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The singular metal genius of Metallica.
CAPTION: “Metallica are the Marines of metal,” Scott Ian, of Anthrax, said. “First one in, last one out.” The band recently finished writing and recording its eleventh album. IMAGE CREDIT: Photograph by Ian Allen for The New Yorker
CAPTION: Lars Ulrich’s drum set. From the start, Metallica refused to capitulate, stylistically or otherwise, to anything around it. IMAGE CREDIT: Photograph by Ian Allen for The New Yorker
The merch preceded them. Forty-eight hours before Metallica performed in Las Vegas, restaurants and bars along the Strip were crammed full of pilgrims dressed in branded gear: T-shirts, jerseys, sweatshirts, sneakers, tank tops, hats, beanies, socks, wristwatches. The most grizzled devotees wore fraying denim vests decorated with several decades’ worth of patches. Metallica’s licensing team estimates that about a hundred and twenty million Metallica T-shirts have been sold since 1995. The motifs are iconic. There’s the one where a hand clutching a dagger emerges from a toilet, alongside the phrase “Metal Up Your Ass.” There’s the one where a skull is wearing scrubs and performing brain surgery with a fork, a knife, and its fangs. There’s the one where the skull has a fistful of stumpy straws and is announcing, “This shortest straw has been pulled for you!” You get the idea.
Metallica is now in its forty-first year. The band was a progenitor, along with Slayer, Anthrax, and Megadeth, of thrash, a subgenre of heavy metal marked by thick, suffocating riffs, played with astonishing speed. Lyrical themes include death, despair, power, grief, and wrath. Though metal is often dismissed as underground music—frantic, savage, niche—Metallica has sold some hundred and twenty-five million records to date, putting the band on par, commercially, with Bruce Springsteen and Jay-Z. It is the only musical group to have performed on all seven continents in a single calendar year. (In 2013, Metallica played a ten-song set in Antarctica for a group of research scientists and contest winners; because of the fragile ice formations, the band’s amplifiers were placed in isolation cabinets, and the concert was broadcast through headphones.) Since 1990, every Metallica album has débuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200.
In 2009, Metallica was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. A speech...