Funniest Metallica Piece Ever Written

Choir Boy Frustration

So this madness all started with the MTV Icon: Metallica special, which is basically a big jerk off session with numetallers spewing their load over the “influence” of Metallica on their music, and, indeed, ALL LIFE AS WE KNOW IT! Groups like Staind, Korn, etc. all played covers of old Metallica songs, mostly from the fucking “black album” (because only PUSSIES do “s/t” albums!) if that’s any indication as to how fucking CLUELESS the collective jackanapes partaking in this sick circle jerk were. Interjected between these pornographic displays were montages of video footage frankensteined together and narrated VH1 Behind The Music style so as to tell the story of Metallica, told backwards and chronologically. All I managed to see was the “we’ve been working on this new album, St. Anger” part of the Metallica story, as I promptly changed the channel after Avril Lavigne’s performance of “Give Me Feul” (the only reason I was watching to begin with, ‘cause I mean, c’mon, if you’re gonna do a bad Metallica song you might as well go all the way to Reload, and yes I’m talking to you Staind, you “Nothing Else Matters” covering faggots!) which thankfully they scheduled early in the program.
At some point within the day I was, uh, DOING SOME RESEARCH on Allmusic.com, and they had a feature piece on Metallica’s St. Anger, which of course I had to read. There it was; two seeds of hype planted within 24 hours. Now anyone who knows me knows that I’m not only susceptible to hype (how many other GUYS do you know dumb enough to actually OWN a Strokes LP?), but will go as far as to PRAISE hype as being one of the only truly important aspects of the modern pop group. That being said, I should have known right there that I was done for in regards to St. Anger.

Father Perturbation

With St. Anger’s hype machine working overtime inside my brain, I was gratified to say the least when I finally saw the video to the album’s single “St. Anger”.
The video is a fucking GEM, lemme tell ‘ya. Metallica are playing at San Quintin, and in between the band playing the single to a bunch of entertainment staved prisoners (Pick one of two of the following useless parenthetical interjections: a) talk about a CAPTIVE AUDIENCE! Gua-hu-hu OR b) “hmmm, should I get gang raped in woodshop or go and see the filming of the new Metallica video?”) there’re these short skits of minorities committing crimes and going to prison which resemble all those straight-to-video gang themed films that were so popular when Boyz In The Hood first came out.
As if Metallica finally tapping into the oft-neglected “incarcerated gang member” demographic isn’t good enough, the song, St. Anger is one of the biggest pieces of shit you’ll EVER hear on any airwaves. My jaw dropped when I first heard how AWFUL the thing sounded. I mean, I honestly can’t recall the last time I heard a single from a “Major Artist” like Metallica with such shitty production! Even the cable access Christian video shows would blush at the not-even-demo-worthy sound quality. Needless to say, “St. Anger”, and thus St. Anger were now weighing HEAVILY on my mind.

Bishop Anger to Rook Rage

My friend Matt sympathized with my now-obsessive morbid curiosity regarding St. Anger, both the song and the album. I mean, how the fuck did this thing get on the air? How the fuck did they release the album on Elektra? It’s like they put the goddamn thing out, and OOPS, “hey Bob (Rock, the fucking producer of this disasterpiece), uh, you forgot to mix the album!” And as bad as the production is, “St. Anger” is one of the most downright BIZARRE songs, musically, to get airplay since Justin Timberlake’s (or should I say Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo’s) “Like I Love You”. First of all, even the radio edit is long for contemporary airplay standards, and juxtaposed to the Creed-esque lite-numetal parts are these sorta fast pseudo-blast beat death metal parts. Then during those numetal parts, the new bass player guy Robert Trujillo (we assume; super vague liner notes meant to disguise the fact that Bob Rock played bass and co-wrote the album don’t say who does what specifically on the album) does these guttural Biohazard-esque back up vocals which sound utterly PREPOSTEROUS next to Hetfield’s sung out crooning. Add the constant PLONG PLONG PLONG of the drums that sound like fucking ANVILS, and you’ve got a strange little ditty polluting the cable music video channels during a summer of great songs/videos by Beyonce, AFI, The Ataris, Joe Budden, etc.

Saint Anger: Prologue

After days of watching video channels for long periods at a time WAITING for the “St. Anger” video, which (big surprise) NEVER gets played, I had to admit to myself that I had officially infatuated myself with this song to the point where I would need to procure a copy of my own. I e-mailed a friend of mine, Derek, who works at a record store, and sent me a copy gratis. According to him the CD/DVD set had sat in the used bin at $8.99 for over a month. After the package arrived, the CD just sat idle for few days. I was too intimidated to play it. I mean, I was delving into pretty shady territory even having something like a new Metallica album in my house, let alone my CD player. I mean, what if I listened to this thing long enough and it actually GREW on me? Trust me; it’s happened to worse records before, and what if the album was SO bad that I couldn’t even listen to it? Did I really want to have to admit defeat at the hands of St. Anger? Yet I could never be defeated if I never challenged the album by listening to it. The album was staring me down, and it seemed to me that I had absolutely NOTHING to gain from listening to the thing. But I knew deep down that this unsettling obsession with their god awful single would never truly die unless I took this bull/shit by the horns and *ahem* LISTENED TO THE FUCK OUT OF IT. Little did I suspect the deeper philosophical implications of the endeavor that lied before me…

