METALLICA
ONE.
21 going on 22 and I am in a dodgy, dodgy share house in North Hobart, when North Hobart was still alright. When there was an empire of Parthenons and The Empire was yet to become The Republic, down there on the corner of Burnett and Elizabeth. 1990 and I’d done acid, everything was unfurling and my life was about to become a 17 year mess.
In the share house was a guy who traded heavy metal music videos on VHS. He sold and swapped them all over the world, running a tiny business dedicated to the fanatical spread of metal. The metal tape trading underground is the stuff of legend now, but the spread of extreme metal across the globe owes much to a massive network of patient people, writing letters, copying cassettes and photocopying catalogs. Along with music, video clips and concerts were traded, often illegally filmed and shedding slight layers coherence with each generation of dubbing.
It didn’t matter; the secret metal world lapped it up and over the course of the 80’s and onwards, an international audience was built. Fanaticism is sweet sometimes.
I was barely aware of the metal tape trading world, and there I was sharing accommodation with a member of this secret elite.
I didn’t really like metal much. I didn’t know much, though with the cocksure certainty of a male in their early 20s, I knew everything, and I had little time for the more obvious manifestations of heavy metal that were available. Glam Metal and its attendant sexism, whilst sporting some great riffs, put me off with its terrible display. I was, after a very sheltered existence, aware now of things like sexism, racism, and homophobia, and to combat the shame one feels when you realise you’d been raised with such inexcusable vulgarities somewhere in the background, become ultraleftyPC, so a band like Motley Crue was just inexcusable.
On expressing these views to said metal collector, I was stunned to discover he concurred. My tiny and sheltered brain was almost exploding when he described himself as not being into Glam at all but more down with Thrash and Doom and had I heard Sepultura?
No, I had done no such thing.
Beneath The Remains, the 1989 album from the Brazilian Thrash pioneers was at the time causing a sensation in the metal underground and the band were emerging as important player in the global scene. This one thing I really love to this day about metal in all its forms, it’s a truly global music. Metal is everywhere, removed and singular, totally un-involved with fashion and trends beyond its own.
Sepultura. I still remember the assault on my ears from those abrasive, shrieking guitars and those classic urgent, intense vocals that are a hallmark of thrash metal. Sepultura was good for certain but it did not grab me, although we had a box of wine and sat around as the trader played me more stuff. It was cool, and it was fun to drink and listen.
After a while, he got out a VHS tape.
This was ‘Two of One’, which contained two version of a film clip for the song One, by Metallica.
Metallica.
They're not what they were now, Metallica.
Was there ever a better example of one of the keys to being a truly great band is knowing when to stop?
Metallica. A vast engine of product, nowadays. A band no longer but a money making machine, perhaps.
That’s okay. I do not begrudge them their lucrative career.But once upon a time, Metallica wrote glorious, dark hymns that articulated a kind of blue collar existentialism, thrilling sonic constructions that defined Thrash metal as a genre with complete understanding of the importance of speed in creating extreme musical statements. Metal had been slow and plodding until the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal copped a few ideas from the punks, and the US thrash explosion of the 80s was the next gear up: Metallica were propulsive, they sung about depression and alienation, and dared even to discuss suicide. I very nearly wrote instead about their masterwork Fade To Black, with its precision dissection of the emotional state of a human contemplating taking their own life – dangerous material indeed but the thing is that song worked. Metallica worked. They used to look like they were working class people: sleeveless black shirts and no bleached hair, they looked exactly like their audience.
They were not rock gods. They were real, just for a moment.
I was yet to find any of that out when play was pressed on the VHS in 1990 and revelation occurred.
The film clip for One is famous now. I know you can dial it up on YouTube now, but then then you had to buy a VHS tape. From the 7HT record bar in the mall. The clip had been around for a year at least, but I was oblivious to it.
It’s a terrific, smart video that uses many of the conventions of the music clip yet subverts them. The band is playing live, but it looks like they are in a practice space. They are in a cluster around Lars’s drum kit, in a circle, facing each other. This is inward; it implies that they are working together to do this. There is no audience. It is only the band.
The camera cuts from face to instrument to movement to moment. Lars damping his cymbals by grabbing them. Kirk finger tapping. Head banging.
James Hetfield’s grimace.
Interspersed are segments from an obscure film about war. Quotations. A dialogue between a father and a son.
“What is democracy?”
“I think it’s got something to do with young men killing each other”
There it was: this was an anti-war statement. It was deadly serious. It was not nothing but a good time.
There was something so very serious and determined and earnest about this clip, about this band. About the content of the song. War is on such a vast scale it remains unimaginable, One’s tactic as a statement is that it focuses on one horribly maimed soldier, denied even the release of death, searching through a wasteland of memory for a way out. How horrible. How isolated.
How tangible.
I mean - it's just one person.
The title is brilliant: here is one soldier. He would be all of horror of war. It was a successful strategy.
Yet, there was more under that surface. There was a nihilistic undercurrent that spoke to futility and to the isolation of mental illness.
Survivor guilt.The pointless horror of existence, born to die, your control removed by an authority that will decide the shape of your life. Ripped apart yet not dead, disembodied, and alone in darkness that is endless. Industrial accidents. Killed at work. Daddy isn’t coming home.
The song itself speeds up as it goes, building to a crescendo of finger tapping and faster and faster edits between the film and the musicians, their bodies symbolic cut into parts and stuck together by the sublime magic of the medium; Lars, James, Kirk, Jason, a beast with four heads, hands playing the riff with mechanical precision, not showmanship, no flair, just the music, perfectly constructed solos from Kirk, the chords, the song, the song, the song never ending but fading out on a terrifying, relentless riff that sound like an eternal loop of gunfire, symbolic of the consuming monstrosity of mechanised warfare, interspersed with dialogue about isolation, fear, hopelessness. The sudden, final cut back to the film that has featured throughout the song and one final sample rings : "Keep the home fires burning"
The story told in the clip moving and frightening.
This was not Motely Crue. Not Warrant. Not Bon Jovi.
What was it?
Metallica.
_________________________________________________________________________________
the above was written to be read aloud, and the time I did, at the end I threw the horns. Of course I did. I found it recently, edited it, and here it is. It's not the greatest bit of writing I've ever done but it makes me smile, and it's interesting because I really can't be bothered with a lot of music I liked thirty years ago, but I still think One is pretty good, great even.