As Antonio Gramsci argued, ruling groups maintain power partly by making their ideas seem like common sense. This helps explain the political significance of Metallica’s call for disengagement at a time when Israel’s genocide in Palestine demands urgent international attention. Hetfield’s vague agenda of “love, energy and heavy music” ultimately amounts to a refusal to stand for anything meaningful. And that refusal is itself deeply political.
Seems kinda weird to pick on Metallica. None of their music strikes me as anti-colonial or revolutionary. I suspect that if the band wanted to air their politics, they’d do it on FOX news anyway. Their fans are all genX white men; they’d be fools to “come out” as liberal, much less revolutionary.
And who cares about Metallica? They only have one good album and it was released in 1984.
It is self-inflicted because Hetfield chose to be a massive hypocrite on stage by giving a little speech about not being political while shitting on Macklemore for being political.
If he had taken the apolitical option to keep his mouth shut and just play the music, then I’d agree it’s weird to randomly single out Metallica. They’ve always been bootlicking hypocrites, it’s nothing new.
I think he was more targeting Haley Williams from Paramore wasn’t he?
Metallica infamously got Napster (the original music download site) shut down, which empowered the RIAA (and later the MPAA) to go on an anti-piracy crusade, which locked down access to a lot of media.
Granted, the RIAA has been fighting that fight for decades, but it was the legal justification they needed (and public support from one particular band) to start targeting individual people to make examples of. I remember they sued some grandma who didn’t know how computers work because her teen grandchild downloaded an MP3 to her computer. They put her in debt for the rest of her life. They went after children too.
And this was around the time that torrenting started, which was a convenient way to download data on the Internet without over-taxing a singular computer. But because media pirates were using the new format to share music and movies, the RIAA and MPAA targeted torrenting itself as a tool of piracy, which limited its use professionally. To this day, thanks to them, torrenting is pretty much exclusively viewed as a way to pirate illegal content.
Fuck Metallica.
You don’t need to have “anti colonial” tag to speak about Palestinian children being slaughtered live on front of your eyes.
Also i disagree that all their fans are white men (whatever the fuck that means), i think Metallica is or maybe was a big global band that have enormous fanbase all over the world (literally).
The message the article tries to deliver is basically calling out fuckface Hetfield, as he is going political (in a negative way) with his recent pesudo-love and anti-politics rhetoric.
Also, they come across as tools. They’re the last band I’d want to hear politics from.
Though I will disagree, their music is fantastic. Even short hair Metallica has great songs.
Everything post-Mustaine has been extremely mid at best
I’d argue that’s a loud but unpopular opinion
I stand by it idgaf
It’d be weird if you backed down from an internet fight in 30 minutes
It’s how I expect all my internet fights to go.
If you said everything post-black album, I’d agree. I kinda liked Load and Reload even, though.
📠
At most they were an anti-cold war, anti-nuke band, not so much with modern politics.
Why bringing the topic to begin with ? He clearly threw shade on Mac for no reason
Gotta take the heat off of Sheeran.