In a few hours, I’m going to be seeing Metallica here in sunny Denver, Colorado. This morning my son and I listened to the band’s “Top Hits” on Spotify, and I must admit it got me jazzed for this concert. Growing up, all my friends listened to the local hard rock radio station, while I stuck to the classic rock station my parents liked. This meant that I missed out on Metallica at their late 80’s-early 90’s peak. Before I could form an opinion on the band, the whole Napster thing happened, and I found myself unwilling to give the band a shot. In hindsight, Metallica’s argument against Napster/illegal downloading of music isn’t as terrible as it seemed to me at the time. Now that I exist in a world where music is all but free, I can see that there were serious consequences. Small, up-and-coming bands went from making very, very, very, very little money to none at all. The Jay-Z’s and Beyonce’s of the world make a staggering amount of money, but nobody else in the music business does. Well, Metallica continues to do alright, too.
Anyway, it wasn’t until I went to college and started listening to a greater variety of music did I check out Metallica. One of the first albums of theirs I ever listened to was ST. ANGER, which as we all know by now, wasn’t very popular when it was released. In many ways, I feel like Metallica is a bit like Weezer in that their rabid fan base automatically hates every new album they release and wistfully pine for the previous albums…the same ones they trashed upon their initial release. Of course HARDWIRED…TO SELF-DESTRUCT has been pretty well-received, but I feel like this is the exception that proves the rule.
My affection for Metallica was further cemented by the 2009 Guitar Hero video game; if I’m honest, as pathetic as it will probably sound, most of my exposure to Metallica came from this game. Now with Spotify, I’ve gone back and listened to all their albums in their entirety (except for that awful 2011 Lou Reed collaboration album LULU). I enjoy their 1983 debut album KILL ‘EM ALL, mostly because it sounds like a band full of enthusiasm and intensity. But their super-popular 1991 ‘Black Album’ is also really good. Honestly, all their albums are solid which is rare in the world of metal and the world of music in general.
I’m excited to see how well the band is live, I’ve heard they are amazing. I will document what happens in a couple of days. I’m also really interested to see what the crowd will be like. I’m picturing a lot of gray hairs (mine included). For one thing, the tickets were a bit steep, and as a younger colleague pointed out to me today, “Metallica are old men.” But metal is a weird genre, one that is very fixated on the past, so I imagine there will also be plenty of younger metalheads in attendance as well.
Defending Axl Rose 