Metallica

0:00:04.2 Landry Ayres: Throw on your battle vest and open this pit up because today we are going to thrash our way through the music of Metallica. Joining me, our Associate Professor of Philosophy at the College of William & Mary, Chris Freiman.

0:00:18.2 Chris Freiman: Thanks for having me.

0:00:19.2 Landry Ayres: And distinguished service Professor of Philosophy at King’s College, editor of the Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture Series and author of the new book, The Meaning of Metallica: Ride the Lyrics, Bill Irwin. Bill, thank you so much for joining us.

0:00:34.0 William Irwin: Thanks, Landry. Good to be here.

0:00:38.3 Landry Ayres: If I may, Bill, especially because I… We actually had emailed you over a year ago at this point, probably 18 months ago, just being like, “We’d love to get you on the show. We love your Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture Series.” And you said, “Well, I’ve got this book that I’m working on about Metallica.” And we were like, “Metallica. That’s… ” And it just… We never got around to it, but then I was like, “You know what? The book is coming out. Stranger Things brings it back into the zeitgeist all of a sudden they just… They just use Enter Sandman on, I think, Westworld a week ago or so. So why not do it now? It’s a great time to talk about what Metallica can mean for us today and what we can can learn from the lyrics. But I was curious, why Metallica of all things for this book? Because you seem like a guy who, based on your writings, is very well acquainted with not just Metallica, but a lot of music and a lot of media and literature. So why Metallica of all things?

0:01:35.8 William Irwin: Well, Metallica’s been the soundtrack of my life since about 1984 when Ride The Lightning came out, and they’ve been therapy to me, they’ve been poetry, they’ve been philosophy. They’ve taken me through teenage existential crisis. They’ve taken me through my midlife crisis. And you know what, I started writing about Metallica just in connection with this book, Educated by Tara Westover. She was raised as sort of a fundamentalist Mormon. And I was quoting from Metallica because there are songs about religion, and James Hetfield was raised… James Hetfield, the lead singer and chief lyricist was raised as a Christian Scientist. And it just sort of took on a life of its own, the book. And the lyrics have just always meant so much to me personally that I just sort of had to do it as a labour of love. And hopefully, the book is a conversation starter on the lyrics, certainly not a conversation ender.

0:02:49.9 Landry Ayres: And Chris, knowing from your various Facebook posts, there are no Limp Bizkit, who I know is your favourite, but does Metallica mean anything special to you? Or is it emblematic of the genre? How did you come to appreciate them?

0:03:03.6 Chris Freiman: Well, I was gonna say maybe we need to do a new episode on Limb Bizkit at some point. So put me down for that.

0:03:09.3 Landry Ayres: I’ll put it in the queue. Yeah. [chuckle]

0:03:10.9 Chris Freiman: [chuckle] Okay. We’ll have to go two hours, special edition. Yeah. So I mean, my experience at the quiz was somewhat similar, although that’s really interesting, I didn’t know that about James Hetfield being raised a Christian Scientist. That’s that’s interesting. But just in terms of my own experience, I’m trying to remember what… Some mid-​’90s… At some point in the mid-​’90s, I’m old enough to have been a part of the generation that listened to music on cassette tapes. And I remember… It is funny, we’ve come from cassette tapes to now purely digital within my lifetime. That’s how far we’ve come. But I had, I wanna say, four cassette tapes at a certain stage of my life when I was really getting into metal, and two of them were Metallica.

0:03:57.6 Chris Freiman: I believe Ride The Lightning and Master of Puppets. And so I would just, as a kid does, just play it endlessly on repeat. And yeah, I like the band. They’ve reinvented themselves multiple times. I pretty much like all the things that they do. I like that they don’t seem to be too deterred by the critics, like they just… They just kind of do their own thing and they make the music that they wanna make and they make people happy. And I’ve been listening to them for over 20 years now. I expect that I’ll continue to be listening to them for as long as I’m listening to music. So yeah, Metallica and Libertarianism, what’s not to like?

