‘The Black Album’: how Metallica sold out the right way
There are no two words more damaging to an artist’s reputation than “selling out”. Although many people like to play to the broadest audience they can, the idea of cashing in to get the asses in the seats often feels like turning your back on the people who were in your corner before you had anyone listening to your stuff. While Metallica have been running away from accusations of selling out for years now, The Black Album is the perfect example of how someone can have their cake and eat it in front of the entire world.
But Metallica has been running away from sell-out fodder ever since the days of Ride the Lightning. Kill Em All was their proof of concept for being able to write metal masterpieces, but the idea of them having the gall to write a song using acoustic guitars like on ‘Fade to Black’ was downright treasonous to some fans, even if it grew into one of their heaviest lyrical tracks of all time.
Even when the group started getting tighter and tighter on And Justice For All, there came a moment when things began to feel stagnant. There were only so many times that they could have made eight-minute songs with a thousand different parts, so bringing in Bob Rock to work on The Black Album helped them scale things back properly.
Rock had already been used to working with acts like Bon Jovi and Aerosmith, but his goal wasn’t to turn Metallica into a radio-rock act. He saw what they could do live, and even if they were able to deliver a fantastic show, there was room for improvement when it came to capturing those songs in the studio. So, while a song like ‘Harvester of Sorrow’ sounds thick and chunky, it couldn’t hold a candle to the production value of something like ‘Through the Never’ or ‘Holier Than Thou’.
But we may as well discuss the elephant in the room when it comes to those metal purists: ‘Nothing Else Matters’. While many people could tolerate a ballad like ‘The Unforgiven’, hearing them make something this soft was like watching them throw away their legacy, but the fact is that this slow ballad that “ruined” their career may have been the most ambitious move they could have made.
Most ballads of this stature get dragged through the mud because they have nothing to say, but hearing James Hetfield sing about missing his wife back home is absolutely sincere. Whereas most other bands would have been comfortable throwing on whatever cheesy synthesiser was available at the time, bringing in Michael Kamen of The Wall fame to add an arrangement made everything sound a lot fuller when it came out of a car radio.
Anyone who thinks that they lost their edge because of one song either has a few blind spots for the record or hasn’t even listened to it in full at all. The Black Album might have mellower songs by comparison, like ‘My Friend Of Misery’, but you could put ‘Sad But True’ up there with any of their heaviest riffs from the 1980s, and it would still beat out half of their discography.
While Load and Reload made a better case for some fans’ claims of selling out, The Black Album is still an impressive rock record from front to end and never stops being entertaining. There might be some fans that swear by acts like Slayer and Exodus that got upset, but anyone thinking that the album is objectively terrible because of a few slower songs is going to need to undergo surgery to get the massive stick out of their ass.
