Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [178]
‘I think also the reason we went next-level was because we knew we were on to something,’ said Lars, ‘that somehow when James and me had written these songs [we knew] there was a batch of songs that deserved that kind of level of work and that level of attention to details…that were worth fighting for.’ It was also, he realised now, ‘the element of the time, the element of the scene, the element of the temperature in music at the time’. That ‘this was the beginning of the Nineties and all the pop stuff, the hair stuff, the whole LA thing was coming to an end. There was about to be a changing of the guard. There was a bunch of things brewing up in Seattle. There was a whole new kind of thing going on, and the whole music mainstream audience had been shifting very subtly further and further left over the course of the Eighties. All of a sudden all of the sixteen-year-old kids were ready to embrace different things. So you can’t take out the sort of way the planets are aligning analogy. And the planets just aligned in ’91, ’92 when that record came out, it all just came together at the right time, with the right songs, the right producer, the right attitude and the right temperature on the music scene to create this absolute fucking monster that that record then became, for better or worse.’
It was, as Lars suggests, simply one of those once-in-a-lifetime albums: good for Metallica, who were now considered one of the most important bands of the coming decade. But beneficial also for the music scene in general, helping thrust open the door for alternative, underground rock to be accepted as a staple of American radio and TV, something then-unknown new names such as Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden would take full advantage of before the year was out. The backdraught of this was that Metallica would no longer be considered cutting-edge. But that, Lars pointed out astutely, was because ‘the mainstream has moved a lot closer to the new left edge than they were five years ago. To that bank clerk, Metallica’s still the most fucking extreme thing he could get into.’
Not that it made them immune from criticism – writers who had been impressed by Hetfield’s unflinching portrayal of the war victim in ‘One’ railed in the post-Gulf War atmosphere against the overt patriotism of the unapologetically flag-waving ‘Don’t Tread on Me’. But even here, the band had an answer: James, they pointed out, had written the song many months before the invasion of Kuwait, the flag he was flying not the Stars and Stripes but the one carried by the Culpeper Minutemen of Virginia during the revolutionary war, its coiled-snake banner – à la the Black Album sleeve – carrying the motto ‘Don’t Tread on Me’. (Indeed, a replica of the flag hung in One on One throughout the recording sessions.) ‘America is a fucking good place,’ James responded defiantly in Rolling Stone. ‘I definitely think that. And that feeling came about from touring a lot. You find out what you like about certain places and you find out why you live in America, even with all the bad fucked-up shit. It’s still the most happening place to hang out.’
Hetfield also, briefly, got into hot water over comments he made in the NME, characterising rap music as ‘extra black’, adding that it was ‘all me, me, me, and my name in this song’. Again, he was unapologetic: ‘Some of the stuff, like Body Count, our fans like because there’s aggression there. I love that part of it. But the “Cop Killer” thing, kill whitey – I mean, what the fuck? I don’t dig it.’ It reminded him, he said, of ‘the Slayer thing with Satan and tear-your-baby-up. Like going out and shooting cops. Hopefully, no one’s going to go out and do either. People like it, it’s fine. Whatever blows your skirt up, as my dad would say. It just don’t blow mine up.’
Although second to AC/DC, everywhere Metallica