This video was directed by Anton Corbijn. If you were a rock star in the 90s, Anton Corbijn probably directed a music video for you.
In this video, a young man discovers that Metallica is inescapable. Even on television, every channel features either a show or a commercial that features the members of the band. For someone who has access to 24-hour Metallica television, the young man doesn’t seem to care about much. Not even his girlfriend can get much of a response from him. He would rather just fantasize about monsters fighting. The young man in the video is played by George Clements. He also appeared in a music video that appeared on Queen’s Made In Heaven compilation.
In Atlas, Rise!, Metallica sings about having the weight of the world on your shoulders and refusing to let it hold you down. No matter how much Atlas has to carry, he will always rise and so will Metallica.
The video keeps things simple, focusing on the band’s skill. The video was directed by Clark Eddy, who has also directed videos for Sublime, Crash Test Dummies, and Kid Rock. Most of Eddy’s credits, though, are as an editor. As an editor, he has worked on videos for Dua Lipa, Rihanna, Destiny’s Child, Iggy Pop, and Pitbull. That is quite a collection.
Sometime, people like to drive too fast. Sometimes, people like to live too fast. For those special moments, there’s always Metallica.
This video was directed by Wayne Isham, who has directed the majority of Metallica’s videos, not to mention videos for just about everyone else in the music business as well. The video was produced by Quentin Tarantino’s production company, A Band Apart and the use of dramatic title cards certainly does fit in with Tarantino’s aesthetic. The video feels like a tribute to the car chase films of the 60s and 70s. It’s Death Proof before Death Proof.
Fuel was later covered by Avirl Lavigne. Be careful bringing that up in certain company.
Frantic was the 2nd single off of Metallica’s controversial St. Anger. Like a lot of the songs off of that album, it was inspired by the band’s previous battles with drugs and alcohol. In this video, a chicken delivery driver has his life flash before his eyes after crashing his truck and he realizes that he wasted most of it. He’s laughs when he realizes that he’s still alive but then another vehicle crashes into him.
The first time I saw this video, I thought it was an awkward concept for a Metallica video, considering the band’s own history with road accidents. Over time, I’ve come to better appreciate the video. The lyrics of the song are influenced by Buddhist thought and I don’t know if there’s better evidence that life is pain than getting a second chance at life that only last for 2 minutes.
Does everyone still hate St. Anger or is it okay to now admit that it wasn’t as bad as everyone said when it first came out?
Don’t worry, James Hetfield has got your back. In fact, he wrote an entire song about the moments right before someone starts to panic. The song calls it The Unnamed Feeling and this is probably the rare Metallica song to which everyone can relate. St. Anger will probably always be a controversial album but I think it’s aging well. Hetfield was obviously dealing with some serious things during the recording, You don’t need to watch Some Kind of Monster to know that. You just have to listen to the songs. Personally, I like knowing that even a pioneer of thrash metal can sometimes get nervous. That means there’s hope for the rest of us.
The video features the band playing in a room in which the walls are slowly closing in. In between scenes of the band, we watch people dealing with that unnamed feeling. Keep an eye out for Edward Furlong, who previously lived on the edge for Aerosmith.
“At first I didn’t even want to play it for the guys. I thought that Metallica could only be the four of us. These are songs about destroying things, head banging, bleeding for the crowd, whatever it is, as long as it wasn’t about chicks and fast cars, even though that’s what we liked. The song was about a girlfriend at the time. It turned out to be a pretty big song.”
— James Hetfield, on Nothing Else Matters
Eventually, Hetfield did play it for the guys and Nothing Else Matters went on to become one of Metallica’s signature songs. The song may have been inspired by Hetfield’s feelings about being away from his girlfriend while he was on the road but, as Hetfield explained it to Mojo Magazine, “It’s about being on the road, missing someone at home, but it was written in such a way, it connected with so many people, that it wasn’t just about two people, it was about a connection with your higher power, lots of different things.”
The video was directed by Adam Dubin and edited by Sean Fullan and is made up of clips from the 1992 Metallica documentary, A Year And A Half. Along with the song, the video is best remembered for a scene where Lars Ulrich throws darts at a poster of Kip Winger. Do you blame him?
For his part, Kip Winger has said about Metallica’s hatred of him, “That is why it’s the great irony that we ended up on that geeky guy’s shirt on Beavis & Butt-head, because Metallica couldn’t play what we play, they couldn’t do it, they literally — technically — couldn’t do it. And I’ll challenge those chumps to that any day of the week, but we could play their music with our hands tied behind our back. And so, I was a little teed off about that, but in the end, none of that shit matters…”
If you say so, Kipster.
