Any time anyone bags on Enter Sandman, I put this up: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xj3jkl
Metallica on Jools Holland, 2008. The format is that all the bands (usually five) are in a roundtable and Jools moves from band to band. Nine times out of ten, the other bands just sit quietly while the band who's playing, plays. Here, they pan around the room and every other band is dancing, singing along and even, if memory services, playing along. They lit the place up.
"Dumbed down" or not, it moves.
Argumentum ad populum.
No, it's good because it serves the purpose that art is intended to: communicate and connect between people. VV Brown's music is about as far as you can get from Metallica, and yet she was voicing every word. Somehow, this biker dude from San Francisco and his Danish buddy connected on a visceral level with an English rapper, an English indie singer-songwriter, an Americana singer from Neptune, New Jersey, and a French chanteuse (the other guests on that day, excluding Kings of Leon).
I'm not really sure what point you're making. You said that, whenever someone bags on Sandman, you point to the video of Metallica's performance of the song on some TV show. Consistent with pretty much every TV show ever where a musical group performed a song, the audience was into it. And apparently other artists were on the show and they were also into it. OK... but...
The popularity and success of the song aren't in dispute, but your point in responding to people bagging on the song seems to be that lots of folks like it. Also, the fact that other artists on the show behaved like they were into it doesn't necessarily mean they actually like the song. They could have been feigning for the cameras. Not saying they were, but it's certainly possible. Heck, if I had been there, I might have acted into it (I don't think it's a BAD song by any means).
No, Paul. No. I covered some of this; if you watch Later...with Jools Holland, there are ALWAYS about five acts on, of varying levels of popularity. They've had people who made their first appearance on TV there, as well as artists like Robert Plant and Paul McCartney. As I noted, in watching probably 50 episodes or so, I can count on one hand with fingers left over the number of times the other acts did anything other than sit politely on their drum riser or on stools. In fact, the only other time I saw a reaction like that was to Paul McCartney. The audience here didn't do that with "Cyanide", the other song Metallica played, but when this one started, there was energy and excitement in the room. It was PALPABLE (it should be noted, I saw that performance in real time; it's an hour show with probably eight performances over all).
The point was, and still is, that while everyone's taste is what it is, and I'm not here to change that, the complaints about the song are just that, taste, and the song HAS transcended being "just another Metallica song", simple or not. It's got that X factor that I imagine many artists would kill for, and that's the ability to connect people who maybe don't even want to be connected to. I took from that video that people like VV Brown and Nicole Atkins recognized something special about that band playing that song that wasn't common to every other song either they or the other artists performed.
Topic: Metallica Thread (Read 181482 times)
