The Album About Death
Gave New Life to a Generation
Forget not judging a book by its cover. It is 1984. My brother Danny and I, budding baby metalheads fresh off Van Halen’s 1984 and Mötley Crüe’s Shout at the Devil, purchase a new cassette. It costs all of the money we have, put together. We buy it based on the cover art alone. It depicts an electric chair, flying in the night sky, in an electrical storm. It is called Ride the Lightning, and it looks awesome. The band name, Metallica, is also awesome. In retrospect, the best band name is Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem, but it doesn’t count. Right now, the best band name is Metallica.
How, aside from the cover, are we to judge? Look online? The Internet was barely a gleam in Al Gore’s eye. Just the year before, Twisted Sister’s Dee Snider was busy roasting Gore at the Senate hearing on obscene song lyrics, thanks to the Parents’ Music Resource Center (PMRC), not coincidently led by Gore’s then-wife, Tipper. Friends’ recommendations? We are 13 and 11 years old. No one we know listens to heavy metal, not yet. Certainly no one we know has heard of Metallica. The radio? The radio never plays Metallica, or anything even close. So we buy Ride the Lightning based on the cover. It isn’t a book, anyway,
Forty years later, celebrating the anniversary of Ride the Lightning on 27 July 1984, Metallica are the biggest heavy metal band in the world, arguably the biggest heavy metal band of all time. It seems inevitable now.
It was not.
Not only was it not inevitable; it is something of a miracle, a testimony not just to Metallica’s musical brilliance, and their work, but to cultural shifts that 13-year-old me could not have imagined.
Danny and I popped the cassette into our gray plastic boombox, at the time the only means to listen to music. I will never forget the feeling. The opening of the first track, “Fight Fire with Fire”, lulls us in with a major key, lush guitar intro—the calm before the electrical storm. And then. This was not like Van Halen or Mötley Crüe, or any of the so-called metal we watched on Friday Night Videos. It was like an assault, if assaults could, somehow, feel amazing. The guitar was SO HEAVY. The vocal, SO GUTTERAL. The snare drum, going WHAP WHAP WHAP WHAP—reveling in the violence implicit in the word “beat”. All in unison. The song is exhausting, but also thrilling, and it feels utterly new.
We listen to the rest of the track with our jaws on the floor, as it cycles through more brutality, sweetness in the guitar solos, the rapid, rabid 16th-note double-bass drum rhythm unrelenting, until the song’s final guitar dive bomb—borrowed from Jimi Hendrix’s rendition of the National Anthem—leads into, not just the bombs bursting in air, but atomic extinction. It is not hyperbole to say that our lives would never be the same. This must have been what it was like to watch Hamlet performed in 1600 or view Picasso’s “Guernica” in 1937.
At the time, we thought we were alone, that we had discovered this phenomenon ourselves. It turns out that millions of other loners found Metallica alone together. We were hearing history, and making history by hearing it. Ride the lightning indeed.
It is hard, even now, for me to reconcile that ruthless sound, the technical, visceral bombshell of Ride the Lightning, with a band that have sold more than 125 million albums worldwide. But even as early as 1996, when Metallica were invited to headline Lollapalooza, alternative rock fans of the previous iterations already felt that Metallica were too mainstream, too male, too metal for them. Some of the early fans lamented that Metallica themselves had moved to the middle of the road with their self-titled Metallica album—better known as the Black Album—in 1991.
But I think it was just the opposite—the mainstream moved to Metallica. How else to explain the popularity of a group that specializes in, maybe invented, the concept-but-not-a-concept-album album? Following Ride the Lightning, Master of Puppets (1986) tackles the fear of a young person being manipulated—used to great effect decades later, in 2022, for “Stranger Things”, in a season precisely about young people being manipulated. …And Justice for All (1988) explores loss of liberty, just as the word “liberty” is elided by ellipses in its title.
The concept-but-not-a-concept-album concept of Ride the Lightning is, of course, death. But not just death: being unwittingly killed, dying outside of one’s control. That might seem like a lot for then-13-year-old me, but it was, of all things, comforting. I listened to Ride the Lightning’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls”, its title and concept borrowed from Ernest Hemingway, the same year I read A Farewell to Arms in English class. I would not truly understand the novel until I reread it a decade later, but I immediately understood Metallica.
At the same time, like literary authors, Metallica were doing something worth analyzing, something beyond what I even thought I understood. Yes, they were singing about death—the cartoon skulls and swords I doodled in my notebooks rendered sonically. But they were also singing about life. I think I intuitively knew that, too, and maybe they were doing something closer to literature than I thought. Maybe I was judging a book, and not just an album, by its cover after all.
Everyone’s death is, of course, outside one’s control, even suicide, as the record would explore. Dying is always, ever, unwitting. But it’s worth recapping the album to appreciate its generous, catholic approach to dying. Consider the track list:
- “Fight Fire with Fire”: death by nuclear war. Lyric: “We all shall die.”
- “Ride the Lightning”: death by capital punishment, via electrocution. “Death in the air, strapped in the electric chair / This can’t be happening to me.”
- “For Whom the Bell Tolls”: a soldier’s death in war. “Take a look to the sky just before you die / It’s the last time you will.”
- “Fade to Black”: death by suicide; more below.
- “Trapped Under Ice”: a metaphor for guilt? “Ice” as a slang term for crystal meth? I… don’t think there’s a metaphor here. “I am dying to live / Cry out / I’m trapped under ice.” Death by… being trapped under ice.
- “Escape”: the exception! Not death, but life! “Life is for my own to live my own way.” James Hetfield hates it.