0:04:36.4 Landry Ayres: Well, that’s really the interesting thing, is I was thinking about this and I was like, I mean, you could obviously do whole podcasts on Metallica, I’m sure they exist out there, but if there’s one person who is gonna be able to tie it into the things we usually talk about on this show, I know it was gonna be you two. So what is emblematic about Metallica? Because I think my place in this conversation is very different because I am at best a casual Metallica fan. My dad was very musical. He’s a musician. My mother is very musical. They were into rock music and stuff, but they stopped just short of things that got that heavy. Like I was emailing Bill, I was like, “We were… ” When it got to heavy things, my dad raised me in a Rush household rather than a Metallica household, which you get into the libertarian-​leaning lyrics there, but it wasn’t quite the thrash of Kill ‘Em All or anything like that. [chuckle]

0:05:34.5 Landry Ayres: So what is there for Libertarians in Metallica? Because I think there is some aesthetic reasons and that type of genre has a lot of appreciation within the community, but is there something more to it than just the sort of rebellious do it yourself aesthetic of heavy metal as a genre? Or does metallic specifically do something special?

0:06:00.3 William Irwin: Well, you mentioned Rush there, Landry. So let me pick up on that because I’m sure a lot of listeners to the podcast are Rush fans, very popular band in the libertarian community. And there are some connections there with Rush. The members of Metallica were all Rush fans, and in fact, they wanted Geddy Lee to be the producer of Master of Puppets, which is of course enjoying renaissance at the time. And it almost happened, there was… They just couldn’t get the timing right. And the song structure’s actually, people who are only familiar with the sort of simpler Metallica songs like Enter Sandman may not see this, but with a song like Master of Puppets coming into prominence again, the song structure is pretty complicated. It’s not perhaps at the level of what you see in a lot of Rush songs, but once you get from Master of Puppets and into… And Justice for All, that’s where they really went very far in the direction of progressive metal.

0:07:06.4 William Irwin: And I think lyrically, people who find libertarian leanings in Rush, which are certainly there, purposely so. Neil Peart in particular, a fan of Ayn Rand and Anthem, and The Fountainhead, very much that aesthetic and that credo of doing things on our own terms. “We’re artists and we’re making this art.” And as Chris had said in the introduction, in some ways, not even caring very much about certainly what the critics say, and to some extent, not even what the fans would say. And I think ultimately, what’s there that ties Rush and Metallica and that has some libertarian appeal aside from, as we’ll get into to I’m sure, issues that are specifically those of liberty and justice, and anti-​war, but aside from that, there’s just a tremendous individualism and a sense of individual responsibility and taking responsibility for one’s own life and creating art that is authentic and genuinely reflects that.

0:08:20.5 Chris Freiman: Yeah. I have to say, I’m loving all of these little interesting bits of information. I had no idea about the Geddy Lee connection. That’s really cool. Yeah, and for me, I wouldn’t even say it’s so much the lyrics, but more, I don’t know, ethos or something like that, for lack of a better term. So I don’t know… So Bill, you might be able to correct me if I’m wrong here, but I remember reading something about how at one point, I guess in the ’90s, Metallica heard a Soundgarden record and they loved it. And they said, “Alright, and now we’re making Load,” which was not a critically acclaimed album because it was… It sounded like a little bit grungy, like Soundgarden. And they got a lot of negative feedback on it, but they did it ’cause that’s they wanted to do. And then they did Reload which was a similar sort of sound. And I just always kind of respected that ethos or that vibe where they said, “This is the music that we like, this is the music that we wanna make. And if you like it, buy it, if you don’t, don’t. But we’re gonna do things our way.” And to me, that’s always something that I’ve really respected and it’s resonated with me.

0:09:34.4 William Irwin: No, that’s right, that they’ve always done what they wanted to do. And the Load albums were really disappointing to a lot of long-​term fans, myself included at the time. I’ve since come to really appreciate them because metal itself was falling on hard times at that point. Little did I know, almost double metaphor of underground death metal was really taking off as was the new wave for black metal, but I wasn’t in touch with that. But anything that was at all mainstream metal was basically pushed aside. And we were hoping that Metallica was going to carry the flag for metal forward, and we got something that really sounded a bit perhaps too much of the time with the alternative and grime scene. But hell, that’s what they wanted to do and they did it. And there’s even a country song, Mama Said, on Load, and hats off for them for doing whatever the hell they wanted, and they definitely didn’t care what the critics said. It’s never been about trying to please Rolling Stone or the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame or any of those bullshit institutions. I think it did sting when some fans had some negative reaction at various points. But even that, they’ve done what they’ve wanted to do. And certainly there’s something admirable about that with the libertarian ethos as Chris was saying.

