Meditation Fart Hut — Papa’s Basement 506
To me, meditation is like Communism: Interesting in theory, Hell in practice. I mean, who can stand to sit in the stink of their own awfulness without chasing it away […]
Metallica released a new single – its first in I believe eight years (I ain’t looking that shit up to confirm) – the other day. And it rocks. And I couldn’t be happier.
It’s been so long since I’ve cared about this band that very few of you know this, but from 5th through 8th grade, my love of Metallica transcended all fandom. To me, it was religion. Every day, I wore one of my 11 Metallica shirts to school (my wardrobe had less variety than Beavis’s – at least he wore a Slayer shirt once), carved their logo into my desk hundreds of times, and bumped one of their tapes from my walkman countless hours per day. I purchased every Metallica single, every Metallica bootleg, every magazine that featured them in any way.
People say that no white person can understand what it is to be black and called the n-word. I beg to differ, because if anyone said Metallica sucked in my presence, whether it was words or fists, something was coming at their face and fast (maybe my jizz if they played their cards right, wakka wakka!). Yes, there were other acts I listened to, but Metallica was the Louis CK of their world: Clearly the top dog, and you were being a nitpicking twat if you disagreed.
Then, it all went horribly wrong. In 1996, Metallica released Load. To describe that album as I would have when I first heard it, everything was bad about it and nothing was good about it. Gone were the speed, the anger, the balls. The album’s cover depicted a bunch of blood mixed with a literal load. Guitarist Kirk Hammett and drummer Lars Ulrich had ditched bandolier belts for enough eye shadow to make Robert Smith scream “FAAAAAAAGS!” at them across the lunchroom before beating their asses. They even ditched the logo I had mastered drawing backwards and blindfolded for this piece of shit.
Most normal people encounter their first heartbreak when their first boyfriend or girlfriend is caught making fingerbang with someone else under the bleachers: My heart died its first death when Metallica decided they had enough being gods to smelly little metalhead puberts like myself and instead wanted to court the alternative audience. I took off my Metallica shirt that day like a man traded by the team that he loved, battered and broken. And, while I have explored countless musical acts in the intervening years, in terms of blind, fervent devotion, nothing was ever equal to my love of Metallica.
And then, a funny thing happened: Much like a porn star who explored acting or singing with zero success only to realize years later that, what they were truly good at, how they made people happiest, was taking a dick on screen, Metallica decided, “Fuck it…let’s be heavy again.”
The resulting track, “Hardwired,” is the aural equivalent of a 1996 Jenna Jameson getting spit roasted while giving a wink and a thumbs up to the camera, the band existentially aware that they are doing exactly what they are supposed to do. T.S. Eliot once wrote, “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” Thankfully, it looks like Metallica has arrived where they started. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have 11 shirts to go dig out of storage.
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