Damage Incorporated

Metallica and the Production of Musical Identity

Glenn Pillsbury

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136091223
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

"Damage Incorporated" is the first book about the legendary heavy metal band Metallica that provides a detailed exploration of the group's music and its place within the wider popular music landscape. Written with a broad readership in mind, it offers an interdisciplinary study that incorporates a range of topics which intersect with the band's music and cultural influence. For students of popular culture, mass media, and music, "Damage Incorporated" will be necessary reading, and sets a new standard for the study and exploration of metal within the field of popular music studies.

CHAPTER 1
Thrashing All Around

Rhythm, the Body, and the Genre of Thrash Metal

[W]hat really blew our mind, the second we heard it, was that Metallica was the answer to America's prayers. They were the first band that we heard that really made America look good … they gave the American headbangers something to hang their hat on.

Jon “Johnny Z” Zazula¹

Introduction

For the New Jersey music promotion and shopkeeping team of Jon and Marsha Zazula the arrival of San Francisco-based Metallica in April 1983 may have indeed been the answer to a prayer, even if most of the rest of America had not exactly felt the need to appeal to the divine on behalf of homegrown heavy metal. The Zazula's record shop and flea market, Rock & Roll Heaven, had acquired a copy of Metallica's 1982 demo No Life ’Til Leather via the tape-trading network of the underground metal scene. Eager to expand their promotion interests, the Zazulas contacted 18-year-old drummer Lars Ulrich, wired $1,500 to him and three other young men in California, and then prayed, once more, that the band would actually make it 3,000 miles across the country without killing themselves or each other. Gigs in the New York-New Jersey area had been booked already and the band (which had recently added Cliff Burton on bass) did make it. Barely. In particular, tensions between Metallica's two guitarists, James Hetfield and Dave Mustaine, had reached an alcohol-fueled breaking point on the cross-country trek, and after only two shows on the East Coast, Mustaine was officially kicked out, sent back west to California on a Greyhound bus. At the same time Kirk Hammett, recently drafted out of another San Francisco metal band called Exodus, was quickly making his own trip east to audition as Metallica's new lead guitar player. Hammett's first gig took place exactly one week after Mustaine's last. Following two more shows, and with the band's lineup apparently settled, the Zazulas then took the biggest financial risk of their lives by bankrolling the recording of Metallica's first album, Kill ’Em All (in May 1983) and then forming Megaforce Records in order to manage the band and promote the album.

In the received history of thrash metal, the Zazula's gamble paid off exceptionally well for Metallica. For the Zazulas, the episode also turned out to be one of the high points of their professional activities in American metal. The two groups would part company in mid-1984, following the Megaforce release of Metallica's second album, Ride the Lightning. At that point the Zazula's promotion efforts proved to be so successful that Michael Alago, head of Artists & Repertoire for Elektra Records, lured away Metallica.² Unable to compete with the broad marketing reach of Elektra (or those of the band's new management company, Q-Prime), Megaforce stood little chance of retaining any business association with Metallica. In the face of sticking with a financially troubled independent label (even with the close personal ties that went along with it), the band consciously decided to make a move into the burgeoning major-label metal market and tap into resources that would enable its commercial visibility to expand far beyond its already impressive underground status.³ Metallica's decision was ultimately a business one, and would be its most significant career decision until the preproduction for the Metallica album at the end of the decade aimed, in part, to give their music a broader commercial appeal. For not the last time, moreover, accusations of “selling out” accompanied the label and management decision.

The intense commercial activity surrounding Metallica during 1983 and 1984 offers an illuminating nexus in the discussion of popular music and identity. Intertwined are the emotional impact of heavy and powerful music played to an enthusiastic audience and the desires of a range of individuals to capitalize on that enthusiasm for mutual monetary gain. Moreover, the arrangement with Elektra promised to give the band an unusual amount of authority over the artistic content being released in their name.⁴ In other words, Elektra would not force the band to change its writing and recording habits by insisting on a company-chosen producer or company-hired songwriting help. At the same time, the arrangement enabled Metallica to appear as though it was separate from the industrial machinations that seemed to create pop metal bands, even though their relationship with Elektra—also home of Mötley Crüe and Dokken, two of the most successful pop metal bands during the 1980s—meant the band was ensconced in it to some degree.⁵

This chapter investigates some of the details of the music known as thrash metal. I focus, of course, on songs by Metallica, but my aim is neither merely to draw a picture or take a snapshot of the genre, nor to somehow write the book on thrash metal. Rather, I spend this chapter investigating not the question “what is thrash metal?” but the more provocative and compelling “why does thrash metal do what it does?” The “what” answers, which those unfamiliar with the music might seek, are hopefully contained within the “why” question, but the “why” questions enable answers with potentially more significance for projects not directly related to Metallica. The sound and musical techniques of thrash metal have been little studied by popular music scholars, and while the style has been examined as part of heavy metal (in general), a detailed investigation of how thrash metal's characteristics are finely deployed provides an important contribution to the study of many issues in popular music studies.