0:11:03.2 Chris Freiman: I like that country song. That album definitely grew… [chuckle] It grew on me too. At first I was like, “Oh, I don’t know about this.” And then, over time, yeah, I started to like it. And I listen to it now. The other nice thing too is my son, my eight year old son, I’m getting him into it. And so he is more of like the Load, Reload era. But it’s given me a renewed appreciation for that part of Metallica’s timeline.

0:11:31.9 William Irwin: Yeah, and Mama Said is a great song, and it actually is directly inspired by his own mother’s death. She died when he was 16 years old because they were Christian Scientists essentially, and she didn’t take medical treatment for cancer. And his father who was a Christian Scientist, had left the family, and so he was, in a sense, orphaned. His father wasn’t dead, but he had to go live with an older brother. And you really start to get on those Load and Reload albums some very personal reflections that are coming in in a way that you didn’t get quite as much early on.

0:12:11.6 Chris Freiman: So just for my own curiosity though, do you know why he left Christian Science? I assume that he did. Do you know why, what prompted that?

0:12:20.6 William Irwin: Oh. Well, I think after his mother died and he moved in with his brother, he didn’t darken the doors of any kind of church for a very long time. He had had enough of religion. There’s lots of anti-​religious animus and songs, particularly on the early albums. Creeping Death is the retelling of the Exodus story, the flight out of Egypt, and Leper Messiah, really taking aim at the televangelist. And the song that’s particularly about the Christian Scientist’s upbringing is The God That Failed off of the Black Album. So, I think he took leave of Christian Scientists’ religion just because it had never made any sense to him. He had seen the results of not taking modern medicine into account. It also limited him in a lot of ways. He had to excuse himself from like health lessons in high school. And I think it kept him from playing high school football, because he didn’t wanna get injured and not do anything that would be proper for injury or maybe they wouldn’t even let him play if he… I don’t know. But it really left a bad taste in his mouth.

0:13:48.5 Landry Ayres: We’ve been talking about the sort of do-​it-​yourself ethos that the band had, mostly in a stylistic sense. They were the tone of the albums, the production style, the structures of the song. And that is very, very potent and recognizable when you look at the arc of their entire discography. But it’s interesting to look at them in sort of discrete periods. And I think, Bill, your book does this specifically because it is about the lyrics more than anything. It’s called Meaning of Metallica: Ride The Lyrics, which is where a big part of the message of the band is really carried. There is the aesthetic power of heavy metal, but the stories that they are telling and the real nuance comes from the words that James Hetfield is writing.

0:14:43.2 Landry Ayres: And there’s… There are a lot of changes in the way that they’re tackling their subjects, from the classic early thrash teenage rebellion of Kill ‘Em ‘All, and then you’re getting sort of institutional attacks in… And Justice For All, and stuff like that, and then you’re moving on to a lot more sort of… It’s like a really nuanced kind of interpersonal conflict in some of the later albums as well. What do you make of the sort of almost flat out aggression and sort of attacking of institutions that goes on in the tone of the lyrics versus these sort of live and let live, almost born out of this hippie ethos of the sort of post-​Vietnam era? How do those two things intersect? And it’s a really interesting dynamic to me that they have become this older band, have they just mellowed with age over time, or is there something more to that?

0:15:48.5 William Irwin: It’s a great question, Landry. I think those things fit together very well. In the sense of the live and let live sort of hippie mentality that then was headquartered in San Francisco, still is, although James Hetfield couldn’t tolerate living there anymore, he’s moved to Colorado. But the atmosphere of being a San Francisco band and the sort of live and let live and try anything and let your freak flag fly sort of mentality of San Francisco certainly is part of that. But of course, part of the hippie mentality too was always questioning institutions. And so questioning and really brutalizing religious institutions and questioning government institutions, that all sort of fits with a hippie mentality, but it also is not done to the sounds of Pete Seeger jangling guitar or a Kumbaya, it’s put forward in a very different way. And there’s also a very prominent anti-​war message, in particularly early Metallica songs like Fight Fire With Fire, and For Whom The Bell Tolls and then Disposable Heroes. But listening to those songs, if you’re not listening to the lyrics, all you get is aggression. But these are anti-​war songs that are not kinda wimpy and whiny, Give Peace a Chance kind of things. They’re grab you by the lapels and say Stop The Madness anti-​war songs.

