So according to Lars Ulrich popular folklore, Metallica fans in the 80s and 90s were so adamant about them staying the fastest and heaviest thing ever that starting around Ride The Lightning, every time they wrote a “ballad” sellout cries were everywhere.

These same fans who flocked over to Pantera around 91 or whenever, and lauded Pantera as not only Metallica’s replacement for heaviest band (in the mainstream), but “uncompromising”. Yet Pantera have quite a few ballads to their name:

Cemetery Gates
This Love
Hollow
Planet Caravan (yes I know its a cover, they still put it on a record and they still played it live)
10s
Floods
Suicide Note Part 1

Not a single fan cried sellout on them. You don't read interviews from Phil or anyone whining how their fans gave them shit for writing those songs. Hell Cemetery Gates is pretty consistently ranked the top Pantera song of all time! Metallica can’t turn the fucking clean section of their guitars on without fans complaining yet Pantera does it and no one says shit. How does that work?

One question: who cares?

This thread reads like somebody proved you wrong on Reddit somewhere and now being angry, you decided to post a topic here hoping all of us would go, "I agree!"

I guess the obvious answer is that Pantera got heavier over time, while Metallica got lighter. When Pantera came onto the scene (assuming first contact for almost everyone ever was Cowboys from Hell), ballads were already 100% accepted. Plus something like Floods is really only a ballad in the loosest sense of the word - compared to the title track on that album, sure. But compared to your regular ol' ballad a la all those hair metal bands?

I can't say what people in the 80s thought of Fade to Black or Sanitarium, but if I had to guess I'd say you're on the money and no one ever accused Metallica of selling out until the black album, and Lars just made that shit up retroactively when Nothing Else Matters was panned by the metalheads.

Also, 10s is one hell of a song. It's really unexpected, the sort of song not many artists would ever try to write, or even have the creativity to come up with. But it works. (I understand if this is not the accepted view of the track)

A lot of people also called Metallica sell outs for releasing a music video, so it's essentially arbitrary and a boneheaded debate overall.

Well you are right by ballad in the looser sense. Compared to Fade To Black, Nothing Else Matters, etc.

Ballads were accepted in metal before Metallica came along IMO, In The End, Beyond The Realms of Death, Rainbow Eyes, Sun Goes Down. Metallica just talked so much shit about being so much better than Motley Crue that they backed themselves into a corner.

Also, I 10s.

Apparently the complaining started right from 1983 on, with some saying that Metallica's debut KEA was slower and more commercial than their live/demos had been in the year or so before that. Naturally Mustaine was a significant voice in this criticism, for example complaining about the changes to The Four Horsemen as compared to the Mechanix demo (they did add the middle, slower part, and certain parts of the riffing do sound slightly faster to me, such as the palm muted quintuplets, but so far as I know it was never as fast as a Metallica song as it was on Killing is My Business). Part of the (very small) backlash was Metallica's own fault, as they had represented/sold themselves as being a proudly belligerent FASTER-HEAVIER-LOUDER!!!1!1! thing. No sir, none of that touchy-feely stuff other bands (especially the make-up wearing, feminine-looking ones) put out. Then before long it was more thoughtful subject material, less aggressive/raw, acoustic parts, etc. I would agree though that complaints along these lines didn't start to gain serious momentum until the Black Album. I'm sure there were also many like myself, who got into Metallica c.1991-1994, went back and listened to their old stuff and loved it, but didn't feel alienated until Load dropped, with their hair cut, makeup on, sipping martinis, songs that were now almost completely rock, and so on. Over time I did come to be ok with the changes in Metallica, but when they first happened (ie. the first major changes after I became a fan) it was like, "wtf is going on here?"

Wow this is the first time I've ever heard anyone (not you) say that No Life Til Leather was better than Kill Em All.

But yea, absolutely. They did so much harm to themselves with that. One of my favorite parts of Boris's MOP review is when he slaps this down as not a great marketing move, but a pussy move:

[Hetfield] felt the need to declare between songs in 1985 that he would not be saying the words "ooh baby" and wearing lipstick. Paul Baloff took the battle to the other side, issuing an ultimatum to anyone in the crowd wearing a RATT shirt. Bobby Blitz just didn't even mention it, letting the songs do the talking. He was "leaving the poseurs behind".

"This is a Black Sabbath song off of the Paranoid album. So don't freak out on us. We did the song because we wanted to. It has nothing to do with the integrity of our direction. It's a tripped out song. We think you'll dig it. If you don't, don't fucking listen to it. Thanks. On behalf of the rest of Pantera, Phil Anselmo '94."

That quote is from the Far Beyond Driven booklet. I don't think fans were that insecure about ballads in 1994 but Pantera themselves sure as fuck were.

