Ration Reality

Dear Diary,

When I was in eighth grade, Metallica’s “… And Justice For All”  ruled my and nearly every other adolescent within spitting distance of me’s life. Girls, boys, black, white, Catholic, Jew, Zoroastrian, you name it. Kids who weren’t even real Metalheads clung to their cassette tapes like priests at the apocalypse. Our school was overtaken by the epic, crushing riffs, solos, double kick drums and wooden yelling that make Metallica, well, Metallica. I myself had merely dabbled in the Metal arts at this point. In sixth grade I discovered Metallica’s “Master of Puppets” along with every other junior hescher at PS 159 in New York City’s Bayside, Queens. This city/hood/borough was left behind for supposedly greener pastures on the strong and Long Island.

There I was introduced to Slayer, more specifically what is still one of my favorite Metal songs, “Angel of Death“. But on the reals, I hadn’t really dove in head first into the deep end of the Metal swimming pool. “… And Justice For All” was the first Metal album that I took into my heart and gut. I felt it deep down in a funny place. I digested it whole and absorbed every Metal nutrient I could find in the rich and powerful fibers of it’s being. I truly believed that this was as close to perfect as a record could get. Living in Alaska as I did at the time, the pervasive darkness, the desolate nature of things and the ever present sense of doom weighed so heavily upon me that I, at age 13, was sure I would die. “… And Justice For All” came out just as I was about to lose the fight. Waking up to the creeping, sinewy guitar lines that are the intro to “Blackened” seemed to give me the strength to continue the fight. I fought on and eventually triumphed over that frozen nightmare, a task that seemed next to impossible when I arrived wide-eyed from big, bad New York. Now I’m grown and I want to examine this record, this document, to see what it was that I saw, what inspired me to engage in open warfare with such a hostile enemy.

The time is now. The place, my place. My homebase, office, and command center. I am indeed grown now, all two hundred and a quarter pounds of me, all 32 odd years of weathered Jew that I am . I have purchased the album in question for probably the umpteenth time, it being one of those albums that perpetually disappears and needs to be replaced. I waited for just the right moment to put it on. I really wanted to be in the right head space for this undertaking. Unfortunately, I made a near fatal error at the jump. I put it on my JBL’s thinking that would be the optimal manner in which to hear all the crunch and click of Hetfield and Hammet’s guitars and Ulrich’s drums. What a fool I am. Not only were headphones absolutely required for this endeavor, I will state right now for the record that anyone wanting to get the most detail and clarity, not to mention a greater stereophonic experience should invest in a nice pair of Cranial Amplification Nodes  or Cans as we say. Cans in place, volume Fucking cranked, I settled in to what might possibly be the recapturing of a criltical time in my life.

“Blackened” began just as I remember it, a distant whisper of intertwined, squeeling/gravely guitars, slowly unravelng and giving way to a vicious drum fill and the second movement (yes, like classical music) of the intro..

Just as before, the hair on the back of my neck rose and I felt something like power coursing through me. There it was, as if 20 years hadn’t charged by vigorously, violently and victoriously.

This first song was everything it ever was. I was giddy, but my glee was doomed not to last. The second song, also the title track, wasn’t quite what I hoped and what was once side A proved to be a little disappointing. Then I remembered the evolution of this record in terms of my experience with it. The first side is meant to be more digestable, less complicated and in the end less gratifying then the side to come. As Chuck D  once said “The B-Side wins again and again!”

Let us pause for a moment and talk about Metallica as a band as opposed to this, their seminal album. Metallica has earned a fucking awful reputation among die-hards and the music community as a whole. There seeming sell-out, beginning with the so-called “Black Album” and their first real hit single “Enter Sandman”, started it all.

Then they cut their hair. Then they got sober, all of which would have been forgiven had they continued to make quality music. The other spear through our hearts was their backing of the crackdown on Napster and peer-to-peer file sharing networks like Gnutella. That tore it. They were establishment douchebags now, fuck them in uncomfortable places. BUT, and as you can see that’s a big but, there was once a time when they ruled with dignity, a time when Metallica was genuinely cool, when they were some bad motherfuckers who made some sick ass records. That time ended with the album we discuss today, and so it goes.

Side B of “… And Justice For All” reads like a laundry list of what have become staples of Metal’s conceptual zeitgeist: Being generally fucked in life, clinical depression, straight-up insanity, and living death. Musically it’s pretty much non-stop punishment, the kind I and many others yearn for in the pussified world of rock.

It’s everything Metal should be; complex, darker than hell is hot and brutally aggressive. Bands really don’t make records like this anymore. It’s got lyrical substance, diversity both in topic and structure, it’s compositions at first changing so often that it’s hard to keep up and then becoming highly satisfying when you get to where you’re going. Repeated listens yield only more pleasure. There is not a bad song on this record and it’s worst is better than most could ever dream of. This album was the culmination of everything they did with their previous records, a massive achievement in every way. It’s fitting that they basically died and were reborn because there was nowhere to go from here, nowhere but down.

The Metal is dead. Long live the Metal.

J. Eugene Wilson