Never was too crazy about Nothing Else Matters. Not sure if it is just because it got overplayed and saturated radio at the time or what, but I just don't care for it anymore. Not a bad song by any means, but it just had a short shelf life for me.
See, I wasn't alive in 1991, so I think I have the potentially beneficial experience of coming to this album basically the same way I come to any other album. I mean, yeah, I hear Enter Sandman or Nothing Else Matters out in the world from time to time, but it's like once a year, not once a day.
I think both of them hold up as good songs regardless of their status as two of the most recognizable songs in rock. But for me Nothing Else Matters stands out as a great song, maybe the best of its type (metal power ballad), while Enter Sandman is a very good song but doesn't significantly exceed songs of a similar style like Don't Tread On Me or Sad But True. It may also help that I tend to like metal ballads.
It was an interesting time. I was in high school from '84 to '88. Metallica and thrash in general were seen as underground and very extreme at that time, even among "metal heads." But you could sort of feel things starting to slowly change with Master of Puppets, and then albums in the same timeframe from Anthrax, Megadeth, and Slayer. It was starting to open up a bit. And Justice for All opened things up a lot more as they started to tour with more well-known bands that exposed them to a larger audience. That, coupled with the fact that AJFA was a bit more accessible than its predecessors, a "hit" video for One, and the Grammies fiasco gained them a lot of exposure. The Black album hit at just the right time. Thrash still wasn't widely accepted in the mainstream, but the pump was primed. With the Black album definitely being more mainstream and the groundwork having been laid, it really broke thrash bands through into the mainstream. With Megadeth following suit not long after with Coundown, songs from those bands started getting tons of play on radio and MTV. Prior to that, it was pretty scarce. But suddenly, those songs were
everywhere. And I think that perhaps it was somewhat "new" to have music this heavy being played in the mainstream, some of those songs really got played to death. Don't get me wrong--it was great. But at the same time, I think the saturation and overplaying kinda wore the shimmer off of some of those songs for those of us that were around back then.
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Topic: Metallica Survivor - The Black Album: Round 4 (Read 872 times)