Finally getting around to checking out the new Sting album and the new Metallica album.
I fell in love with Sting as a very young man. My sister had a copy of Nothing Like the Sun, and I remember listening to it on a long road trip in the back of our gigantic old junky van. So many of the songs on that album stood out as amazing to me.
"Englishman in New York" and "Sister Moon" and "They Dance Alone (Cueca Solo)" and "Fragile" and his cover of "Little Wing" (which I didn't even know the original yet at the time) and "Be Still My Beating Heart" and...well, they all blew me away with how emotional and moody they were. The only song on the album that didn't really speak to me was the single, "We'll Be Together," which was playing on all the radio stations at the time.
I still think of that as my all-time favorite Sting album, but my relationship with his music only deepened when Soul Cages came out. Again, the single, "All This Time," was playing on all the radio stations, and I appreciated it better than I did "We'll Be Together," but it was the rest of the songs on the album that really got me.
I didn't have that album, but my girlfriend did. This was my first serious girlfriend, and a few weeks after we started going out, she won two free CDs from a radio station. When she went to get it, she discovered that their selection to choose from was pretty slim. Nothing she was really after was there, but she could make do with a couple.
She chose Squeeze's Play album, and Soul Cages by Sting. I suppose she probably listened to Squeeze a few times, but I never once heard her play it. Soul Cages, however, became our album. Sting became our artist. And, on a rotating basis, the various songs on the album became our songs.
If I thought the songs on Nothing Like the Sun were moody and emotional, I hadn't seen anything yet. The songs on Soul Cages are amazing. They all flow together, weaving a tapestry of story, meaning, and feeling. We listened to that CD until the laser burned out.
We lay on the bed in her room, making out and listening to Sting day in and day out. Imagine the kind of impression that makes on a young man with his very first girlfriend. He's never going to forget that music.
Sting still had several more great albums in him. Ten Summoners Tales was chock full of great songs. Mercury Falling became the same as Soul Cages for me with my second serious girlfriend. She once said she wanted to dance at our wedding to a few different songs on that album...there never was a wedding, but that's how serious our relationship was at one time.
I even appreciated most of the songs from Brand New Day, but that was where Sting was starting to slip. He seemed to be unhappy with the music that he was most known for. Or maybe he wanted to grow as an artist or something, and I guess I can understand that, but I wanted stuff like the songs that made me fall in love with him.
His subsequent albums had less and less stuff I wanted to hear, and now here we are in 2016.
He came out with a new album about a month ago, and I haven't heard a single song off of it until today. Sting is my second favorite music act of all time. I'm listening to this album, and it doesn't really appeal to me very much. I don't know how many more times I'll bother to listen to it. It makes me really sad. Nothing can go on forever, but I sure would like them to.
As I said, Sting is my second favorite all-time. Metallica is my number one. When I was entering high school, Metallica was an ascending band. I was starting to realize that I really like hard rock music. I was listening to 93 Rock on the radio all the time, and I was interested in expanding my experience of the genre.
All the rocker kids at school wore Metallica shirts around, so they seemed a natural choice to check out. My first cassette that I bought was their $5.98 E.P. – Garage Days Re-Revisited.
I was excited, because I could afford $5.98. I listened the hell out of that album, and before long, I had more. A friend gave me my all-time favorite album, Master of Puppets for my birthday. Then I got Ride the Lightning. Then Kill 'Em All. Then, And Jusice for All came out, and I got that one too.
Metallica was the perfect combination of strength and beauty. The music was both heavy as shit sometimes and melodic and moving at other times. It was perfect for an artistic teenage boy. I loved the beauty but also craved the thunderous, testosterone-driven aggression.
But, before I even got out of high school, Metallica started to change. They hired Bob Rock to produce their next album. Bob Rock was known for producing softer bands like, Motley Crue, Bon Jovi, and Aerosmith. He had the golden touch though. Those bands sold a lot of albums, because he softened and mainstreamed their sound. That's what he did with Metallica.
They came out with the album that everyone knows, their self-titled black album. It was slower, softer, and lesser than Metallica had ever been before, but they sure sold a lot of records. Everybody was hearing them on the radio now. Even guys like Rish Outfield became fans of the band for a little while. Rish recently confessed to me that he went to their concert in 1992. That blows my mind.
Rock hit the skids in the '90s, and Metallica lost their way even worse. They seemed like they really liked their status as top-selling artists, and were willing to do whatever it took to stay that way. They all cut their long hair off at once and changed their sound significantly for their next album, Load. They even dumped that amazing wordmark of the bands name that they'd used on every album up until that point.
Then they dropped a second album just a year later called Reload.
They did a new garage days album, a double CD with their old stuff re-released and new covers to go with them. I saw them on MTV performing a song from the album, and when he was asked why they were doing an album of covers, he said, "people are buying the bootlegs." Their old garage days album, that first cassette that I bought, was now out of print, and Metallica didn't seem to like that someone else was getting their money.
This, of course, led to their disastrous fight with Napster, when they angered a lot of their former fans, and really solidified their image as corporate douchebags that just wanted money and didn't care about anything else.
A few years later, they tried a glorious comeback album. They'd heard about how their fans were angry with them, that they didn't appreciate how soft they'd become, and probably saw how well Nu Metal bands like System of a Down and Korn were doing, and they tried to imitate them. That's right, the band that was synonymous with Heavy Metal, basically the Michael Jacksons of Metal were trying to imitate the new young bands in their genre instead of doing what they'd always done to get to the top of the mountain in the first place.
It wasn't well received, and the band had to do another glorious comeback album years later.
Through all of this, I stuck with them. I liked their new sounds from the self-titled album to the grung rip-off albums to even St. Anger. It wasn't until they released Lulu, a collaboration with Lou Reed, that I realized that I probably wasn't a Metallica fan anymore. I couldn't go there.
I was on Facebook one day, when I saw a post announcing a song from their new album, I clicked on it to listen, and was horrified. I wondered what it would take for Metallica to make something that I wouldn't buy. They were my all-time favorite, after all, and if they came out with something, I bought it. But that day, I finally discovered.
I never bought Lulu, and I've never heard any of the songs from it either. It was possibly the worst thing I'd ever heard. Doubly worse, because it was Metallica that made it.
So now, here we are, years along, and Metallica has come out with a new album. It too came out weeks ago, and I'm just now getting around to listening, instead of buying it on day one.
And once again, it just doesn't appeal to me. Just like Sting, it seems like Metallica lost their way years ago, and just can't manage to recapture the magic. They were once infallible in my eyes. Then they became forgivable. Now, it's the worst of all. They're meh. The opposite of love isn't hate. It's indifference, and that seems to be how I feel about Metallica now--my all-time favorite band.
Interesting how far both of those artists have fallen in my esteem as the years go on. Once there was a time when I would have never thought that possible.
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