26 years after the release of Nothing Else Matters, Metallica is still selling out stadiums worldwide. And Winger? Look for them at the closest county fair.
Let’s give the final words to James Hetfield:
“I remember going to the Hells Angels Clubhouse in New York, and they showed me a film that they’d put together of one of the fallen brothers, and they were playing ‘Nothing Else Matters.’ Wow. This means a lot more than me missing my chick, right? This is brotherhood. The army could use this song. It’s pretty powerful.”
My earliest memory of this song is a 6th grade math class. I don’t remember why, but they had a computer in there, and one of the kids put the song on. I have no idea when I first saw the music video. All I remembered about it was the bed getting hit by a truck. The rest of the music video is pretty forgettable.
I guess you could take it simply. It’s about a kid having nightmares that we ascribe to the “Sandman” bringing by putting you to sleep. Trying to carefully watch it now and paying attention to the lyrics, it looks a lot like the kid is having nightmares of death that don’t go away with age, but only become closer and closer to reality as the years pass. According to Songfacts, the line “off to Never Never Land” was supposed to be “disrupt the perfect family” as a reference to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. The Sandman can bring you sleep, which is where you can die at any age, as shown by the old man who we also see alone in the bed. Plus, we tend to use sleep to mean both going to sleep at night and death, as in putting an animal to sleep. You also see that in the image of the old man underwater as if he is trying to kill himself. The scene with the kid praying as the old man watches really makes me think that they are meant to be the same person. In particular, since you are your own Sandman in reality. Never Never Land is a place where you never grow up, but sung darkly as Enter Sandman is by Metallica, then it makes it sound like a fantasy to cloak the fear of your eventual death. In that case, the Sandman could also be seen as The Reaper, and Never Never Land is just death. Or maybe I am just overthinking all of this because I had a friend who died in his sleep when he was a teenager. Probably not though seeing as this kind of thing is a bit of a motif in Metallica’s music such as the songs One and The Memory Remains.
The music video was directed by veteran music video director Wayne Isham. Unless you have never watched a music video before, you probably have seen his work. One minute it’s Enter Sandman for Metallica, and the next he is directing Bye Bye Bye for *NSYNC. More recently he brought us a music video for Nickelback and a couple for Neil Diamond. The point is that Wayne Isham seems to be willing to direct anything you give him.
Martin Coppen shot the music video. He has done around 40 music videos.
Jay Torres edited the music video. He has a handful of music video credits, but based on his website, seems to have gone on to other things.
Curt Marvis, Jeff Tannebring, and Matt Mahurin were producers on the music video. Matt Mahurin is the only one that seems noteworthy. He appears to have directed somewhere around 70-80 music videos. One of them was as Allen Smithee for the music video for Building A Mystery by Sarah McLachlan.
Through good times and bad I have always been a huge fan and follower of Metallica. Even as they foolishly went off track following the path Bob Rock set for them throughout most of the 1990’s through the disastrous St. Anger debacle as they tried to return to their earlier sound, I have always followed this band which made up the original Big 4 of thrash metal (Metallica, Anthrax, Slayer and Megadeth).
It was on their 1998 cover album, Garage Inc., that the band released one of their most popular songs. It wasn’t an original, but a cover of the classic Bob Seger hard rock song about the hard road and life of a musician. Seger’s “Turn the Page” is just one of those hard rock tunes that latches onto the listener and forces them to listen and understand. Most such songs tend to be quite pretentious with nothing much to say once the listener really pays attention. The same cannot be said about Seger’s song.
Metallica decided to cover this song for their Garage Inc. album which was all about them covering their own favorite hard rock and metal songs of the past. While Metallica kept the original’s tempo, they added their own heavier and harder edge to song that straddles the line between hard rock and heavy metal. Even James Hetfield’s alcohol and cigarette ravaged vocals lent a sense of the hard road and life the track sings about.
The biggest change from the Seger song to Metallica’s cover has to be the accompanying music video which still remains one of the most controversial in MTV’s music video history (well, when they still played music videos). Seger’s song was released in 1973 when the concept of music video was nonexistent. With Metallica’s cover it was almost a guarantee that it would get a music video and what a video it was and still is.
The video was directed by Jonas Akerlund who had made a name for himself directing some of the most creative and innovative music videos of the day. His take on the song switches from a musician’s hard road and life on the road to that of a single mother trying to make ends meet as an erotic dancer by day and a prostitute by night to provide for her young daughter. The video was banned from receiving any sort of airplay on MTV as it dealt and showed the disturbing side of such a life. The fact that the tamer version of the video (below) still couldn’t make it on the airwaves just showed how much more haunting and controversial the uncensored version turned out to be.
