktulu"
  • 2004: Best Metal Performance - "St. Anger"

--nagytibi 08:59, 2005 May 27 (UTC)

Unnamed Feeling ep

Before the Some Kind of Monster ep came out, there was an ep for Unnamed Feeling. It contains the same live tracks as SKOM. Not too sure how widely it was released, but I saw it in music stores. --Baseballfan 00:00, 30 May 2005 (UTC)

Load and ReLoad overenthusiasm

I toned down or removed some of the over-the-top apologia in the section about Load and ReLoad. It's an exaggeration to say they "spawned a plethora of radio hits"; I toned this down; and I especially object to the claim that for every fan of the early days who hated the new stuff, Metallica picked up a new fan. The latter statement is very Pollyannaish, and of course is unverifiable spin, but most importantly it's completely belied by the poor sales of these two albums compared to the big three and even Lightning. Tempshill 00:18, 21 July 2005 (UTC)

Album sales

Can we come to some sort of agreement re. worldwide album sales? The last three edits or so have been about this, with sales figures of 80, 95 and 300 million copies sold worldwide. Where can we get accurate info on this? AEriksson 12:44, 10 August 2005 (UTC)

I beleive the Metallica Documentary "Some Kind of Monster" released in 2004 stated that they have worldwide sales of 100 million. 300 millions seems like grossly overstated figure considering total US sales according the the RIAA's website stands at 57 million.

Vandalism

ummm as I am not a fan of metallica, I feel I should not change anything on the page, however, someone should check what's under the FanBase headline.

Links to foreign language fan sites

Right now there's a few external links to foreign language Metallica fan sites, should these be deleted or something? --Sus scrofa 11:51, 24 August 2005 (UTC)