St. Anger

Normally for an album of this magnitude, I would break the thing down on a track by track analysis, and give a background of the band’s career up until the album in question, but I’ll refrain from doing such in this case for the following reasons, one; NOBODY CARES, two; I certainly don’t care, Three; I honestly don’t enjoy listening to the album enough to do so, and finally; if I were to minutely pick apart all the errors in this album I could fill fucking ENCYCLOPEDEAS.
The production is what’ll really strike the average listener. In an attempt to return to the stripped down and “raw” sound that producer/surrogate bass player/general douche bag Bob Rock ironically enough KILLED on Metallica’s s/t album from ’91, Bob decided it would be best if he just didn’t mix the album and made all the equipment just sound like shit. I mean, if it was in fact Lars’ idea to have the snare sound like a giant cell-phone tower being struck with a hammer two blocks away while the kick in contrast sounds like it’s being played TWO FEET AWAY FROM YOUR EARS, then it was certainly Bob’s duty to put his contender for Douche of The Universe in check. The truly incredible part is that the listener NEVER gets used to the abysmal drum sound, despite its persistent plonging (and you KNOW something’s bad when it invents a new verb!) throughout St. Anger. “Hey, why should I make the drum levels sound different when the parts of the song change? Can’t you see I’m busy committing CAREER FUCKING SUICIDE ovah heah?” spake the Rock.
The guitars are not only tuned way low, but mixed super quiet, so needless to say the bass is completely obscured in the non-mix. All you can hear is DRUMS, and VOCALS, which is fucking ABSURD because, as the cover of the CD indicates, THIS IS A FUCKING METALLICA ALBUM, and maybe it’s just me, but when you buy a FUCKING METALLICA ALBUM, you’re supposed to be able to hear the FUCKING GUITARS!!! What’s more is that, as you may have guessed, the drums and vocals are the worst fucking part! Completely ignoring Hetfield’s now-AWFUL pseudo (or is it post?)-Vedder et al. vocal style, the way which the vocals were actually recorded on the CD make them sound even WORSE, if one can imagine! Take the legitimately laughable vocal build on the opening cut “Frantic”; with each repetition of the chant “Frantic, tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tock” Hetfield’s voice goes an octave higher and higher than he’s comfortable singing, so that by the end of his ranting Hetfield’s voice sounds as pubescent as his core audience. What’s more is that on closer examination, namely by watching the accompanying DVD of the rehearsals for St. Anger where Hetfield’s vocal build DOESN’T crack like a 13 year old Phil Anselmo, it seems that Bob was the one egging him on to go for those high notes.
I mean, did anyone see A Year and a Half in the Life of Metallica? Remember watching Bob twisting James’s arm to get every minute detail right for the vocal delivery on Metallica? Well, what the fuck was he doing this time? I guess he must have been too busy writing and playing bass on this piece of shit to worry about whether or not James could his a single note right. Just listen to the Bobcat Goldthwaitisms of “The Unnamed Feeling”, the G.I. Joe-cum-Hulk Hogan and The Wrestling Boot Band backup vox on “St. Anger” or the ejaculatory crooning on “Invisible Kid”, or James’ voice cracking during the dramatic yell during “All within My Hands” and tell me someone wasn’t asleep at the fucking wheel.
Beyond vocal technique, though, there’re just some blatant flaws in the way Bob recorded the vocals. Again, they’re WAY too high in the mix, smothering everything else save for the abysmal drums. Also, for an album trying to sound so dirty musically, the vocals are way too clean and crisp, a stark contrast to the distorted beyond belief sound of the guitars. The most unforgivable act of Rockdom, however, is not catching the frequent microphone popping of the “T’s” on “Sweat Amber”. Not only does the last “T” in “How sweet does it get?” CLEARLY pop, but the line repeats something like eight goddamn times in the song, and what’s more is that Bob puts reverb on the syllable in question, each pop another nail in the coffin of Bob’s career.
But you know, as much fun as it is to ridicule Bob for the amount of cocaine that’s somehow been rerouted to his eardrum, making him a deaf and an utterly incompetent producer, there’s not enough smoke and mirrors in the world to make the songwriting on St. Anger sound anywhere in the universe of good.
Okay, so the riffs; they’re lazy, period. And what’s worse is that you can just tell the band has so much goddamn confidence that these fucking sub-teenage-numetal riffs will just tear the listeners head into frenzy. I mean, there are VERY few instances on this album of one riff going straight into another, there’s just buildup, BUILD UP B-U-I-L-D-U-P and THEN!!!! Nothing. Not a damn thing. Just another weak four-chord riff they nabbed off the cutting floor of Linkin Park’s last album.
Lyrically, it can only be expected to be written at a 6th grade reading level, with the emotional development of the writer not going too far out of that age range, but these guys must have been some pretty fucking stupid 6th graders, man! Some random excerpts; “Shoot me again/I ain’t dead yet”, “Can’t you help me be uncrazy?”, “Kill, kill, kill, kill”, and of course, one of the most baffling lyric to get actual radio airplay in a LONG time “I’m madly in anger with you.” Jeezis, I’ve heard of attempting to sound intellectual, and I’ve heard of pseudo-intellectual, but these guys must be TRYING to sound pseudo-intellectual. Like, ain’t these cats something like a half a fucking century old a piece? And they’re still wrestling with thesauruses to voice their “pain”? Christ, I hope if I ever get to this state of living off of fumes of nostalgia for my youth my retrogressive trip won’t be so fucking SQUARE sounding as these assholes.
And now, ladies and gentlemen, the ace up my sleeve, the nail in this termite-infested coffin; this (again) fucking METTALICA ALBUM contains-are y’all ready-NOT ONE GOD DAMNED MOTHERFUCKING GUITAR SOLO! That’s right, the band with Kirk fucking Hammitt, Lars Ulrich, and both of their small dicks, huge egos, and over-compensatory tactics contains ZERO guitar solos. I mean, this has to be, aside from aforementioned career suicide, a sign of the apocalypse or something. Not one guitar solo! Let it sink in for a second…75 minutes, 11 trax, meaning the average song length is ‘round 7 minutes, and within none of these 7 minute drowning scenes does there appear one solo of any kind. How do they fucking fill the time you ask? BY REPEATING EACH POORLY WRITTEN RIFF UNTILL YOU WANT TO MURDER YOURSELF! So like I said, as laughable as Bob Rock’s production is, there is just no saving a seven minute (never mind the occasional nine minute pummeling) solo-less song.

