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In my travels on YouTube I pick up a lot of clips I dig, a lot of times to watch the fretting and timing they use. Found this little gem of a compilation of Metallica’s ballads – some with sound exceptionally great bridges.
You have to disregard the first 15 seconds, and 2:30-3:30 is pretty rough. It picks up steam around 3:45, with several very bright spots.
If you are like me though, around my age and a crap guitar player who has spent many a Sunday afternoon with the ballgame on in the background with a buddy passing the guitar back and forth while one has a beer and the other licks out whatever junk they have picked up, you agree you would have went to the fridge for a couple more and sat back and gave this fella an extra “turn” after this performance.
And probably grinned ear to ear in pure fun.
Growing up, Metallica was rarely what I would call my favorite band. I was never into the whole theme early on – and the harder stuff irritated me as I could rarely make out the words. A lot of heavy metal just seemed like raw anger. And hadn’t picked up a guitar at the time.
But Metallica’s ballads had some kind of power for a very diverse group of people my age. The purists hate them, but hey.
Generation X is generally considered the folks born between the time of 1965 and 1983. I was born in 1975, in the second half of that.
Early Metallica was coming around when the eldest of our generation were becoming adults, and filtering in on the wake of my Michael Jackson period. For many kids my age, Michael Jackson was perhaps to us what the BeeGees was to our parents. And I know mine hated Jackson.
As boys became men, Jackon, Prince and the like often fell to the wayside along with maybe some of our illusions about life in general.
And Metallica spoke to many of those kiddos in a way their parents seriously could not understand.
In a way the latchkey young could not, and no longer cared to explain to parents who often behaved like elder siblings rather than parents.
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That is what we could not explain. And still can’t, to many.
Maybe some feel a different band was the fulcrum of Gen X youth sentiment. Maybe the folks that inspired Metallica, Sabbath, Cooper, etc. Or later bands like Nirvana or Pearl Jam. Or even totally different angles entirely like the New Order/Erasure deal.
But I think Metallica had the widest reach for a single act. Not all of their stuff, sure. The ballads though – they are one of the cores of Gen X to me, a generation that is destined to be overshadowed by its younger sibling Gen Y, which is twice it’s size and of a very different overall world view – quicker to adopt views, less intense, and like the Boomers more ethereal in general. Which makes sense, Gen Y and the Boomer generations are rougly the same size with the far smaller Gen X sandwiched between them.
Generation X, who are most responsible for the innovations, programming, and pure creation that birthed this thing called the Internet and the very technologies this entire website runs on. The kids who saw ennui and emptiness in the hypocritical conservative social order that was the “Me first, you last” years and got angry about it in their own way, likely not to be repeated for several generations. And who were awakened politically by this damned Iraq invasion just as they were hitting their thirties and won’t likely ever sit down again.
And indeed will likely have the torch well and truly passed to us far earlier than our parents did, and hold it longer, just as the smaller Silent Generation that came just before the Boomers did. Those folks in their 70s right now, who fought in Korea and whose generation is overshadowed socially by the GI Generation of WWII and the Boomers of Vietnam – and who raised many of the kids of Gen X in their parent’s absence.
Metallica has been a real pain about online distribution. They “sold out”. But their effects on music? Big, man – big. No denying it.
- from houstonchronicle online