0:17:34.7 William Irwin: So I think it all fits together. And I think over the course of time, you see Hetfield’s lyrics develop from the sort of mission statement on Kill ‘Em All of let’s spread this gospel of heavy metal… Ride The Lightning is a death-​obsessed album. Almost every song on there deals with death, most explicitly For Whom The Bell Tolls and Fade to Black, which is a suicide song, Creeping Death and Trapped Under Ice about cryonics, that really spoke to my budding existentialist philosopher as a teenager. And then you get into Master of Puppets where nearly every song deals with manipulation, whether it’s the title track, which really is, if you look closely at the lyrics, a song about the self-​manipulation that occurs under addiction, although it can be interpreted allegorically in other contexts as well. But you have the manipulation of religion in Leper Messiah, and the manipulation of an institution in Welcome Home Sanitarium. And then, as you mentioned before, and as we were discussing with Chris, you get some more self-​reflective and personal-​sounding songs when you get to the Black Album and the Load albums and beyond.

0:18:57.5 Chris Freiman: I should say, also, one thing I appreciate about a lot of Metallica’s lyrics is that they seem to strike a nice balance between… Or maybe a middle ground between bands that have lyrics that are just completely meaningless or nonsensical, and then bands that are just way over the top preachy. You listen to a Rage Against the Machine song, and it’s like a… They’re lecturing at you. And I don’t wanna be lectured in my heavy metal. But I think Metallica did a nice job of kinda finding a middle ground there, where they were subtle, more subtle than a band like Rage Against the Machine’s lyrics, but they were also meaningful. And that’s what I like. I think that’s kinda the right way to do it.

0:19:38.9 William Irwin: Never sanctimonious. Growing up in the ’80s, there was the metal crowd, and I was taking classes with the kids who were going to college, but none of them were listening to Metallica, they were all listening to U2. And I could never stand U2, I found them sanctimonious and preachy, and I don’t know if you ever heard the joke, What’s the difference between God and Bono? God doesn’t walk around Dublin thinking that he’s Bono. That was sort of… I just couldn’t stand that, and I think Chris is just exactly right, that Metallica… And it’s partly because there’s no agreed political point of view within the band that happens to be that Hetfield writes the lyrics, but they’re never so on point to a particular moment or a particular current political issue that it seems preachy or it seems anything like that.

0:20:43.9 William Irwin: So when you get to the most overtly political album… And Justice for All, those songs, really, they could be speaking of an earlier time like Shortest Straw, which really speaks in some ways to the Red Scare of the 1950s, but as perennial, it fit the mood of the ’80s and it doesn’t go away, it seems to fit the cancel culture of today, but it’s never about a particular politician or a particular issue, so specifically that you feel like you’re being preached at.

0:21:24.1 Landry Ayres: I’m always curious about what libertarians think about a certain topic because I find it more divisive than it might seem at times, which is something Metallica is very, very known for today, at least, which is the issue of intellectual property. So if our fans are not familiar, Metallica was involved heavily and was really critical in driving the shut down of file sharing site, Napster, which was really kind of the canary in the coal mine for what the sort of music industry was turning into with the digitization, and which sort of leans into streaming and how people consume the media that they’re listening to.

0:22:10.7 Landry Ayres: So I’m curious specifically from perhaps you too… U2, that was a good pun. Bringing it back. What do you make of Metallica’s stance on intellectual property? Do you find it justified or do you think that was a misstep, or is there some nuance? And also, do you see any evidence of what you might think in their lyrics and how they’ve done things? ‘Cause that’s one thing that I didn’t immediately pick up on when I was trying to search for lyrics that had a lot of themes, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not necessarily there.

0:22:50.6 Chris Freiman: I don’t know, maybe I might be the only libertarian who’s sort of agnostic about intellectual property. I know both sides are really… They’re really… They dig in their heels on these things. I confess I’m not really sure what I think about intellectual property, I can see the merits of both sides of that argument, and I think there’s probably a place for it, but I also think it definitely does get abused and so what exactly an intellectual property regime should look like ideally, I’m not really sure. That being said though, I did respect Metallica’s position. So whether or not they were right or wrong about Napster, I think they had a point.