The Genre of Thrash Metal

Formed in late 1981, Metallica emerged as perhaps the single most important group of a heavy metal underground during the 1980s, a musical style variously labeled “thrash metal,” “speed metal,” and (later in the decade) even “death metal.” Based on their reworkings of British metal groups such as Diamond Head, Iron Maiden, and Motörhead, Metallica is usually credited with inventing the thrash metal genre during 1982 and throughout 1983, a process that culminated commercially with the release of Kill ’Em All in July 1983. Throughout the 1980s many thrash metal groups followed, taking the sounds of Kill ’Em All as an important model and developing the particular aesthetic of shock and intensity that parents' groups would eventually understand as genuine celebrations of violence, mayhem, and Satan worship.

However, when we study the history of genres, we can best look for beginnings rather than origins, as different conversations wherein people come and go, where certain things jump out of previous conversations to be re-articulated in others. Within those conversations the details and elements of a genre regulate the exchange of meanings. In popular music generally, and within genres specifically, Robert Walser notes that “subject positions are constructed and negotiated, social relations are enacted and transgressed, and ideologies are developed and interrogated.”⁶ Many of these ideas also occur in discussion of literary genres. Russian literary critic and theorist Mikhail Bahktin, writing in the first half of the twentieth century about the nineteenth-century Russian novel, states that language is, at its core, “heteroglot,” meaning that it is the product of multiple—but still historically specific—individuals reflecting multiple identities:

[L]anguage is heteroglot from top to bottom: it represents the coexistence of socio-ideological contradictions between the present and the past, between differing epochs of the past, between different socio-ideological groups in the present, between tendencies, schools, circles and so forth, all given a bodily form.⁷

While the assessment of Metallica's heraldic position is an interesting one in light of the band's great success in later years, Bahktin's ideas dispute the claims that genres are ever fully invented. Rather, as part of larger cultural conversations musical syntaxes become reconfigured, with certain parts emphasized over others. Furthermore, the crucial elements of recognition and response among the participants must be present for any reconfigurations to have meaning. In the case of the thrash metal genre, then, we might clarify the above and say that Metallica drew on the multisectional song structures of New Wave of British Heavy Metal (NWOBHM) groups such as Diamond Head and Venom, foregrounding the speed, the particular harmonic language emphasizing tritones and flatted seconds, dark, fantastic lyrical imagery, and the celebration of a metal musical-cultural identity quite opposed to the glam metal scene in Los Angeles.⁸ Throughout the 1980s, numerous bands joined the conversation, notably Mega-deth, Slayer, and Anthrax, and each offered further reconfigurations. For instance, Slayer placed less emphasis on the notion of multisection song structures in favor of even more breathtaking speed, even more shocking lyrics, and wildly chaotic guitar solos, while Megadeth's early music focused largely on Dave Mustaine's lead guitar skills.

Moreover, 1983 might be thought of as the origins of a thrash metal “school” simply because some of the most successful bands associated with the style released their first albums that year.⁹ In the intersection of commerce and creativity, and due to the necessity of historically situated individuals for the production of musical meaning, the application of the thrash metal label to the 1983 albums represents the distillation of broad notions of musical identity into a linguistic expression. The large-scale commercial infrastructures of the record label system are of course not the sole means by which generic conventions are expanded to new participants, but neither is the label system insignificant in that regard. The understanding of Metallica (or Slayer, or the other 1983 bands) as representative of something called thrash metal took place after Kill ’Em All had come out.