This reads like another thinly veiled attempt at shitting on a band the OP doesn't like.

It's a very juvenile way of looking at things to think that all ballads, as a sweeping whole, are terrible or lame or whatever. Glad most bands grew past that sort of "extreme, hardcore" mindset eventually.

I like both bands. I just question the awareness of their fans in the 90s.



Yea on the one hand I thought about leaving out Planet Caravan for that reason, but I felt like someone else would have brought it up so I left it in for the sake of being thorough.

Some fans will always find things to complain about. Metallica is actually a good example, perhaps because they are the most popular metal band ever.

* They aren't as fast as they were in the early days (demo/Kill em All).
* They write ballads.
* They released a music video.
* Its not thrash anymore!
* They cut their hair.
* Hammet wore eyeliner.
* Oh no they made a country song.

Etc. And most of it is stupid. You don't have to like everything they did or do obviously (I sure don't) but put the critique where it matters.

You only heard about Metallica because they are much bigger than Pantera and they are pioneers of thrash. Everyone is going to complain about crappy ballads from bands, but you're only going to hear the largest and loudest groups.

I just read Ultraboris' review for Master of Puppets. That was amazing. He's so insanely serious about it, you can't help but laugh. Now whether or not that was the way he actually felt about the album, or was just his way of trying to upset the people that hold the album in such a high regard, I guess doesn't really even matter. It was quite entertaining. I've come across some of his reviews but I don't think I've actually sat and read that one. It reads like some angry instructor from a gay reform camp, trying to scare kids straight about the metal they listen to, as if expressing any other emotion besides anger in metal, or specifically thrash metal, leads to weakness. It's corrupting our youth!

Did he ever post reviews for Ride the Lightning or And Justice For All? Or were they deleted or something?

What's this all about? I haven't a clue. pantera started out as a glam barely-metal band, as I'm sure the op knows. So it's not like ballads were anything new or strange to them, at any point in their career. And Metallica were just doing what the NWOBHM bands that influenced them had already done, recording a slow and moody song on each record starting with their second. I'm sure the people who thought 'Fade to Black" was a "sellout" were in the minority even back in 1984 and probably were the kind of people who had just started listening to metal a few months ago.

Well that's certainly an ironic hipster way of looking at it.

He did, and they were deleted.





I left out Pantera's 80s career because part of their modern marketing was to pretend that it didn't exist, since they weren't on a major label before CFH. And when sufficient evidence came back to haunt them, they like to claim "Well we got heavier and more atonal and more anti-commercial overtime" which is what I'm criticizing.

Sure...that's hardly hidden these days. pantera got bigger in the 90s because they had bigger, louder, "better" production and a singer with a lot of personality and physicality. There's no way that early pantera could have competed with the mainstream glam bands in the 80s; they just didn't have a strong singer and their early albums sounded thin and shoddy.

Yea but I'm not talking about that. Reread my original post. If you've read Rex's autobiography his claims support my argument.

Fade to Black was never seen as a sellout song or a ballad, I can tell you. It was (and I guess still is) a well liked song. Cemetery Gates was never seen as a damn ballad either, nor This Love; Floods? C'mon, that song is just not frantic as Sandblasted Skin or the title track on the album... Revisionism too much?

Pantera was the only band in really mainstream circles going against the grain in terms they got heavier while the rest was playing terrible alternative shit [Compare CFH to TGST]. They also had a 'metal' attitude, were rude and energetic on stage, had a good balance in groove and heaviness with some good riffs (not just dumb breakdowns). I guess the involvement/association of Anselmo in the underground and more extreme metal also helped to give a more 'real' image to the band; Dimebag was also a pretty good guitar player and the band always was solid and powerful with good sound both on studio and live, so they were seen as a sort of metal banner that kept the metal spirit alive when metal was betrayed by Metallica (and most of thrash by the time).

If Metallica was THE band in the 80's, Pantera was THE band of the 90's.

In my observation, the hate towards Pantera started when Metalcore started to get some major stages and was more mainstream, which AFAIR was more or less when they stopped releasing material. Pantera started to get so much hate for the groove they infused in metal that was influential for so many shitty bands, just like Meshuggah started to get hate when Djent appeared.

Now, about Metallica... in short they made a lot of claims in the 80's that they betrayed, whereas Pantera sticked to their guns to the end (from CFH at least). Pantera could have made some less heavy songs but those were sparse, barely 1 or 2 per album at max? Metallica dropped all thrash influence in favor of whatever the fuck they did; Pantera kept the metal and even got heavier whereas Metallica just stopped being Metallica after the S/T.

This seems like a thread you'd see on ultimate-guitar. Anyways, yeah Metallica "sold out" I guess, but its not like Pantera didn't completely switch up their style once aggressive music became more mainstream.

