James Hetfield sing-grunts the phrase “bitch” six instances on “Ain’t My Bitch,” the comically distasteful opening observe off Metallica’s 1996 album Load, taking nice pains to by no means pronounce it the identical means twice. Within the first refrain it’s “biiiiii-tchah” plus a sort of “beeyotch…ohhhhh,” whereas within the second refrain he goes “betch-yah,” then “beyaaaaatch,” adopted by “biiiiiiiihiiiiiiitch-no-it-ain’t-mine,” and at last, a single, gleeful, guttural “OOH!” adopted by a phrase that feels like a mix of “BINCH!” and “BELCH!” on the outro. It’s this sort of psychotic consideration to fully pointless element that helped Metallica set up themselves because the progenitors of a very brutal model of thrash all through the Nineteen Eighties, in addition to spend the mid-’90s and early 2000s simply as adeptly dismantling virtually each iota of that goodwill. Metallica had been iconoclasts, waging perpetual conflict in opposition to eardrums, the music business, their friends, and even their very own members. And with Load, there’s greater than a bit of reality to the notion that the band had discovered a brand new goal for ire: its personal followers. It’s the sluggish album, the sellout transfer, the exhausting rock report whose packaging was plagued by deliberate provocations. And now, there’s extra of it than ever.
“All preconceived and preexisting concepts of who we’re and what we’ve carried out are at some extent proper now the place we’re standing at an enormous potential level of rebirth,” declared Lars Ulrich in an interview with the official Metallica fan membership journal main as much as the unique album, which seems within the 128-page ebook accompanying the field set version of Load’s current reissue. The truth that Ulrich’s assertion is a bit of incoherent is an ideal encapsulation of how, by the mid-’90s, Metallica had been actually going for one thing, however nobody, together with them, was precisely positive what that one thing was. They’d scrapped their authentic, unfathomably cool brand for one thing blandly fashionable, the spiky typographical thrives on the M and A of the unique sanded off in favor of a sans serif containing solely a touch of the hazard. They bought haircuts, stylish ones, which for causes too convoluted to get into, infuriated their fanbase.
The drastic visible rebrand inadvertently primed Metallica’s viewers for the sound of Load itself, which forged off even the barest vestiges of their thrash previous and was as a substitute chock-full of unsettlingly lumbering riffs, boogie-woogie-oogie solos, discuss field fart sounds, spoken phrase drivel, a heavy Skynyrd affect, and even a straight-up nation music. Load’s cowl picture, a pre-existing work by the conceptual artist Andres Serrano, has been learn as a provocative response to society’s newfound paranoia concerning the physique and its features amid the AIDS disaster, or maybe an train in intermingling symbols of life and loss of life, creativity and decay. It is usually, textually, an image of blood intermingling with jizz. Such is the duality of Metallica, a band who even and maybe particularly at their finest walked the fantastic line between totalizing brilliance and knuckle-dragging brutality.
