by Michael McCarthy
What you’re about to read is a Facebook post that I found myself writing this morning after someone mentioned Metallica’s black album in a music community on there and most people had very negative things to say about it.
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I find it fascinating how so many people hate Metallica’s so-called black album now. I remember when that album came out, everyone loved it. I literally never once heard anyone say a bad thing about that album. On the contrary, most people were blown away by the fact that they even had a couple of ballads but miraculously the ballads didn’t sound like a lame sell out.
Cut to 2024. Now I read negative remarks about that album on an almost daily basis in metal communities on here. I just read one comment where someone called it “the beginning of the end” and everyone seemed to agree. That album is almost universally hated now.
My only gripe about the black album was the fact that they made videos for a bunch of the songs. You probably don’t recall this, but when Metallica started out, they had this anti-music videos thing. Kill ‘Em All, Ride The Lightning, Master of Puppets, etc — not one video was released for any of the songs on those albums. And yet those albums were huge sellers. If you walked into a high school on any given day back then, you’d find at least 10 people wearing Metallica shirts on any given day. They were very, very popular in spite of the fact that music videos were all the rage and they refused to make them.
Then they released the album …And Justice For All. And they made a music video for the song “One.” But nobody called it a sell out. It’s an epic song and it was a truly epic video with loads of footage from an old movie, which I cannot remember the name of right now. Honestly, it was one of the best music videos ever made and still is today. And everyone loved it. But the band said that they had no intentions of making any other music videos. Then they released the black album and reversed course, releasing several singles from that album, all of which they made videos for. I remember really liking the video for “The Unforgiven” but I can’t remember much about the other videos. That said, even though they completely flipped flopped with that, you didn’t hear fans calling it a sellout or otherwise complaining. The videos were all over MTV and the album sold like crazy. I just read that it’s the best selling metal album of all time with over 16 million copies sold in the United States alone.
Yet everyone seems to hate that album now. 16 million people bought it and most of the thought it was fantastic, many calling it the band’s best album at the time, but today you would have a hard time finding people who’d admit to liking that album.
I can kind of understand when people now say that it was the beginning of the end because they did make all of those videos and it definitely had a pretty commercial sound compared to their previous albums. I guess now a lot of people do think it was a sellout but nobody said that when it was released.
For me, I guess the black album was the last great Metallica album. After that they released Load and Reload and while I wouldn’t call those albums grunge, they did kind of veer in that direction a bit and they sounded overly commercial and I couldn’t get into them. There were a couple of songs on Load that I thought were OK but the rest of the album was so awful that I couldn’t listen to it. They were a band I’d always loved but something about that album made me feel betrayed. Even though it was the same guys in the band, it sounded too much like a different band. And I did feel like that one was a sellout. They changed their whole image when they released that. I actually wrote a list called 15 Reasons to Hate Metallica, which I published in my zine ANT and Nikki Sixx of Motley Crue and Sebastian Bach of Skid Row both shared the list in music groups on AOL and it basically went viral before anyone was even using the word viral. And guess what? Almost nobody who commented on it defended Metallica. Virtually everyone either found the list to be amusing or accurate or both.
I guess now most fans view the black album the way I viewed Load. I would have to agree that the black album was not a thrash metal album and they had always been a thrash band previously. They were a very original one and all sorts of different songs but their albums could be easily categorized as thrash. And I suppose you can’t say that about the black album so maybe that’s why everyone now views the black album the way I viewed Load and Reload.
Honestly, the only album Metallica ever released after the black album that I really liked was St. Anger, which is easily their most hated album. It was a very raw sounding album and something very different from them and people did not like it at all. Personally, l actually hated it, too, at first. I think I listened to it three times and decided I was never going to listen to it again. But I think a lot of that had to do with the fact that I hadn’t liked the last few albums that came out before it so at that point I had a pretty negative opinion about Metallica. But then my friend Josh sent me a mix CD on which he put one of the songs from St. Anger, “All Within My Hands.” And I was going through a break up and could really related to the lyrics of that one. So I ended up going back and listening to the album again. And I didn’t hate it. I didn’t immediately love it but I decided that I would give it a proper chance and for the following week or so I listened to it once a day from beginning to end. And it just kept growing on me. Also, around that time the band released a documentary about making that album and other things called Some Kind of Monster and I went to see that and it made me like them again. Well, perhaps except for Lars. There’s a part in the movie where he’s auctioning off some painting he owns for a million or more dollars and he really comes off like a money hungry snob. I don’t think he made himself look that bad in the rest of the documentary but that part just left a bad taste in my mouth. However, I loved the documentary over all. So I was already listening to St. Anger a lot at that point and the documentary made me want to listen to it even more. I kind of felt like they were making a triumphant return to form even St. Anger didn’t quite sound like a Metallic album. If James Hetfield wasn’t the singer and someone played that album for you, I highly doubt you’d think it was Metallica.
I suppose the thing I liked most about St. Anger was that they weren’t trying to sound commercial anymore. I’d felt like they’d sold out with Load and Reload but now they’d basically abandoned just about everything that made a Metallica album sound like a Metallica album and I just found it very fresh and exciting.
I can’t remember what the average fan thought of St. Anger when it was released. But I don’t think it was universally hated. Now, yeah, you’d have a really hard time finding anyone who’d admit to loving St. Anger but I seem to recall a lot of people embracing it when it came out. And that documentary did very, very well. Music documentaries typically don’t play in theaters and if they do they’re usually not super successful but Some Kind of Monster was well reviewed and quite popular. I don’t know if it played at mainstream cinemas that usually show Hollywood blockbusters, but I saw it at an art house cinema in Pasadena, California and the place was packed even though it was on a weekday afternoon.
Since St. Anger, I haven’t been able to get into anything they’ve released. I acknowledge that their more recent albums don’t sound like a sellout or anything I could fault them for but I just couldn’t get absorbed in them. I didn’t hate them, but I’d listen to them maybe five or six times and get bored and never listen to them again. I do think Death Magnetic is pretty good but not good enough that I can say for sure that I’ll ever listen to it again.
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