Ballad by metal standards: slow and feature cleaner guitar sections. Which all of those songs are.

Yeah but the only one of those that any sane person considers a ballad is Cemetery Gates because, well it's the only one that truly fits the mold. Cemetery Gates totally fits the template of a heavy power ballad, and even the heavy parts of the song aren't even among the heaviest moments on the album (seriously, tracks like Heresy, The Art of Shredding, and Domination are powered by attitude fueled riffage, Cemetery Gates is all about emotion), whereas the heavy parts of This Love and Floods seriously fucking crush. By your defintion, I suppose Phobophile counts as a ballad because of the piano?

And correct me if I'm wrong (I wasn't there for it but I've definitely heard enough over the past two decades or so) but I'm pretty sure that Fade to Black was never considered a sellout song purely for it being a ballady song. The song from RTL that got all the heat was Escape, because that was a slower and more melodic song that wasn't an overt ballad like Fade to Black was (which, considering the fact that the neo thrash kids didn't exist yet and thrash as a genre barely existed itself, nobody really worried about it because everybody did ballads in the 80s). The band did at least assure fans that they would never ever ever 4 srs write a song softer than Escape, which is obviously a hilarious promise in hindsight.

Really though, I think some of the people here answered your question with the observation that Metallica got softer over a period of time when their peers were getting heavier, while Pantera did the opposite and got heavier while their peers got softer. It really just sorta boils down to that.

I've never heard anyone complain about Escape (or at least I've never heard Metallica whine about fan backlash to Escape). and despite This Love and Floods having some heavy moments, they don't break out into blinding fast speed, rather staying the same speed consistency, if not slower than the songs original tempo.

BH is right, Escape does (did?) get a lot of heat. I've heard people complain about that song a lot. Just as an aside, I have little input concerning the main topic here.

I do remember reading or hearing somewhere (I think maybe the Mick Wall biography) Lars admitting that Escape was indeed meant to be more accessible or whatever, essentially saying what was mentioned above.

I just calls 'em like I sees 'em. I have no idea what you mean about that being ironic or whatever. Obviously the review is an exaggerated hyperbolic piece and I was using a similie to express the sheer disdain at display in all its misguided ridiculousness. Whether or not you take his words at face value is irrelevant.

Admittedly, my source for the apology about Escape came from a series of tapes my mom recorded off the radio sometime after Load came out when a local station played every Metallica song up to that point alphabetically, with little tidbits of trivia before every song. I shouldn't put too much stock into it because the second song they played was Whiplash and they actually friggin forgot to play some massively popular song like Battery or Creeping Death until they were halfway through the alphabet

Wasn't around then, but here's a quote from Lars:



And the hatred of "Escape" is probably mostly due to James, as he holds a pretty infamous grudge against the song and won't allow the band to play it live. I know one or two people who seem to hold an irrational hatred for it as well (personally, I always thought it was a great song!). When I ask them why, they say "If you were a guitarist, you'd understand!!"

By ironic hipster I mean you sounded like an asshole who encourages bad taste. You said he was trying to "scare people straight" in metal. It's called having good and bad taste and establishing what it is such. And if you think Boris really thought the only emotion you should display is thrash and anger then you have no clue what you're talking about.

As a producer of one of my favourite old cut shows once said, "the memory cheats"...I really have my doubts it was as anywhere near as bad as he said. Did people complain about "Children of the Damned" too? I doubt it!

Releasing a video on MTV for "One" was definitely a big deal for some though; I have talked to several people who said that signaled the end for them and that they could see Metallica already betraying their ideals...

Overkill mentioned Lars in the "thank yous" of Under the Influence as Lars "Video Premier" Ulrich.

hahahah...perfect. Right time for it too: 1988...

Escape did seem a little out of place on RDL, but I always enjoyed it. Sandwiched between Trapped Under Ice and Creeping Death, it serves as a nice change of pace between those two more aggressive songs.

Yeah, the One video was not well taken by metalheads. Don't remember when or where but I'm sure Metallica stated they wouldn't never make a video and they did. Metallica was 'guilty' of taking thrash and metal to mainstream audiences [in a deliberate commercial way, not just as an effect of their success] and the black album meant the biggest sellout of history, ever.

If I remember well, they took like 5 years to release Load? people back then said they would fix the problem and that's why they were taking so much time for the new album (besides touring like hell) but then Load came and it was a huge dissapointment; the final nail in the coffin for most.

I'll have to try and dig it out if I can find it, but I'm pretty sure there's a very early issue of So What! where it was written they actually had concepts for videos for "For Whom the Bell Tolls" and "Sanitarium" and neither got off the ground because they were too elaborate for the limited budget or didn't like the proposed ideas from the label/director or something to that effect. The whole "we'll never make a video" thing was a put-on and considering the level and amount of bullshit they've openly stated through the years, no one should be shocked if they were dishonest about that the whole time back then.

