As Antonio Gramsci argued, ruling groups maintain power partly by making their ideas seem like common sense. This helps explain the political significance of Metallica’s call for disengagement at a time when Israel’s genocide in Palestine demands urgent international attention. Hetfield’s vague agenda of “love, energy and heavy music” ultimately amounts to a refusal to stand for anything meaningful. And that refusal is itself deeply political.
And justice for some
Specifically, the rich white folks.
fuck em Dethklok > Metallica
What a random and nonsensical article…. I suppose we should also drag Kings of Leon down? I haven’t seen them show support for Palestine either!
In fact we should boycott EVERY artist that ever didn’t display a Palestinian flag on the stage. That’ll show ‘em all!!
This is so disappointing…is it ok to still listen to their old stuff and just pretend that they broke up after Master of Puppets?
You can, but you should know deep down that most of their lyrics are just “bandwagon rides” and pretentious.
Personally, this situation would fall into issues I have with other bands/authors/popular figures and how I handle their material. If I own copies of their media, whether on CD or downloaded files or physical books, I will continue to listen to or read it if I do enjoy it. I will no longer purchase anything new, stream on any platform, or borrow anything from the library as a way to show my non-support.
An example: I loved Coraline by Gaiman. That guy is a gross creep, but I already own a copy the book and the Blu-ray, so I keep my copies and do not purchase anything I do not already own.
Gaiman didn’t do any of the real work on teh film, so feel free to enjoy it
The Sandman is what hurts me, but again, he just wrote the words and made the story. There were lots of other people involved and they arn’t creepy assholes
Yeah, but at least for streaming it, I worry about any royalties that may go to him, so I just avoid that risk since I have it on disc. I feel your pain 💚
I still have disturbed on my lifting playlist, but I’ve dumped gaiman and die antwoord. Regardless, it was pirated anyways
100% get it
I do miss Die Antwoord and haven’t found anything else that hits quite the same. Wish I had known the depths of their shittiness before buying a couple vinyls.
What did Disturbed do?
David Draiman (lead singer) did a photo op signing IDF missiles with a sharpie.
In June 2024. Well into the genocide.
That’s disturbing.
Very much so.
Jesus fucking christ.
I really liked some of his covers, but that was beyond grotesque to see.
Is it actually true about gaiman though? Such a bummer if so. I love his writing.
Yeah, like Soggy said, it’s really bad and he hides behind kink, which as a person who is into kink, it really grosses me out because consent is so important in that space. Any seriously problematic author or musician that is that bad, I just can’t support.
That said, if I saw something at the thrift store by a problematic creator, I would consider purchasing it because they don’t get money for it. My favorite thrift store supports the animal rescue where I adopted my rabbits from. They have books and CDs for a dollar so I’m ok buying from them if it’s a piece of media I truly want to absorb and the money would go to a good cause.
Paying my bunny tax
The accounts about Gaiman are truly reprehensible. Nauseating, even. Dude’s a rapist hiding behind kink and non-traditional relationships. (Amanda Palmer is also revealed to be a predatory sociopath at best)
Let it happen naturally: all you have to do is pay more attention to the things Hetfield and Ulrich say and do, then their music will become nauseating. Or don’t and continue to enjoy them, who cares.
Lucky for me I was a Megadeth fan and ignored Metallica over the Mustaine drama when I was a teenager, so when they went mask-off over Napster I locked in my opinion that they suck.
I liked both but as others said, both bands have bad political opinions. I think you can still enjoy music while knowing the creators are not great people. As long as they’re not murderers or rapists or something awful like that.
I didn’t say not to enjoy music if the artists are idiots, just saying you naturally won’t miss the music after finding out enough that’s intolerable about the artist. What is intolerable is up to you, and the opinions of others is what I meant by ‘who cares’, I should have finished the sentence: “… who cares what others think.”
Mustaine is a rightwing douchebag, so its all shit
He sure is. I still enjoy the old Megadeth though.
he was great when he drank a lot
lol
Maybe he was drunk when he wrote “Sweating Bullets”. No matter what that guy does (within reason) that song remains awesome to me
Yeah I stopped paying attention to him and Megadeth when he went all super-christian.
i never give a shit about if an artist is a terrible person. im just listening to music
im just listening to music
What you’re doing is paying them to continue being a terrible person
no I’m not
Where do you think musicians get money from?
their label
on that note, are you supporting slavery by using devices with materials mined from slaves?