By many accounts, thrash metal was not a term used to describe the 1983 bunch before they had connected with record labels, nor did the bands use it in their own promotion efforts.¹⁰ Indeed, Metallica's 1982 business card used the term “power metal” to describe the band, but even that label did not amount to much importance. Accounts of early 1980s metal musicians and fans consistently acknowledge the appearance of the term thrash metal as occurring after they had heard the 1983 bands on purchased recordings and read about them in metal fanzines and other publications. It was in this way that the institutionalization of thrash metal and its application to Metallica's music largely took place. Such a sociolinguistic pattern was not unique to thrash metal, but it does help illustrate part of the dynamic interplay between musical expression and cultural meaning. Thus, while 1983 makes for a tidy origin for thrash metal, it overlooks the complexities of individual identities as well as the complex processes by which meanings are incorporated into new situations. Why, though, is the term thrash metal attached specifically to the 1983 moment? If sheer speed represented the most obvious and remarkable characteristic of the music, what was the difference between up-tempo metal from the late 1970s (for instance) and up-tempo metal from 1983 onwards? When does speedy metal not automatically constitute a distinct generic type called thrash metal? Where do the beginnings lie, and what kinds of utterances and subject positions become reconstituted in order to mark the beginning of a different set of conversations?

The primary musical difference lies in the consistent treatment of tempo in a rhythmically intense manner and as a distinctly aggressive musical element. The speed of thrash metal in the early 1980s was also a reconfiguration of the sonic transgression from two other sources: American hardcore punk bands such as Black Flag, Dead Kennedys, Misfits, and TSOL; and the British metal bands Venom and Motörhead. The relationship between American hardcore and thrash metal was complex, but a large degree of aesthetic influence projected outward from hardcore toward metal in the first half of the 1980s. Indeed, thrash metal giants Slayer and Anthrax (as well as Metal Church) were organized in 1982 by guitarists who had begun their performance careers in otherwise unsuccessful hardcore bands. The frenetic pace of hardcore, driven by loud rock instrumentation and a high-pitched distorted vocal style, stood as perhaps the most direct sonic link between the two styles. Thrash metal also drew on a similar suburban working class audience that characterized the hardcore scenes in Orange County, CA and San Francisco. Moreover, it imported hardcore's mosh pits and its image of independent Do It Yourself (DIY) values.¹¹ Still, though they shared a common interest in presenting extreme transgression, individual musicians could also be (and were) adamant about either a hardcore or metal identity. Thus, thrash metal's ultimate musical divergence from hardcore involved a conscious move to write more musically involved songs, as well as to embrace some amount of individual virtuosity. Frenetic tempi, according to the early thrash aesthetic, occupied only one element (to be sure, a significant one) of the ideal musical picture.

Lyrically, too, thrash metal musicians were much less ardent in their politics than most hardcore bands, preferring instead to derive their images of power from other sources. To thrash fans and musicians, hardcore seemed too preachy, too concerned about getting a “message” across (and usually a Leftist one at that), and perhaps too real. Dead Kennedys's “California Über Alles” (1980), for instance, opens with the lines “I am Governor Jerry Brown / My aura smiles and never frowns / Soon I will be President …” and exemplifies the potential for a kind of seriocomic critique largely jettisoned by thrash (even while the underlying harmonic language of these lyrics, with its rhythmic articulation of the tonic chord and reliance on a quasi-Phrygian tension in the riff, could comfortably be found a few years later in thrash metal¹²). Thrash metal ultimately came to present a politics of its own, indeed one that shared some common sociological roots and inquiries with hardcore. As will be discussed in Chapter 3, thrash metal lyrics later in the decade would question injustices related to industrial capitalism, warfare, the environment, as well as the issue of social control. But thrash metal's initial answers to questions of broader social relevance rarely revolved around music as the means for political commentary or direct sociopolitical change. Instead, thrash metal focused on the elevation of the individual, rather than a united underclass of “kids” (represented by bands), as the agent of social struggle. Indeed, its notable reliance on imagery drawn from fantasy and the occult provided the palette for thrash metal's representation of the triumph of the individual.

From Motörh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Thrashing All Around: Rhythm, the Body, and the Genre of Thrash Metal
• Chapter 2 Death Greets Me Warm: The Fade to Black Paradigm
• Chapter 3 Thinking-Man's Metal: Whiteness, Detachment, and the Performance of Musical Complexity
• Chapter 4 The Road and the Mode: Musical Tourism and Ethnicity Roaming
• Chapter 5 Shape Shift, Mutiny in the Air: The Sell-Out Question and Popular Music Histories
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Selected Discography
• Selected Bibliography
• Song Lyric Permissions
• Index