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(Credits: Raph Pour-Hashemi)<\/p>\n
Sat 7 March 2026 22:15, UK <\/p>\n
For a band that personified the genre of metal so perfectly, Metallica<\/a> were a bit of an outlier in their scene. <\/p>\n Not everyone in the thrash underground could have made ballads like \u2018Fade to Black\u2019 or instrumentals as dense as \u2018Orion\u2019, but they were always willing to try something new rather than going back to the same headbanging riffs that made you want to beat your skull against a wall. But when it came to the lyrical front, James Hetfield wanted to give his audience something a little bit deeper than the traditional sinister lyrics that you would get from everyone else.<\/p>\n Granted, it took a while for him to get there. A lot of Kill Em All was all about living the rock and roll lifestyle, and since a lot of his lines aren\u2019t anything that you wouldn\u2019t find in a biker bar or being said by some kid in a Black Sabbath T-shirt, they got the job done well enough when penning songs like \u2018Whiplash\u2019. But there were also areas that Hetfield never felt comfortable touching on whenever he made his songs.<\/p>\n He could always tell the listener a story with his words, but did you ever notice that none of his songs was about demons and dragons? Those were the road-tested topics that made metal badass, but Hetfield wasn\u2019t interested in writing that kind of flowery fantasy stuff. He wanted to dissect the evil that exists in the world, and a lot of the time, the greatest villain in the entire world is what men do to each other.<\/p>\n This probably explains why a lot of their darkest songs revolve around war. \u2018Disposable Heroes\u2019 is all about people being thrown onto a battlefield to fight for a cause they don\u2019t believe in, and even Hardwired\u2026to Self Destruct has songs about people suffering from PTSD<\/a> after spending years in the service. But long before Hetfield even knew what war was all about, Johnny Got His Gun was the first movie that scared the shit out of him more than anything else.<\/p>\n Most people would understand the kind of period dramas that depicted war in the worst ways, but the story of a man losing all of his senses and only feeling pain after being stuck in a coma was enough to chill the band to the bone. But if all you hear in the movie was the man\u2019s thoughts, Hetfield thought that giving a voice to him on the song \u2018One\u2019 would have been the perfect topic for a metal song.<\/p>\n