Yes. There is a difference in the degree of choice one has; lots of good music out there… Not so many choices for ethical electronics beyond reduce, reuse, and recycling.
well, same how i feel about music. plenty of good music out there, i cant refuse it if its good
Music is a core part of culture, and a large part of how one’s worldview is created and normalized. Listening to music made by assholes has potential to make you a bigger asshole.
I think it’s a bad idea to let later knowledge ruin music… usually (yes there are some exceptions…don’t read about the band Lostprophets…). Metallica is a band of idiots with bad selfish opinions. That doesn’t mean they didn’t make good art decades ago.
🏴☠️🏴☠️🏴☠️🏴☠️🏴☠️🦜
Seems kinda weird to pick on Metallica. None of their music strikes me as anti-colonial or revolutionary. I suspect that if the band wanted to air their politics, they’d do it on FOX news anyway. Their fans are all genX white men; they’d be fools to “come out” as liberal, much less revolutionary.
And who cares about Metallica? They only have one good album and it was released in 1984.
At most they were an anti-cold war, anti-nuke band, not so much with modern politics.
Why bringing the topic to begin with ? He clearly threw shade on Mac for no reason
It is self-inflicted because Hetfield chose to be a massive hypocrite on stage by giving a little speech about not being political while shitting on Macklemore for being political.
If he had taken the apolitical option to keep his mouth shut and just play the music, then I’d agree it’s weird to randomly single out Metallica. They’ve always been bootlicking hypocrites, it’s nothing new.
which is a crock of shit because they put political symbols on one of their most famous albums
Also, they come across as tools. They’re the last band I’d want to hear politics from.
Though I will disagree, their music is fantastic. Even short hair Metallica has great songs.
Everything post-Mustaine has been extremely mid at best
📠
If you said everything post-black album, I’d agree. I kinda liked Load and Reload even, though.
I’d argue that’s a loud but unpopular opinion
I stand by it idgaf
It’d be weird if you backed down from an internet fight in 30 minutes
It’s how I expect all my internet fights to go.
Gotta take the heat off of Sheeran.
Metallica infamously got Napster (the original music download site) shut down, which empowered the RIAA (and later the MPAA) to go on an anti-piracy crusade, which locked down access to a lot of media.
Granted, the RIAA has been fighting that fight for decades, but it was the legal justification they needed (and public support from one particular band) to start targeting individual people to make examples of. I remember they sued some grandma who didn’t know how computers work because her teen grandchild downloaded an MP3 to her computer. They put her in debt for the rest of her life. They went after children too.
And this was around the time that torrenting started, which was a convenient way to download data on the Internet without over-taxing a singular computer. But because media pirates were using the new format to share music and movies, the RIAA and MPAA targeted torrenting itself as a tool of piracy, which limited its use professionally. To this day, thanks to them, torrenting is pretty much exclusively viewed as a way to pirate illegal content.
Fuck Metallica.
You don’t need to have “anti colonial” tag to speak about Palestinian children being slaughtered live on front of your eyes.
Also i disagree that all their fans are white men (whatever the fuck that means), i think Metallica is or maybe was a big global band that have enormous fanbase all over the world (literally).
The message the article tries to deliver is basically calling out fuckface Hetfield, as he is going political (in a negative way) with his recent pesudo-love and anti-politics rhetoric.
Those asshats were always posers
Obligatory FUCK LARS! The biggest poser of the bunch.
Metallica only serves rich people. No one with a regular job can afford those concerts. These guys used their fans so bad. They’re a stained paragraph to the long story of humans and music. They shouldn’t even be mentioned anymore.
If the fans had any balls, they’d let Metallica disappear forever with their money. It feels like it’s happening anyways which is why they only play for rich people now.
Who’s getting their political takes from celebs or artists? Stop.
🤨🫸 “getting political takes from celebrities”
😎👉 “choosing artists for their political takes”
Art has been political since the invention of art. You cannot separate the two.
Who’s still convinced in 2026 that celebs and artists are all as politically knowledgeable and insightful as the most ignorant and superficial ones?
Stop.
Rage against the machine is very popular for their political takes, so i guess a lot.
Ever spoken out loud to another human? Probably most do.
Plenty of apolitical people do. Is it a good idea? Prolly not. Has that stopped them before?