St. Anger: Epilogue

So what was I talking about way back when I alluded to some deeper philosophical lesson St. Anger has to teach us? Well listen, obviously this is a shitty CD right? I mean, anyone in their right mind wouldn’t even need to hear a Metallica album released in 2003 to guess that it’s gonna fucking suck ass. But regardless, here I am typing up this ungodly dissection of this bloated corpse of an asphyxiated child found in the city river, and whereas any rational human being would just look at this thing whose stomach is swollen with polluted city water, whose blue blood radiates through his or her (as the sex has at this point become utterly indeterminable) thin skin and say “that’s one dead-ass motherfucker”, here I gotta sit and say “yeah, but look at how fucking dead the thing is! I’m gonna go and write about the extent of which this poor fucker’s dead. Man, I can’t help thinking about how fucking dead this motherfucker is, blah, blah, blah.” The question thus changes from “what the fuck was Metallica thinking?” to “what the fuck am I thinking caring about what Metallica was thinking?”
Like, what am I lacking inside myself where I gotta be not only drawn to the failure of strangers, but put in HOURS of energy in an attempt to better inform other strangers about the degree to which these poor schmucks who I’ve never met, and with whom I have no emotional engagement with, fucked up. I mean, it’s not like I’m getting paid for this shit, like I HAVE to write about shitty contemporary rock albums in order to pay my rent; this is FUN for me! And what does it say about you the reader who can sit through an approximately 3,000 word diatribe about an album which, most likely, you knew was bad before you even stumbled across this harpooned Loch Ness Monster? What is the BIG picture here?

Pope Anger
The thing is I’m not even a fan of Metallica’s old shit. “Those who can’t Slayer, Metallica” I’ve said on more than one occasion. What is it, then, about St. Anger that keeps drawing me back in? I guess it’s analogous to slowing down on the freeway when you see a car wreck, but a part of me tells me there must be a little something more to it than that.
On many separate occasions since acquiring my copy of St. Anger I’ve had friends of mine with similar music tastes request to hear the album when they come over, one even submitting himself to a screening of the bonus DVD IN HIS OWN HOUSE nonetheless. Another poor soul even purchased the motherfucker ON VINYL! In both cases the post-St.Anger experience seemed to parallel the pre-album hype induced madness which I was stricken with not to long ago, the gist of which is, in a phrase; “this fucking thing is SO bad it won’t get out of my head!”
Say what you will about St.Anger, it definitely demands one’s attention, which, if I’m not mistaken, is a working definition of (*gulp*) ART! It also fits the definition of another word which begins with “A”, ATROCITY, and no album comes to mind in recent years which fits both of the bills so appropriately as St.Anger. If Lou Reed had heard this shit back in ’75, I’m sure Metal Machine Music would have sounded a helluva lot different. Now quit gawking and drive, you’re holding up traffic.