The two metal bands James Hetfield can’t stand: “A little cartoony”
As the 1980s began to unfold, Metallica was the most accurate encapsulation of what heavy metal had to offer.
Whereas every other hair band was strutting their stuff on MTV and looking absolutely ridiculous as a result, the thrash legends were blazing a trail for the next generation of musicians, following in the footsteps of Black Sabbath and Judas Priest.
Although James Hetfield had a hand in turning the genre into a mainstream force, he didn’t like what he saw when he heard nu-metal acts like Limp Bizkit and Rage Against the Machine tearing up the charts.
Then again, the rap-rock movement was created right around the time Metallica started. Hip-hop had only just gone mainstream, but right as ‘Enter Sandman’ started roaring up the charts, acts like Rage Against the Machine were taking the militant sounds of Public Enemy and combining them with the raw grit of early Sabbath and the ethos of hardcore punk.
By the time Hetfield and the band jumped on the alternative bandwagon with Load and ReLoad, though, Hetfield was in a much different headspace. After becoming one of the biggest rock stars in the world, his more recent idols were stoner rock acts like Corrosion of Conformity or the heavier stripe of grunge acts like Alice in Chains.
But as acts like Korn started scaling the charts, people started to twist metal into something different. While Rage still had a decent agenda by championing various political causes, Fred Durst’s only inspiration seemed to be talking about how much of a creep he was or repping his misogynistic tendencies on tracks like ‘Nookie’.
While Hetfield never gave his opinion on the lyrics, he felt that both Rage and Limp Bizkit didn’t have the kind of musicianship that he looked for out of a group, telling Playboy, “Limp Bizkit seems a little cartoony to me. I don’t like some guy just yelling. Like Rage Against the Machine—it wasn’t singing, it was just some guy kind of pissed off, telling you his opinion.”
His frustration seemed to stem from a broader shift in what defined heavy music. Where Metallica had built their reputation on precision, technical ability, and tightly constructed songs, the rise of nu-metal placed more emphasis on attitude and immediacy, often at the expense of musical complexity. For Hetfield, that trade-off diluted what he believed made the genre powerful in the first place.
Yet the changing landscape was impossible to ignore. As nu-metal acts dominated airwaves and younger audiences gravitated towards their sound, Metallica found themselves navigating a new era where influence didn’t guarantee relevance. In many ways, the genre had evolved beyond their original blueprint, forcing even its pioneers to reassess their place within it.
Even though Woodstock 1999 should have effectively killed any respect people had for nu-metal, it didn’t really go away; it just evolved. Despite Limp Bizkit’s corny take on heavy music, acts like Slipknot and Lamb of God were starting up, bringing about the New Wave of American Heavy Metal, which relied heavily on lightning-fast drumbeats as well as guttural vocals that sounded like the vocalist was singing through a garbage disposal.
There was always a place for being aggressive, though, and Hetfield inadvertently cowered to nu-metal without knowing it. After all, they still wanted to be the greatest heavy band on Earth, and since they couldn’t stick to the same sound, their choice to tune down their songs on St Anger made for the atonal mess that no one really wanted.
So, almost by accident, Hetfield was already talking about the groups who would end up replacing Metallica at the top of the musical food chain. They had long been considered the heaviest act that could possibly appear on the radio, but now they were competing with everyone from Linkin Park to Coal Chamber whenever they turned on the hard rock stations.