I was gonna make a separate thread called "does anyone actually like One?" and listing the critic examples of people who didn't, only to realize off the top of my head that it was only three people: Martin Popoff, Boris, and Noctir.

"One" seems to be the song that a lot of casual metal/hard rock fans will reference when trying to impress others with their metal street cred.

"The black album sucks, I prefer One!" I used to hear that a lot back in highschool.

Regarding what I mentioned earlier, about Escape being discussed in the Metallica biography by Mick Wall: I long ago sold the book, but google books has a decent amount available to see.

Regarding RTL and Escape:

"Of the eight tracks on Ride the Lightning--as they had decided to call the album after another of its centerpiece tracks--almost all would survive to become cornerstones of the long-term Metallica mythology: the only exception being the one track that seemed to offer a shred of light amidst the unrelenting gloom, a Thin Lizzy-esque mini-anthem in the making called 'Escape,' its comparatively upbeat message--'Life is for my own, to live my own way'--being the exception to the rule in the otherwise unremittingly bleak landscape of Hetflield's lyrics..." (Mick Wall, Enter Night: A Biography of Metallica, p. 172)

During the time period when RTL was being made:

"The question remained: what would the die-hard thrash fans make of it? According to Flemming, the band 'weren't too concerned about fans not liking 'Fade to Black,' they were more worried about 'Trapped Under Ice,' which they thought was maybe a bit too poppy. That was the only concern during the recording. They joked about it almost being a single song.'" (p. 176)

In an interview with Lars:

"When I teased him and asked if they had ever tried--just once--to write a commercial hit song, he relaxed again and admitted, 'One time and one time only,' citing 'Escape,' in so many words, their Thin Lizzy-esque romp from Ride. The fact that neither Music for Nations nor Elektra had eventually chosen it as a single--the former preferring the more a la mode 'Creeping Death,' the latter not bothering to release a single at all--only reinforced their conviction, he said, that they should never 'depend on adapting to whatever mode popular in music is in at any given moment. We're sticking to what we wanna do, sticking to all the things we, as a band, believe in. And if we can stick to what we are, sooner or later people will have to change their ideas about us and not the other way around.'" (p. 218)

Said to have happened after the mixing for MOP by Michael Wagener, James and Lars was completed:

"Delighted with the results, Michael Alago gave the go-ahead for Elektra to schedule Master of Puppets for an early March 1986 release. He did enquire, at one point, about the possibility of a single being lifted from the album, maybe even a video to go with it--these were still the days when MTV was comfortable rotating rock videos on their daytime shows, although they had yet to actively promote any act as self-evidently uncommercial, at least in their corporate eyes, as the 'kings of thrash' Metallica. Elektra certainly had the budget to try and twist various influential MTV arms, however, if the band was amenable. The band was not. Indeed, over the coming years they would make a virtue out of their apparent refusal to make, as Lars put it, 'suck-ass fucking videos like all the other lame rock bands.' Yet this was an attitude born not of rebellious fortitude but the shrewd micro-calculations for which Ulrich would become far more famous in the American music industry than his drumming. As Lars later told me, back in the 1980s, when MTV was a solitary cable channel, as opposed to the multi-strand, globe-straddling goliath it is today, lording it over dozens of lookalike satellite music TV channels, he and Peter and Cliff at Q Prime had weighed up the various pros and cons of making a video. Star pupil that he was, Lars already had the answer. 'We figured, they're not gonna show a fucking Metallica video anyway. Why waste the money making one then? We knew we'd get more publicity out of not making a video than making one.'" (pp. 220-221)

Good stuff. The part in bold is a perfect illustration of Boris's quote "[Lars] knew that the way to the top was to scheme and to cover one's self in a heavy dose of bullshit."

Well, I'm sorry to offend your sensibilities. I didn't realize you took that review and then my off-hand comment so seriously. I guess that explains why you'd make this thread in the first place. It's a touchy subject for you.

I've never really seen Metallica as strictly a thrash band, in the vein of say Dark "Fucking" Angel. They've always had more 70s influence from progressive rock and more traditional metal, as well as more obviously the NWOBHM scene and hardcore punk. So what if they changed their minds about writing some more emotional songs and making a video. They were still a very young band at the time, figuring things out as they went along. Thrash wasn't even a thing when they first started. Were they supposed to react against the glam metal scene for their entire career.

And for the record, I've never really had a problem with "Escape," but I see how some might consider it a little lightweight. I don't particularly like "Welcome Home (Sanitarium)," but I like the middle section in "Master of Puppets," and I of course love "One," and "Fade to Black."