Here's a new idea: playing rock music is not a right everyone has. Rock music is the music of alienated youth. It is the music of rebellion, frustration, anger and passion. It is not music that middle-aged multi-millionaires who are privileged beyond imagining should be allowed to play. They should be banned from playing it. Maybe they should have parts of their anatomy broken once they achieve a particular net worth to prevent them from churning out the shit they inevitably will once all the money and adulation has flooded in and extinguished the fires of rock that burned within.
The reason for this idle speculation is that I watched "Some Kind of Monster" last night. If you haven't seen it "SKOM" is a documentary filmed over the painfully long time that it took Metallica to make their last, and shittest, album ("St Anger").
As the film opens they have just parted ways with their bassist and one of the first scenes shows the remaining three band members (Lars Ulrich, James Hetfield and Kirk Hammett) sat around involved in some kind of therapy with a highly-paid professional bullshit-talking shyster aka a psychotherapist called Phil. Everything Phil says is pure motherfucking horseshit. But then so is almost everything the three remaining band-members say. Phil just talks and talks and I don't think any of what he says actually means anything. There is a great sequence later in the film when Phil goes around putting up 'inspirational' notices in the studio. Stuff like "The Zone - Admission is Believing". Pop pysch bullshit galore. It turns my stomach because I am a man to whom words are a means of conveying ideas and to use them as Phil and every self-help American twat does without expressing any fucking thing whatsoever, indeed, to obfuscate and confuse, is a getting-burnt-at-the-stake crime in my eyes. Phil is to all intents and purposes one of the band throughout the two years it takes these pathetic fucks to record their shit album. When they finally tell him they want to end his contract with them he turns the knife in them and goes on about trust issues and stuff like that to make them feel guilty. He is a total leech who says nothing sensible throughout and as such is a great and living symbol of the entire self-help pop psych community of charlatan motherfuckers.
The band themselves are pretty pathetic. Of the lot Kirk Hammett is perhaps the most sympathetic. He is a total airhead and has almost nothing of note to say but at least he seems pretty good-natured and inoffensive. James Hetfield is a pathetically self-obsessed twat. He goes off to rehab midway through the film but he doesn't even seem to have a problem. He is much the same twat before and after. Lars Ulrich is the archetypal control freak. He has a very annoying voice and is extremely pretentious and arrogant. They are all generally pretty humourless. Apart from a brief moment when they have to do a bullshit radio promo they don't ever seem to laugh or have any fun, and this film is shot over almost two years which makes you wonder why these fuckers actually stay together. Hanging around these guys isn't much fun. They are constantly dwelling on what might be wrong (JH cites "abandonment issues" at one particularly pathetic moment) and acting like humourless egomaniacs. They are pathetically neurotic privileged people. They seem to have nothing to moan about, apart from the fact that life is so goddamn easy but yet they act like they are facing the end of the world. What if they really had to deal with something real, like cancer? It is only briefly, and so shrouded in the pop psych horseshit they are spouting that it is easy to miss, that they stumble towards what might actually be the problem - the fact that none of them has any desire to continue. Being one of the biggest metal acts on the planet has become a dull dull routine (which, if you are unlucky enough to have heard St Anger, you will understand).
The film does the same kind of thing as Spinal Tap, in terms of satirising rockstar lifestyle, except this is all for real. There are the usual rockstar excesses of massive art collections (Lars Ulrich's best piece of crit on his own Basquiat is "Fuck, isn't it just awwwesome? I mean, fuck"); fast cars; rehab; mass egotism; bear-killing (man stuff); motorbikes; ranching. It is Spinal Tap but without any jokes.
The painful thing is that they hardly ever show any passion for what they are doing - it is just routine and only very briefly do they face up to that. That is clearly the core of their listlessness. They are playing the same music they wrote when they were twenty years younger and twenty years hungrier and it just doesn't make the slightest bit of sense anymore. When they started they were the outsiders but nowadays they are The Man - they are The Industry (as demonstrated by Lars' involvement in the case against Napster). Even the time they spend with fans is carefully choreographed into a "Fans Appreciation Day" - how fucking corporate is that? Then there's the Radio Promo. It might be a cliché but rock music is meant to be a genre characterised by rebellion. But, like rap/hip-hop, big business has moved in and turned the whole thing into a shallow parody of the real thing. Metallica are subverting nothing with any of their releases over the last 15 years except the notion of a good metal album. They clearly don't feel anything for the music anymore. The only reasons I can think of that keep them at it is that they don't know what else to do and enjoy the boost their egos receive when they tour and thousands of people are screaming their names.
Let's make the decision easier for them and break their arms and legs.