0:23:32.7 Chris Freiman: And the point as I see it is, “Look, we’re producing this work, you’re enjoying it, you’re getting this benefit, and so it’s appropriate to pay us.” I totally I respect that. If you provide a valuable service for someone, it doesn’t seem to me outlandish to ask them to pay you for it. And I think a lot of people, they didn’t like it. I remember Metallica’s popularity really took a hit, and I also have this memory, I don’t know what it was, it was like the Grammys or something like that, where they had the Napster guy like present something, and then they cut to Metallica and they were making a joke about Metallica, and they kind of sank into their seats because they were embarrassed because everybody was kinda hating on them for their Napster stance. But I think whether or not Napster was a good thing or a bad thing, or whether the intellectual property regime that we have is good or bad, I respect the stance that…

0:24:31.0 Chris Freiman: I remember this quote from Lars actually, he says something… He’s like, “We’re not toothpaste.” He was like, “We are people who are making something. And we’re not… ” This is me putting way too much philosophical window dressing on it, but it was like, “Don’t treat us as mere means. We’re doing something for you. So it’s only fair that you do a little something for us.” And so… Yeah, I thought that they got a disproportionate amount of hate for their Napster stance.

0:25:03.0 William Irwin: Yeah, I largely agree with Chris. I’m largely agnostic on intellectual property. I think it is property, but I think what counts as property itself needs to spontaneously develop and evolve, it has over time, and intellectual property, because it’s so technology-​based has to spontaneously develop and evolve, and will spontaneously evolve, and has spontaneously developed and evolved, more than other things. I remember very strict prohibitions on what you could photocopy at a certain point, and that’s loosened up quite a lot. Right?

0:25:48.5 William Irwin: Now, there’s some inside baseball and irony when it comes to Metallica, because they made their breakthrough because of underground tape trading. There was their famous demo, No Life ‘Til Leather, that spread around the world by one person taping it and passing it to another, and they encouraged that. And back in the ’80s, and like go back even further than Chris, before cassettes were the old LPs, they, for some reason enjoyed the Renaissance, people like listening to Vinyl again. It is richer, but I hated the skips and the hisses and all that, but sometimes… I got my very first taste of Metallica by making a tape of Ride The Lightning from my friend’s record. And then I bought it, and then I’ve bought everything in multiple media since, but that was technically a violation at some point, but Metallica had no problem with that.

0:26:55.1 William Irwin: They also, at various points, encouraged bootlegging of their concerts and sharing that out almost all of the Grateful Dead, so they’ve been sort of loose on that in some way. So what you didn’t get from Metallica and you couldn’t really expect was a tight philosophical argument about what intellectual property is and why you’re violating it. And what really bothered them most, if you take a look at the interviews is just the scale that it was going on with but with Napster. It wasn’t one buddy making a tape for another, that kind of thing, but it was just spreading the music without any kind of recompense.

0:27:44.6 William Irwin: So that was the real problem. Also part of the real problem is that the main mouthpiece on the issue for the band was Lars Ulrich who tends to be sometimes a bit of a jackass and way outspoken and that kind of thing. So that’s unfortunate, I think from a public relations standpoint, they didn’t handle it well, but I think they ultimately did the music business a service by making that stance. And what we have now is certainly not as good as it was for artists in the ’80s or ’90s in terms of generating revenue and royalties, but at least it’s something with the streaming services. And I think we’ve sort of spontaneously evolved where people are willing to pay for a subscription service or however they stream their music. And so artists get something even if it’s not as much as they wanted.

0:28:42.0 Chris Freiman: And I will say too, I’m sensitive to the ways in which intellectual property can inhibit creativity, and this discussion made me think of the infamous… I don’t know if either you have seen this Vanilla Ice interview, does this ring a bell? Where he’s trying to convince the listeners that he didn’t send what it… It’s like a Queen song or something like that.

0:29:02.4 William Irwin: Yeah, Under Pressure. Under Pressure.

0:29:05.5 Chris Freiman: And he’s trying to convince the… He’s like, “It’s a ding, it’s not… It’s a ding, not a ding.”

0:29:12.8 Landry Ayres: Right. That’s what it is.

0:29:14.8 Chris Freiman: And so I don’t have to pay me royalties here, it’s like, “Ah, I don’t know about that.” And so I can definitely see how overly zealous IP rules can inhibit creativity too.

0:29:25.3 William Irwin: One thing I’ll say also, and this is just a small titbit in Metallica’s defence, I had… Technically, from the intellectual standpoint, the letter of the law, I had to ask them for permission to quote their lyrics. And some artists refuse, some charge, poets are notorious for this, charging money or outright refusing permission for you to quote from their poem. But they didn’t charge me a dime to quote their lyrics. So it’s not like they would have made a fortune off of me and my little book, but that is at least principle, that they recognize that, come on, that’s a bullshit thing. It pretty much is a bullshit thing, I think, that I should have to ask to quote lyrics, and I think that’s something where you see intellectual property law evolve, where it’s… That’s gonna drop by the wayside completely at some point. But for now, I had to ask and at least they recognize that the guy shouldn’t even have to ask.