- “Creeping Death”: death by plague sent by God. “Die by my hand / I creep across the land / Killing first born man.” It’s closer to the movie The Ten Commandments than Exodus, but that’s because Kirk Hammett left Exodus. [rimshot]
- “The Call of Ktulu”: an instrumental, but the title comes from H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu,” a horror story about an ancient, slumbering squid/god/monster that will drive everyone insane when it awakens. I suppose Metallica weren’t satisfied with a mere instrumental, because Master of Puppets would go on to include “The Thing That Should Not Be,” a proper Lovecraft adaptation, including a paraphrase from the story itself: “Not dead which eternal lie / Stranger eons death may die!”
Forty years later, “Fade to Black” remains the standout. It is in keeping with Ride the Lightning‘s death motif, but, as a mediation on suicide, it’s different. It sounds different, the closest Metallica had at that point come to a ballad, with its initial slower tempo, clean guitars, and smooth vocal performance. But it is not a ballad. It is not romantic or sentimental. Just the opposite—it is stripped of romanticism and sentimentalism. The title, never uttered (but eventually sung in “The Memory Remains”, in 1997), refers to the gradual decrease in lighting, until there is no lighting left, first primarily associated with stage plays and then adapted by film as a transition. Ride the lighting.
As a metaphor, at first glance it feels more appropriate for growing old than for suicide, the inferior “fade away” half of Neil Young’s line, “It’s better to burn out than fade away” from “Hey Hey, My My”. Kurt Cobain would go on to quote that line in his own suicide note, but not with the emphasis on “fade away”, since he did not.
Yet, as a metaphor of suicide, the slow “fade” may be more powerful, and more apt, than the quick “burn out”, clarified by “Fade to Black’s” opening lines: “Life, it seems, will fade away / Drifting further, every day.” Forget the most famous literary ode to suicide, Hamlet’s dichotomy of “to be or not to be”. “Fade to Black” deconstructs its binary simplicity. The on/off of “or” is replaced by a dimmer switch. One thing, life, to be, becomes the other, death, not to be, painfully, slowly, as the lights reduce gradually on the stage. Fade to black does not represent the pain of death. It is worse. It represents the pain of life. As philosopher Albert Camus famously opens his treatise “The Myth of Sisyphus” (1942), “’There is but one serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.” Even for heavy metal, that’s a little dark.
Yet Camus continues, “Living, naturally, is never easy. You continue making the gestures commanded by existence, for many reasons, the first of which is habit. Dying voluntarily implies that you have recognized, even instinctively, the ridiculous character of that habit, the absence of any profound reason for living, the insane character of that daily agitation, and the uselessness of suffering.”
“Fade to Black’s” first verse continues along simpler yet similar lines: “Getting lost within myself / Nothing matters, no one else / I have lost the will to live / Simply nothing more to give / There is nothing more for me / Need the end to set me free.”
The pretense of poetry drops. All that is left is plaintive statement, which, in many ways, is more powerful than the artifice of poesy or even philosophy. In retrospect, it is easy, and tempting, to see what some adults in the 1980s were concerned about.
Yet, one small, easily overlooked phrase, an aside between commas on the page but rushed breathlessly together, like one word, in Hetfield’s vocal delivery, is “it seems”, in that opening line, “Life, it seems, will fade away.” Not “Life will fade away”. “Fade to Black” is not a suicide. Even if the lyrics dispense with metaphor, the song itself is a metaphor, a representation, a substitution. The song itself replaces the would-be suicide. Poet Wallace Stevens wrote, “Let be be finale of seem. / The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream” in “The Emperor of Ice-Cream” (1922). “Be” and “seem” are both linking verbs, but their significance is crucially different. “Be”—reality—is the ultimate form of what might be—“seem.”
Like Metallica, Stevens is also talking about death, and alluding to Hamlet’s line to Claudius about everyone’s eventual fate as food for worms. But Stevens also wants us to enjoy life, to eat the ice cream, even though, like ice cream, life can be cold, and easily melts away. Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid” ends in the same way: “I tell you to enjoy life / I wish I could, but it’s too late.” That the line was misheard as “end your life” is as alarming as it is ironic. Maybe “Escape’s” call to life is not the exception after all.
While one could see suicide as taking control of one’s life and death, I see it in keeping with the other tracks of Ride the Lightning, another example of death that is outside of one’s own control, like war or capital punishment. And Hetfield did not commit suicide in any case. He wrote a song.
In addition to revisiting the idea in “The Memory Remains”, the opening verse’s “Nothing matters” would resurface in “Nothing Else Matters”, but with the opposite sentiment. Here, Hetfield is practically channeling philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre: “I never opened myself this way / Life is ours, we live it our way / All these words, I don’t just say / And nothing else matters.”
“Nothing matters” could be nihilistic, a prelude to suicidal ideation. But it can equally become the basis for Existentialism’s radical freedom, the idea that, if nothing matters, then we can do whatever we want. And, in keeping, we are responsible for whatever we do. Adding “else” suggests, in fact, that something is powerfully important after all.
Even Camus didn’t end The Myth of Sisyphus with suicide. His ending is even more famous than his opening: “The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” The last line has become a punchline for today’s philosophy memelords. But for Camus, it was deadly serious.
For all the death—imagined in the songs, and sadly real, just two years later, for Metallica bassist Cliff Burton, who died in a freak bus accident during the Master of Puppets tour—one must imagine Metallica happy as well. For all their loud mediations about death, Metallica have brought tremendous life to the world. Their distorted, discordant, often dissonant music about violence, war, and suicide certainly brought joy to me and Danny, and, unbeknownst to us, millions of other kids who took a chance on an album with a flying electric chair on its cover. Danny even met James Hetfield last year. In Danny’s delight, it was like no time had passed. Ride the Lighting, now, does not just represent an electric chair. It is also a time machine. The best art always is.
This essay is partially adapted from Jesse Kavadlo’s book in progress about reading 1980s heavy metal as literature.