Politics and Death (Magnetic)

It has been a good couple of weeks. Politically, we are seeing the McCain camp back where they were before the introduction of the Freakshow (aka Sarah Palin). McCain once again is looking like a sagging old man desperate to win the Presidency at any cost. While Wall Street bleeds (admittedly not a good thing, but also not without a sense of justice to it) and McCain's history with the duplicitous bankers who have brought our economy to the verge of collapse becoming clearer and more despicable, the undecided fence sitters of American democracy are once again gravitating towards Obama. All I can say is that my fingers our crossed and I hope that this trend continues until we see Obama win in November. Than I wish Barack the best of luck trying to undo all of the damage of the past 8 years. I have the feeling we will see it visibly age him before he's up for reelection.

Politics aside, let's turn to one of the most anticipated albums of '08, Metallica's Death Magnetic. Like many my age, I discovered Metallica when they were still a mostly underground phenomena. I remember listening to ...And Justice For All and it being a sort of religious experience for me. The album had been out for about a year and the video for One was starting to pick up a lot of airplay on MTV. Metallica was the band that all other bands were measured against in my world, and I couldn't imagine them ever doing any wrong.

When the "Black" album came out, I was initially all for the new musical explorations they embarked upon. I felt somewhat vindicated that Metallica was getting mainstream exposure. It gave me a sense of being ahead of the curve somewhat. And then their was a point when I started to really get sick of the incessant videos on MTV, the jocks who were now all about Metallica, and the uncomfortable feeling that this wasn't exactly the band I once raved about.

Then Load happened. Metallica cut their hair. They started making pretentious psuedo-art videos which had them wearing make-up. Fucking make-up! That was part of the reason why I liked Metallica, they were the antithesis of all these fey hair metal bands that seemed to have nothing important to offer besides disposable songs and horrible fashion sense. They stopped sounding the least bit thrash, a style they pioneered, and started to sound like a trite, formulaic top 40 rock band. I remember I had a poster from a guitar magazine that had Kirk and James on it, with their new hair dos and shiny boutique outfits. I promptly hung on the inside of the lid to my toilet. I put word balloons next to their heads. Kirk asks "Hey James, what's that smell?" James answers "Nevermind, man, its making us MILLIONS."

To say that I felt betrayed by Metallica was accurate. I really tried to like Load at first. I remember having a cousin of mine tape it off a radio show that played the whole album before it was released (ah, the days before P2P and Torrents!). I was incredibly disappointed- one of the main reasons why I started playing guitar and actively pursuing music had changed in a big way.

Worse yet, Load made them bigger than ever.

In the years leading up to the much hated St Anger (an album that deserves way more respect than it gets, but that is another subject altogether) I bought one Metallica album. That album was Garage Inc., which was half the epic and no longer in print (not to mention a high priced collectible) Garage Days Rerevisited, which I had a crummy dubbed cassette tape of. It also had the coolest new recording I had heard from them in almost a decade, which was their cover of Thin Lizzy's "Whisky in the Jar."

But as far as their other albums, I would have sooner bought a Brittany Spears CD at the time. I mean Reload? WTF!?! And that S and M album? Talk about self-aggrandizing rockstar bullshit. "Hey, let's play some of our hit songs in front of a full symphony orchestra, because it's a lot easier to do that than to record a new album." I guess songs like "Call of Ktulu" and "Master of Puppets" are elaborate enough to perhaps excuse adding another 70 fucking instruments to "flesh out" the arrangements, but songs like "Fuel" and "Until It Sleeps?" Are you kidding?!? Even Beethoven couldn't polish those turds- he'd be thanking his lucky tuetonic stars that he was deaf.

Point: Metallica has consistently disappointed me for over a decade, prior to their realization that they had become a terrible band (circa 2001).

Then the agreed to have documentary film makers follow them around to undoubtedly film a far more absurdly melodramatic point in Metallica's career than any party involved could have possibly imagined. Once again, like St Anger, this is another dorky subject unto itself.

God, this blog post has turned into a college Freshman composition essay.

To simply summarize, the new album is actually really good. There are plenty of naysayers out there, and I respect their complaints. Metallica has been trying to sell them Shit Sandwiches for a long time now, and at this point hating the new Metallica album is a Pavlovian reflex. But it is a thrash album. It isn't exactly where they left off with ...And Justice For All, but it would be extremely contrived at this point if it were. And "The unforgiven III," while not nearly as awful as "The Unforgiven II," still doesn't belong on the album (my friend Sam, after we had drunk copious amounts of bourbon, memorably tried to will it off the album one night).

So there you have it. Oh, and if you haven't seen Get Thrashed, a great documentary about thrash metal, go out and rent it. It'll make you want to listen to Exodus and dig your bullet belt out of the attic.