0:30:34.7 Chris Freiman: I’m amused to hear that poets are particularly ruthless.

0:30:38.4 William Irwin: Yeah.

0:30:39.7 Chris Freiman: It just seems contrary to the spirit of poetry, I don’t know.

0:30:43.1 William Irwin: They are, notoriously so. Sometimes even in their wills for the estate, there will be no granting of quotation from their poetry. I guess some of it has to do with poems being ordinarily very short units, and so to quote the whole poem, I don’t know, it could potentially take away from sales or the original context in which the poem was in a larger work of poetry. Also, lots of poets are just assholes, I guess, who are…

0:31:19.9 Landry Ayres: Well, they just… Well, I mean, they’re not getting paid much, so they’re trying to hold on to whatever they’re getting probably, is the case. [chuckle]

0:31:26.8 William Irwin: Yeah, but… And it also though, the usual request for the quotation is in a work of criticism. So to somebody who wants to write a work on them, and it’s not gonna be completely flattering, and they want to limit the way in which they’re discussed. It’s dumb, but they do it. Not all poets are, but notoriously some.

0:31:51.0 Landry Ayres: Right. And if you have a fair use justification for the criticism, it’s still on you to prove that, if they were to bring a suit against you. So it’s really just an opportunity for them to try and extract as much revenue as they can and via whatever means, most likely.

0:32:10.2 William Irwin: No, that’s right. And fair use is really the operative term there. And it’s a vague term and it’s meant to change and to evolve, and I find that to be a very libertarian kind of notion, the spontaneity and the open-​endedness of the development.

[music]

0:32:27.5 Landry Ayres: We mentioned before the lack of a tight argument or philosophy that Metallica represents and how Chris was like, “I don’t wanna get preached at when I’m listening to my heavy metal,” and that the group is really about sort of loose principles and ideas rather than nuanced very tightly specific… Like even policy positions, or planks in a platform that they’re trying to support. You both talk about how that’s something that you enjoy about the band. Is that something that you like about music in general, as compared to other media? Because I feel like when you watch a TV show or a movie, it’s much easier to come away with saying like, “This is what the point of this piece of media was. There was a sequence of events and framing… ” And you can do that with songs, and there are songs that are very much trying to tell the story with a point. But I feel like in general, there’s a bit more of an impressionistic thematic sense to music, and do you like that about heavy metal? Or are there any other examples of groups that you think do have that really, really surgical way of writing lyrics that you think might do it differently than Metallica?

0:34:00.8 Chris Freiman: Yeah, so I typically listen to music to feel rather than to think. So I definitely know people they’re super into lyrics and they like to dissect the lyrics and think about them. I like music that just makes me feel a certain way. And I confess, I like a lot of really heavy bands like Deathcore bands. And unless you look up the lyrics, and I have years of experience trying to understand the words, and I still have trouble without assistance. But I just like it because it makes me feel a particular way. And to me, I think that’s one of the unique values of music, as opposed to say something like a novel or a movie. So of course, those make you feel a certain way, but they also make you think a certain way. And obviously that has its place. But oftentimes, I just wanna put on the headphones, I wanna… I don’t know, blare Slipknot or something like that, and it just takes me away for a while. And like I said, different strokes for different folks that, not everybody is gonna feel that way about music.

0:35:13.8 Chris Freiman: I have heard… This is an interesting aside. I feel like this is kinda flattering to… So I don’t know. But I’ve read things that say the experience that heavy metal listeners get from listening to heavy metal is very similar to the experience the classical music fans get. And it’s… I don’t know what it is. It’s something about… Like you just… It’s the music. It’s not really the lyrics, it’s like the way it makes you feel. And so what I take from this is that Slipknot listeners are as sophisticated as like Mozart and Beethoven listeners. That makes me feel good, as someone who doesn’t really like Mozart. I know. Never saw the appeal.