Turn the Page
On a long and lonesome highway, East of Omaha You can listen to the engines Moanin’ out it’s one note song You can think about the woman, Or the girl you knew the night before But your thoughts will soon be wanderin’, The way they always do When you’re ridin’ 16 hours, And there’s nothin’ much to do And you don’t feel much like ridin’, You just wish the trip was through
(Chorus)
Here I am, on the road again, There I am, up on the stage There I go, playin’ star again, There I go, turn the page
So you walk into this restaurant, All strung out from the road And you feel the eyes upon you, As you’re shakin’ off the cold You pretend it doesn’t bother you, But you just want to explode Yeah, most times you can’t hear ’em talk, Other times you can
All the same old cliches, Is it woman, is it man And you always seem outnumbered, You don’t dare make a stand Make your stand
(Chorus) Ah But here I am, on the road again, There I am, up on the stage Here I go, ah playin’ star again, There I go, turn the page Woah
Out there in the spotlight, You’re a million miles away Every ounce of energy, You try and give away As the sweat pours out your body, Like the music that you play
Later in the evenin’, As you lie awake in bed With the echoes of the amplifiers, Ringin’ in your head You smoke the day’s last cigarette, Rememberin’ what she said
What she said
Yeah, and here I am, On the road again, There I am, up on that stage Here I go, playin’ star again, There I go, turn the page And there I go, turn that page
There I go, yeah, Here I go, yeah, yeah There I go, yeah, Here I go, yeah Here I go, There I go And I’m gone
Love them or hate them there’s really no middle-ground when it comes to one of the Big Four of thrash metal. You either love the band even through their dabbling into hard rock and the Bob Rock-era or you hate them for the perceived selling out and the Bob Rock-era. You ask any Metallica fan and they would pretty much agree that their third album, Master of Puppets, was the band at it’s peak. There would be some debate on whether the Black Album was where the band began to alienate some of it’s earliest fans, but that’s not what we’re here for.
We are here for the latest “Song of the Day” and it’s from their second full-length album, Ride the Lightning. The song is the band’s very first power ballad and follows the album’s theme and exploration of death. Where the album’s title took on the concept of death by electric chair the song chosen this time around is about the band’s exploration of the concept of suicide.
Yes, this was the song that the band had gotten into hot water for it’s suicidal lyrics which purportedly led to teens offing themselves after listening to it constantly. What critics of the song failed to realize was just how much teens at the time the song came out saw the song as therapeutic. They related to the song and used it as an outlet for their own alienation and depression.
Just like it’s subject matter it begins with a melancholy melody that gives a glimpse into the singer’s mindset. It’s not the typical fast playing many have associated with thrash, but that arrives soon enough as the song finishes off it’s vocals with a fade out that leads into Kirk Hammett’s 2-minute guitar solo that ultimately fades out as well…
The song that critics of metal gets wrong then and continues to even now is the classic “Fade to Black”.
Fade to Black
Life it seems, will fade away Drifting further every day 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
Things not what they used to be Missing one inside of me Deathly lost, this Can’t be real Cannot stand this hell I feel Emptiness is filling me To the point of agony Growing darkness taking dawn I was me, but now he’s gone
No one but me can save myself, but it’s too late Now, I can’t think, think why I should even try Yesterday seems as though it never existed Death Greets me warm, now I will just say goodbye
“Hold my breath as I wish for death Oh please God, wake me”
Yeah, my taste in music see-sawed back and forth from one end of the spectrum to the other. Yesterday, I reminisced about one of the best R&B ballads from my time as a teenager in high school during the late 80’s. Today, I focus on one of the songs on metal end which remains (in my opinion) one of the best metal songs ever put out there.
“One” was the final single released from Metallica’s fourth album, …And Justice For All.
The song also had the distinction of being the first ever Metallica song which was accompanied by a music video shot for it. Metallica had avoided making music videos of their songs for years. Their success as a band never needed the assistance that MTV could provide. They saw it as a badge of honor that they’ve never made a music video, but that change in January 1989 when the single for “One” was released and a music video followed soon after.
A music video that combined elements from the 1971 anti-war film Johnny Got His Gun and the band playing inside a warehouse. It was an effective video that more than convinced many skeptics that when done properly a metal music video was possible. This wasn’t a video using garish colors, over-the-top imagery of hair metal music videos. It was a video that was just as heavy and through-provoking as the song it was made for.
Through the Shattered Lens 