Chuck Klosterman on Rock by Chuck Klosterman

Author:Chuck Klosterman
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: Music
ISBN: 9781451624496
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2010-09-13T07:00:00+00:00

Disposable Heroes

For most of my youth, Metallica fans made me nervous. By the time Master of Puppets was released in 1986, the kids who were already into Metallica seemed kind of nuts. These were usually weight lifters who had previously liked Mötley Crüe and Van Halen before suddenly deciding that anything overtly commercial was absolutely fake, and that singing about girls and partying was pathetic, and that real rock bands were supposed to wear blue jeans and hate their parents. Being a fan of Metallica in the ’80s was not supposed to be fun. Loving Metallica was like being Catholic: if you truly believed, it was supposed to inform every aspect of your life. I could not relate to this. I preferred songs about having sex with underage girls in elevators, but Metallica always seemed to be singing about being burned alive (or something along those lines).

By 1992, everything about loving Metallica had evolved, even though the music was only slightly different (the songs were shorter and less complex, but it was still the same premise). I remember the first time I went to a party and watched two sorority girls sing along with “Enter Sandman”—it blew my mind. It was like watching Nancy Reagan smoke pot. In the early ’80s, Metallica had refused to make videos; now they seemed to make a new video every six weeks. Over time, it was this “mainstreaming of Metallica” that started to fascinate me, and I went back and seriously reexamined a lot of their older material. I like their music more now than I did back when I was in high school, particularly Kill ’Em All and Garage Days Re-Revisited.

When The New York Times Magazine asked me to do a profile on Metallica before the release of the documentary Some Kind of Monster, it felt like the film was going to be a really big deal: every possible media outlet appeared to be covering it. However, Some Kind of Monster underperformed at the box office (at least compared to its prerelease expectations). In a weird way, all the media coverage may have actually hurt the film’s commercial viability; you could almost experience the entire movie by reading about it. I still think Some Kind of Monster is a wonderful documentary, but everything you need to know about it can be illustrated within the span of three thousand words. Sometimes I suspect audiences assumed they already knew exactly what this movie was about, so they saw no reason to pay $10 to see it. A year after its release, I happened to interview Lars Ulrich again, and I casually asked if he was surprised Some Kind of Monster didn’t make $20 million at the box office. He was not.

“I’m fucking amazed it even made two million dollars in America,” he said. “I can’t fucking believe it even got released. Do you think people in Nebraska give a fuck if A. O. scott says some documentary is good? Do you think anyone cares what Owen Gleiberman thinks about Metallica? I never got caught up in that hype.

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