Celebrations Around Metallica

October 28 marks the 40th anniversary of one of the planet’s top “heavy” bands, Metallica.

Thirty years ago, in August 1991, the legendary Metallica album (or, as fans used to call it, “The Black Album”) appeared, transforming Metallica from a niche band into global stadium stars. This September, the re-released “Black Album” and concurrently “The Metallica Blacklist,” a tribute that included 53 covers of songs from the anniversary album, also went on sale.

Metallica could have timed its first tribute album to coincide with its 40th anniversary and let colleagues rework any songs from its catalog. But obviously, it’s the Metallica album that concentrates the band’s most recognizable songs.

It is unlikely that Miley Cyrus, Jay Ballwin, Dave Gun, Phoebe Bridgers or pianist Igor Levit would be interested in the idea of reworking the best songs from the band’s first four albums. Nevertheless, it was the golden stock of the 1980s that gave Metallica’s musicians their pioneering status. It was hits from “Kill ‘Em All” (1983), “Ride the Lightning” (1984), “Master of Puppets” (1986) and “…And Justice for All” (1988) that formed the fan army that the band had to reckon with when conceiving of a radio-format slowpitch album. At the Monsters of Rock festival in Tushino, which also celebrated its 30th anniversary this year, hundreds of thousands of Soviet rock fans gathered under the banners of Metallica. Not AC/DC and especially not Pantera and The Black Crowes were the main protagonists of this demonstration. The favorite songs of Metallica didn’t earned them the love of the local crowd – the band played only two of them in the first half of the program. Metallica classics – “Fade to Black”, “Master of Puppets”, “Seek and Destroy”, “For Whom the Bell Tolls” and incredible epic “One” were expected in Moscow. And they were all played at Tushino.

Metallica were innovators long before “Black Album” came out. On “Kill ‘Em All” the band formulated the basics of thrash metal style, combining virtuosic riffs of the “new wave of British heavy metal” (Saxon, Iron Maiden, Diamond Head) with the high-speed (up to 200 beats per minute) sounding of American hardcore and the fury of punk bands Ramones and The Misfits.

The key figure of the band was the drummer, Danish-born musician Lars Ulrich, who is rightly considered one of the inventors of thrash metal. He introduced the trend of playing on two bass drums, which in its most textbook form can be heard on “One”. Thanks to Lars Ulrich’s intricate rhythmic patterns, Metallica was already being listened to not only by metal “thrash” fans, but also by conservative smart guys from the cutting edge of musical experimentation in the 1980s.

His partner and co-writer James Hatfield first introduced social and philosophical themes into the lyrics of the speed metal band. The album’s title song “Ride the Lightning” was sung on behalf of an unjustly sentenced to death, and became Metallica’s first ever lyrics about the imperfection of the American judicial system. The title song, “Master of Puppets,” dealt with the topic of cocaine addiction, a topic that was rarely raised in the mainstream in the 1980s. “One” was written by Hatfield, inspired by Dalton Trumbo’s novel “Johnny Got the Gun,” which tells the story of a World War I soldier who lost his limbs and senses but retained his ability to think.

Metallica used the nightmare aesthetic so popular in heavy music, but combined literary plots with stories of real human suffering in the songs.

The band complicated the compositional structure of their works by using classical musical themes and constant experimentation with rhythm. All this provoked the raptures of devoted listeners and critics, but it did not help to get closer to the radio and mass audiences. The Metallica album was the first to reach the top of the charts all over the world. The low, even tempo songs “The Unforgiven” and “Nothing Else Matters” brought Metallica to commercial FM radio and to the hot rotation of music TV channels. At the same time, the band managed not to lose a core audience that loved it for a different reason.