0:35:52.0 Landry Ayres: Well, it’s interesting you bring that up ’cause I always thought it was odd… And I can see where people got it, but I think it’s a stereotype that metal-​heads are dirty, lazy rebels who don’t care about anything, when in reality, a majority of them want to follow after the people that they’re watching on stage and they devote themselves to highly technical, practised, art forms that are extremely precise in a classical music sense. I have played the guitar for many years, but I lapse and stuff like that, but I would not call myself musical or very technical in any sense. The people I know who play metal are like, “I sit down, I practice, I have exercises, there are techniques that I use.” It is much more organized than the reputation and aesthetics of metal might likely be or perceived as by an outsider.

0:36:52.2 William Irwin: Oh, I say, “Right on, with both of you.” I think the commonality between metal and classical, aside from the technical proficiency, is just that really it is art and not merely entertainment, right? Lots of pop music with a very loose definition of art counts as art, but it doesn’t aspire to anything higher, right? And to me, metal delivers in a way that classical generally doesn’t, aside from opera, if you count that in the classical genre, you don’t usually get lyrics, right? I mean, some leader and Schumann leader and Schubert leader and what’s… I forget who that is. You don’t really don’t get lyrics, right? And so part of what’s great with metal done… Well, with Metallica, I’m not going to speak about metal in general, is that you can take it primarily for the feeling as Chris does. Or you can couple that with the lyrics, or you can look at the lyrics separately. And to me, that’s similar to the way in which… When The Matrix first came out in the late ’90s, early 2000s, plenty of people simply enjoyed it as an action movie, and it’s fine to enjoy it as just an action movie. But you can also reflect on it and get much more out of it.

0:38:20.5 William Irwin: And as I suggested from very early on, particularly with the Ride The Lightning album, which is lyrically very well-​crafted and death-​obsessed, it spoke to me as the budding young existentialist and poet. And the lyrics are suggestive, and they’ve meant a lot. And being authored by a real person who himself has changed and developed over time, the music and the lyrics have changed and developed over time. Whereas the writers of a film series or a television show may feel an obligation to keep things true to a character or plot line or storyline or something like that, the individual artist has much more leeway and latitude. And Bob Dylan fans don’t appreciate it very much when I make the comparison, but there are comparisons to be made between Hetfield and Bob Dylan for some of the changes, and some of the fan reactions over time. And also, quite frankly, for the voice. They don’t sound alike, but neither of them has anything like a classical singing voice, and both of them have made a virtue out of the not great voice that they have, and this is what great artists can do.

0:39:53.5 Landry Ayres: What do you think the most libertarian song that Metallica has is? And your favourite. I’m just curious about your favourite. I always wanna know. And why?

0:40:03.5 William Irwin: Well, so I’ll go first, I suppose. I’ll say probably the most libertarian song that they have is Eye of the Beholder, off of… And Justice for All, which is very much… In some ways, it’s a cliff notes version of Mill’s On Liberty, it’s talking about freedom of expression, and the value of freedom of expression, even with what you disagree with, or especially with what you disagree with. That energy derives from both the plus and negatives as the lyrics go. So maybe that’s the most libertarian in the sense of really putting forward, explicitly, the virtue of liberty. There are other songs that are more expressive of individualism. You could talk about Don’t Tread on Me notoriously as capturing the non-​aggression principle or something like that. But there’s plenty to say. But if I had to pick one, particularly one that’s not a well-​known song, I’d say Eye of the Beholder, if somebody wants to check that out. And then for a personal favourite, I would just go back to Ride The Lightning, and the song that first spoke to me is Fade to Black, which is basically a suicide song, but one that manages not to catalyse despair, but instead hope. And it had that effect for me as a depressed teenager, and I know it’s had that effect for many, many other fans.

0:41:44.6 Chris Freiman: Yeah, a great question. So I don’t know… So here’s maybe a bit of a curveball for most libertarian. I might say The Unforgiven because it’s about the dangers and the harms of being deprived of freedom. I really like the lyrics and the sound of The Unforgiven, so I would recommend that to all libertarians. Favourite, that’s a tough one. I like Creeping Death, in part because it’s one of the very few Passover-​appropriate heavy metal songs. [laughter] There’s a very short list. Also, I don’t know, this is just because this song… This was just one of the songs that I would play all the time in my youth. One. It’s just awesome. That’s just an awesome song. So, yeah. So I would put those two up as some of my favourites.

0:42:43.1 Landry Ayres: Thanks for listening. As always, the best way to keep in touch with us and get more Pop & Locke content is to follow us on Twitter. You can find us at the handle @popnlockepod. That’s pop, the letter N, lock with an E like the philosopher, pod. Make sure to follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. We look forward to unravelling your favourite show or movie next time.