The Metallica song James Hetfield called the darkest ever: “The ultimate”
There’s no real limit to how dark any heavy metal can get on record. Everyone’s taste for heavy material changes with every generation, and while the likes of Black Sabbath sounded like the closest thing to Satanic music anyone had ever heard in 1971, there’s no real way to compare them to any of the black metal happening these days. But looking through all of Metallica’s discography, James Hetfield knew it was better to write about the dangers of man than any kind of demons.
Although ‘Jump in the Fire’ flirted with your standard heavy metal affairs, some of the best material that Hetfield ever wrote had to do with the evils that happen every single day. It’s not always easy to take in songs like ‘Fade to Black’ as he sings about someone wanting to take their own life, but when he wanted to paint with a broader brush, he knew he couldn’t go wrong singing about the atrocities of war.
‘Disposable Heroes’ might be one of the lesser tracks on Master of Puppets by comparison, but it’s one of the best cases of tone painting of the group’s entire career. Not everyone needs to have a firsthand account of what it’s like to see combat, but when the breakdown riff comes in and the frontman starts singing about a soldier boy becoming an empty shell, the fast guitar is the musical equivalent of machine gun fire.
It’s one thing to sing about someone thrown onto a battlefield, but ‘One’ is a much different thing. All of the gunfire has stopped in this song, but the protagonist has only begun to feel the horrors of living. Inspired by the book Johnny Got His Gun, Hetfield plays the role of a man who has lost half of his senses and all of his limbs, forever being trapped in his body and only left to rot away in pain as doctors work on him.
Sabbath had sung about the occult, and Reign in Blood by Slayer already had a sinister angle to it, but Hetfield felt that nothing even came close to the character in this tune, saying, “To me, ‘One’ is like the ultimate darkness. The most lonely you could ever feel. My brother told me about this. It scared the shit out of me. When I was writing the song, reading the book, he couldn’t speak for himself, so I brought a voice to him. ‘I’m trapped and I don’t know what to do.’”
And if ‘Disposable Heroes’ was the beginning of that kind of darkness, the machine-gun riffs on this song are a different matter entirely. The first half of the song is haunting and pure melancholy as he sings about his problems, but in the context of the story, the heavy outro is him starting to panic and realising that he’s never going to be able to communicate with anyone ever again.
This is a song that might have been a little bit too dark for MTV, but the video that they made for the track gives the song a lot more context. A band of Metallica’s calibre never really needed glossy videos behind their music, but by intercutting pieces from the film, the whole thing got even darker, especially in the sound bites where Johnny can be heard trying to communicate in Morse code to his doctors, begging them to kill him.
It’s not necessarily a song that everyone can put on for their friends and family and have a good time, but that was never what metal was about anyway. It all came from someone talking about the pain that goes on in the world, and it’s hard to find anything more melancholic than this in the genre. Yes, it’s depressing, and no, it will not be all that easy to get through, but it’s meant to be enjoyed the same way that a good horror movie is meant to be seen.
