When I first started college, everyone and their mother seemed to be putting out a Metallica cover. From those I followed on Spotify: St. Vincent, Cage the Elephant, Royal Blood. The first two or three I shrugged off as a funny coincidence. A couple more and I began to figure something was up.
It was September 2021, thirty years after the release of Metallica's eponymous "Black Album," and that fall I sat down to listen to the band's first release since I started listening to them: The Metallica Blacklist, a compilation of fifty-three covers to commemorate the anniversary of the album that launched metal into the mainstream.
When a band releases a self-titled album, it's a manifesto, a declaration of "This is who we are." Some bands debut with their opus eponymous. Others drop it midway through their discography, a pivot point, a clean slate to announce their new identity going forward. Metallica is an example of the latter.
By 1991, Metallica had toured internationally, won a Grammy, founded an entire metal subgenre through an iconic four-album run that only got more vicious and virtuosic. If they stopped there, the thrash kings could have lived the rest of their lives on royalties alone. But they didn't. After concluding their tour for ...And Justice For All, (people got bored - find that quote where someone says they never want to play ...Justice ever again). Metallica hit the studio for their fifth album
The idea for The Metallica Blacklist came from Metallica management's "Chief Creative Guy" Marc Reiter, who was thinking about how to expand Metallica's reach beyond simply remastering their 1991 tapes. The band was all in. Metallica themselves selected some of the contributing artists—which ones, I never leaned, though I suspect they had a hand in inviting Ghost, St. Vincent, and The Hu—while other contributors were new names to the band, and even new to the band's discography themselves.
One of the biggest critiques of the Blacklist was its imbalance. Metallica allowed artists to choose which song on The Black Album they would cover, so naturally artists whose primarily fanbase weren't metalheads would choose Metallica's most recognized song. (But really, Ghost? You couldn't have gone for a deeper cut?) Every song on the Black Album received its dues eventually—but it was a close call. "Of Wolf and Man" and "The Struggle Within" received only one cover each, while their power ballad "Nothing Else Matters" is the most overrepresented song on the record by a long shot.
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In 1991, with an average age of twenty-seven, the boys of Metallica were surprised to see parents and middle-agers among their headbanging audience. But come to a show now and this age range is the norm.
The Blacklist, however, is heavy with Millennials: those born between 1981 and 1996. If Metallica was a person, it too would be a millennial---the band was founded in 1981. During this time span, Metallica released an album on average every two to three years. The eighties were especially prolific: while in their late teens and early twenties, they released Kill 'Em All, Ride the Lightning, Master of Puppets, and ...And Justice For All, regarded as seminal metal records today.
Millennial babies grew up in the aftermath of Metallica's ascent: rather than from underground clubs and snail mail tape trades, they discovered Metallica through MTV, rock radio, their older siblings' disc collections, video games like Guitar Hero. Some of Metallica's most iconic albums are their age.
Chart showing year Millennials were born vs. Metallica albums
It is often---but not always---the case that younger artists make for younger audiences. Metallica was born at the tail-end of the Boomer years, but they grew up hypnotized by a completely different type of music from the Beatlemania that defined their generation. Today, they are cited as a fundamental track in the mixtape of Generation X.
It's hard to quantify the demographics of an artist's fanbase---even Metallica doesn't have a census a la BTS---but EveryNoise at least tracks the age and gender distribution of music genres. Here's how the Blacklist stacks up.
Chart showing average age of each genre on the Blacklist
Does anybody else have no fucking idea who 95% of the artists on The Blacklist album are?!
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The Metallica Blacklist is a study in what makes a good cover---a question that is deeply subjective and individual, hotly debated in the reception of this album. I parsed through ten professional reviews of The Metallica Blacklist to quantify which tracks were the most well-received, adding up the number of positive or neutral mentions per track and subtracting the negative mentions to arrive at a final score.
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COMPOSITION: Did a structural element of the cover stand out?
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INTERPRETATION: Emotion
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REPUTATION:
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MEMORABILITY: Even if the reviewer left no other editorial, was the piece memorable enough to have been mentioned at all?
Unsurprisingly, Miley Cyrus's Nothing Else Matters beats the rest by a long shot---the high-profile byline sure drives up Pitchfork's engagement---but I was disappointed that one of my favorite songs, Imelda May's "The God that Failed," went unnoticed by popular outlets. But which is the better cover? I'll let you decide for yourself.
So, I mentioned at the beginning that I've only been a Metallica megafan for a couple of years.
I've at least been familiar with the Black Album since high school. But I think I can pinpoint the exact moment when Metallica lured me into the snakepit once and for all: in 2022, Stranger Things Season 4 released on Netflix, and though I never watched the series, I came across their Instagram post months later showing James Hetfield decked out as Eddie Munson for Halloween.
At this point I'd been into Queen, Nirvana, Guns N' Roses, Van Halen. I knew the snobbery with which some die-hard fans spoke of people my age who liked rock music: everyone's wearing a Nirvana shirt nowadays. Did you know the smiley is a band, not a brand? Can you name three songs? It doesn't count if it's from a movie. The same thing had been happening to Metallica for years, recently resurging with Eddie Munson's upside-down solo. The band was having none of it.
In response to a TikTok comment bemoaning Metallica's new "Stranger Things fake fans," the band clapped back: "FYI – EVERYONE is welcome in the Metallica Family. Whether you’ve been a fan for 40 hours or 40 years, we all share a bond through music. All of you started at ground zero at one point in time."
"You know what?" I said. "Respect. I should listen to more Metallica."
I put on Master of Puppets and never looked back.