Posers
Had James just not brought it up, it wouldn’t be a problem. I don’t think that bands are required to bring up politics and defend a side. Sheeran had his hand forced and at that point had to pick a side, and he fucked up. The only reason Metallica is getting scrutinized is because Jamie boy had to make some dumbass comments about not getting political while taking a shot at Macklemore. I was at a concert last weekend, and no bands said anything to draw themselves into a political discussion, and they’re not in the headlines now. It’s simple.
Exactly. Silence was an option.
It is not even political to be anti genocide
I’m an anarcho-communist and with the current state of the discourse around the word “political” I think I could fairly claim communism isn’t political.
Communism is an economical system. The way to achieve is is what is political. Same with Palestine saying free Palestine or i do not want palestinian to be killed is humanitarian, now if you say I support a one state or a two state that’s the political side
Palestine is a political group. All nations are. All cultures are.
But if “political” just means “whatever I think should be controversial”, then communism is apolitical.
Free Palestinians mean free it’s people which is humanitarian not political
Politics is the inevitable outcome of humans interacting with each other in groups. Once you get past the 2 person mark politics start to form, mind you it’s not the grand systems one may think of but it is politics.
I think politics is when a group of even two people form a system for working together. A marriage is a political organisation.
For sure. I don’t think that the conversation has to take place in every setting though. Like I don’t bring up Palestine in every conversation I have. If someone else brings it up, they get to hear my thoughts. If Metallica didn’t want to be associated with the topic, don’t bring it up politics at all. I don’t agree with Sheeran’s response at all, but I do have some level some sympathy that he was forced into the conversation, but that’s it. If he were a better person, he could have garnered insane amounts of support, but he’s not, so he didn’t. Hell, he could have even shielded himself to some extent by just saying that he disagrees with the actions taken against Macklemore and left it at that, even if he carries shitty views. He doubled fucked up by not supporting his friend and by siding with Israel.
In case of Ed, he said to Mac privately that free Palestine hurt genocidal people feeling. That the disgusting thing about Ed. He didn’t have to say that
They just had to go be the musical version of a pick-me, not like other bands! “We don’t do politics” he said, doing politics.
Olivia Rodrigo is more metal than Metallica
Been a metalhead my whole life and fully agree with this statement.
Metallica is the Walmart of metal.
Her music isn’t my cup of tea, but I absolutely love everything she stands up for and what she does. Metallica knows a lot of their base are probably MAGA and I bet most of the band vote MAGA. Fuck those assholes.
Her music isn’t my cup of tea
Have you heard Vampire? I agree completely otherwise, but her vocals in that are AMAZING!
Vampire was an instant earworm for me when it came out, because I’m a sucker for the Creep chord progression. That, and her energy in the song.
So it makes the occasional appearance in my otherwise mostly metal-dominated song rotation.
Ironically(?) her cover of Creep a while ago was the first time I heard her voice. It did make me go, “Huh. Not bad at all.”
For me it was the lyrics in Brutal
Would say the same, maybe because of the age gap. Yet many of her songs are earworms which I enjoy. And I love this collab with Robert Smith from her recent album: https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=8cXUpBguRTA
Did anyone expect Metallica to be principled? They’re copyright trolls for decades, something tells me moral backbone isn’t their strong suit.
Metallica died with Cliff Burton
Obligatory
God I’ve seen them twice live and used to be obsessed with them in high school. Now I just basically want to vomit looking at this. Like I get it. You got fuck you money. I get it, spend it, but yeah what happened to and justice for all? What happened to one? They are a bunch of posers. Long live fucking file sharing. Everybody should fucking share their files and then absolutely just delete them when they’re done. Fuck these wastes of space bro. By the way, they sucked both times I seen them cuz they played a huge amphitheaters and stadiums and it was impossible to even fucking catch a glimpse of their dumbasses. James, you ought to just go back to drinking yourself to death cuz it would be better than shopping here at Armani or whatever the fuck.
Oh and maybe make a fucking sequel to your shitty whiny pissy baby ass “documentary”, so everybody can witness how big of a bunch of cry babies you are once again.
Girl pop stars got more fucking balls than you guys do you dumb fucking pieces of shit. Fuck off James. Fuck off Lars. Fuck off Kirk. And new guy, whoever the fuck you are you can fuck off too cuz you’re shopping in Armani with James. And you guys all suck nowadays bunch of fucking whiny ass pissy boys
The shitty Metallica members don’t fall far from the Lars…
Fuck Lars since the early “Napster” '90’s.
Their last good album was master of puppets only because Dave Mustaine was writing for them.
ba dum tshhh
(out of tempo)
