50. Metallica – St. Anger
In Defense of St Anger
Ladies and gentlemen, this is me bursting out of the gates guns blazing!
Choosing Metallica’s St Anger as my 50th best album of all time? I don’t know, maybe I’m subconsciously trying to establish myself as the group’s black sheep. Or it could be I’m out for attention. Because, let’s face it: I know exactly what people think of this album, the backlash it received from pretty much every forum, how badly and universally it was panned. But, like all of our lists, mine is about context, affect. My list is about me. And I love this record.
Everybody knows the Metallica story: a group of young guys break into rock, take metal mainstream and get huge. Then over time they eventually tone down, cut their hair and become predictable. See, even though this is a band who in a lot of ways created their style, once the structure was set, they never really deviated all that much—most notably in the mid-90s, when their music became its most… radio friendly.
Just for some clarification: you won’t see me talking about history too often in my reviews, but for St Anger I think you really need to. Because this is METALLICA, probably the biggest rock band of our generation, a band some might argue grew complacent and lost serious credibility with some of their later-career radio-rock diddies. But then St Anger comes along, after the fame and fortune and formula, and it does something crazy. It doesn’t attempt a “return to form,” no; it scoffs at the notion that there was ever a “form” to return to in the first place. It isolates itself, away from the fans and the expectations and the rest of its discography, and it embraces the driving-force emotion behind all art, the one thing that has spawned as many disasters as it has masterpieces: self-indulgence.
After Ben Folds got famous with FIVE he made a solo album called “Fear of Pop.” It was more of a “project,” actually, a synthy experiment in layering and studio production. It didn’t sell much (I’d bet most Folds fans don’t even know of its existence). But, he made and distributed it, and later, he was quoted saying something like, “After you’ve sold a million records, you’ve earned the right to experiment on the label’s dollar.”
Obviously Metallica has more than earned that right over the years, but St Anger isn’t about principles or experimentation for experimentation’s sake; it’s about the band reclaiming what’s theirs, and violently.
The story starts with alcoholism, rehab clinics and Metallica not producing a single shred of material in over 5 year’s time. It drags through the cliché of writer’s block and the full circle of using, then stopping, then using again. But its themes aren’t just Metallica- or artist-centered, they’re about anybody who’s ever felt stale and decided to do something about it.
“My name is George. I’m unemployed and I live with my parents.”
Sitting in the same old booth in the same old diner, surrounded by familiar faces and familiar problems, George Costanza stumbles onto an epiphany when he notices a woman checking him out: Do the opposite.
Instead of ignoring the attention and regretting it for the rest of the day like he normally would, he approaches her and in one line details just how pathetic his life currently is. And the crazy thing? It actually works. Like Costanza, Metallica understands with St Anger that breaking the rules is a necessary part of the growth process, music or otherwise. Lars’ tinny snare drum, James’ raw and straining vocals, the discord propped on top of cacophony—this album is a hard-line reaction to, even a manifestation of a lifestyle bogged down by extremes, routines, the inherent “order” or chaos. It’s a turning point, a result of the restrictions set in place that evolve over time, or maybe devolve, into its own distorted brand of structure: loneliness leads to sadness leads to pain leads to anger. And repeat. Faced with that pattern, it reacts in a way that’s both primal and real: by beating on the bars of its cell and brandishing its bloody knuckles to anyone who’ll see them.
This is a commentary I love so much maybe because of just how ballsy it is. The only way to break out of old habits and tired ways of thinking, of living, it commands, is to break out of them. Do the opposite. Trick yourself. Force what feels unnatural until it doesn’t.
Where St Anger lost so many points in the popular vote, I think, is in trying not just to represent but to actually be the act of release. Still, underneath the noise and the loud of every song on this, by far Metallica’s most experimental album, something subtle and full insight is on display. It’s a sign, an arrow pointing straight into dark and twisted woods that reads: Beauty isn’t found, it’s taken.
“Been here before, been here before, been here before…”
“If I could I have my wasted days back, would I use them to get back on track?” the opening lines of the album ask. And well, I honestly don’t think so. Because in the end, you had to have wasted enough, become base and ugly and angry enough to ever muster the courage to burn old photographs, to start a new CD collection, to throw away the end of the puzzle instead of obsessing over its final pieces. St Anger is the loud cracking sound of something lost in space finally crashing back down to earth; it’s the sky opening up before a storm to tell the world that, in a second, everything’s about to change.
I once had a writing professor in college tell me to my face that one of my essays was garbage. It was a break-up piece. She said it in professor-speak, of course, which I appreciated (“This is a piece that I think you had to write,” she told me gently), but what she meant was that the story was almost too personal, that perhaps I was still too close to the material to make it anything worth reading. And though I’m willing to admit that maybe I’m wrong about St Anger, that it could be it’s simply an album Metallica “had” to write the same as my bad break-up short, I can’t help but believe that history will be kind to it.
10, 20 years down the road, when the shock wears off and St Anger becomes Just Another album and not Metallica’s New album—who knows–maybe the pundits will find a certain value, even power, in artist’s sometimes being “too close” to their work. Nobody ever said rebirth was pretty. And in the words of the “philosopher” Dolly Parton, “You can’t have the rainbow without the rain.”
…And people say she’s just a pair of tits.
Listen:
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This entry was posted on Friday, June 4th, 2010 at 6:52 pm and is filed under cd reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
