Some notes on Rock

My band's new record, Metallica's Some Kind of Monster.

Some of you may know this and others probably don’t: before I became an academic I was in a metal band—a christian metal band no less—and on the one hand it’s the thing that most definitively defined the person I became and also everything I demanded to reject from my person.

Well, more to come but we have a new album coming out on Friday—our first in 11 years—and I’m very excited about it. We are releasing it ourselves instead of on the Christian hardcore label that gave us our career: I on the one hand feel kind of guilty but on the other, 1. we don’t sell records and 2. we’re not a christian band anymore. And jesus christ, if you want to be identified with that whole thing right know, I don’t know what to tell you. I might post something soon about what I mean here by this album being called “Years of Silicon,” although with what you know about Italy’s Years of Lead, Facebook, and the rise of the Christian right I think it seems clear. That’s the next post, I guess.

A very weird second post to my substack! I am going to send a link to our single on streaming services before the real post, and then guarantee that more regular posts like this will marry the whole convo: you may have signed up to this list for my end of history musings, film opinions, or ideas about theory. Well have fun because i’m doing all that but it’s gonna be set to Metallica so have fun.

FILM DIARY: Metallica: Some Kind of Monster (Joe Berlinger, Bruce Sinofsky, USA, 2003)

Seen this movie a billion times, favorite band ever, very important document of rock and roll history, etc etc. But I never really fully understood it until I heard a live studio bootleg of the band dicking around during the Load writing sessions (www.youtube.com/watch?v=19fkdLn7SrM) and suddenly an entirely new side of the band I've been listening to my entire life opened up. What it must have felt like at this moment not only to have their band and life's work possibly falling apart due to unaddressed interpersonal dynamics that had been festering for years, but what it must have felt like to stand at the point at which your creative project had met its limit, reached the end of its form upon which the only place left to turn was a legacy touring band.

So much of the film is "about" Lars and James relationship--the postmodern American McCartney/Lennon. Perhaps the film's most famous scene lands halfway through when James, fresh from rehab and afraid to push the boundaries of his newly fragile life, finally broke through Lars who just wanted to listen to some mixes after 4 PM. Lars--ever a camera darling who was most certainly trained for media performance since childhood--frets that he is realizing that he never even got to know the one person he had spent the better part of the last 20 years of his life with, certainly more than his family. As the conversation reaches a limit (like their music), Lars injects his face into James' own and screams FUCK at the top of his lungs. Over the next hour the band slowly begins rebuilding their relationships through the (mostly cringe) music they are writing with no rules, just to remember how to do this again. A key moment of bonding emerges when the band reluctantly records a radio promo demanded by management, and the three figures who we had mostly seen shooting verbal bullets at each other realize its still them vs the world, and the only way they were going to defeat that bullshit was by getting the band back together, so to speak. That's the story of the film as it has mostly been told (Chuck Klosterman's review in the NYT is perhaps still some of the best writing on Metallica in existence), and one hears the story recounted again and again since Metallica's return to stability in the following ways: they needed to "get through" St. Anger to return to their thrash roots on Death Magnetic and so on.

But say what you will about St. Anger and it *is* at times the most embarrassing music the band ever put to tape. It was also the last time the band was a living organism creating something truly new in order to move forward, to express themselves--their last actual work of art. After Lars' outburst at James, the band's trajectory more accurately began to follow this story: they got the garage band therapy album out to fix the interpersonal dynamic of the multi-million dollar corporate entity they had unwittingly built that was responsible for paying not only the bills of the three members but also Q-Prime Management, Bob Rock, and even the employees of the studio helping engineer the band's recent output (One of the film's least appreciated scenes depicts Lars, Bob, and Kirk attending the debut concert of ex-member Jason Newsted's new band Echobrain. Jason leaves without talking to his former bandmates, and we are treated to a scene of Lars having a nervous breakdown in an empty venue while Bob Rock watches the stage, pointing out each crew member wrapping mic cords and putting away monitors. "That guy works at the studio!" "Todd..He works at the studio too, right?" - this was a serious potential economic crisis in the history of the rock industry, which had just barely survived the end of grunge). I think this time around I'm realizing that the real crisis was that everyone realized the paychecks were about to dry up, and what we're really witnessing here is the moment when a group of artists were forced to come to terms with the fact they were no longer in the artistic vanguard, that it was time to accept the status of a legacy group that tours on the hits and sells distressed vintage shirt reprints and egregiously expensive vinyl box sets. The real moment of revelation comes not from everyone relearning how to be friends--it comes from each member realizing that their arrested development and eternal rockstar adolescence had come to an end and it was time to become something else, if they wanted to keep paying the bills. They chose right, and thank god for it. Long live Metallica. But it really is true that history is over.