by Ian Christe
Large and frequent tours had been the backbone of heavy metal, insulating Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, and Dio against the demands of commercial radio. Now the regimen of touring tested Anthrax, Megadeth, Slayer, and Metallica. They had risen through the ranks of tape trading and were now in some cases headlining their own stadium tours and dealing with seasoned crews in established venues. As Nuclear Assault found itself sharing a record label with R.E.M., Dan Lilker remembers the shift—from punk clubs to showcase gigs for music-industry lifers with ponytails and satin jackets. “We dealt with that whole polished thing, but we just giggled a little bit and took it with a grain of salt,” he says. “It just made it interesting, meeting people like that.”
Having savored its resistance long enough, Metallica finally filmed its first video for MTV during the first week of December 1988—late in the game, considering that the album had already gone platinum. The seven-and-a-half-minute “One” was a far cry from typical fare by Mötley Crüe or Poison, which relied on strippers, scarves, and shaving-cream fights for visual interest. A long, grim effort by a band powerful enough to dictate its terms, “One” combined stark black-and-white band footage with scenes from Dalton Trumbo’s 1971 film Johnny Got His Gun. Thus continued the antiwar theme of Ride the Lightning’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls” and Master of Puppets’ “Disposable He-roes"—and the critical acclaim.
However tasteful and poignant its first rock video, Metallica had entered the entertainment mainstream. Inevitable reactionary responses followed in metal circles, the first notes of a backlash. “People overestimate Metallica because they’re Metallica,” said S.O.D. singer Billy Milano. “The whole thing is, Sabbath had that sound fourteen years ago. Twelve years ago they were rocking out heavier than anything today. You can’t even get heavier than Sabbath. Sabbath was the rudimentary of everything.”
Unquestionably Metallica was a bona fide sensation, but flak from the punters only compelled them to stay grounded—to resist the temptation to let success go to their heads. After all, what would Cliff Burton think? As he said in an interview segment from the Cliff’ ‘Em All video—itself now multiplatinum—"We’re not trying to be something big and fancy. It’s just us, doing what we do. Let’s keep it that way.”
Yet while bullet belts and flying hair once provided enough visual excitement, Metallica was now challenged with the logistical problems of entertaining hundreds of thousands of new fans as a headlining stadium act. “We don’t need fifty-feet-tall dragons to sell our tickets,” Lars Ulrich insisted to Kerrang!, but soon James Hetfield adopted Glenn Danzig’s black jeans, wrist gauntlets, and sleeveless black shirts as the band streamlined its anti-image to meet arena-size expectations. Though many show-business traditions went against the band’s ethic, Metallica soon developed a large-scale stage set. Befitting the group’s op-ed page-inspired lyrics, the stage included a towering faux marble statue representing Justice, which crumbled in ruins at the end of each night, leaving audiences to contemplate the decaying state of America’s judicial institutions.
With wider recognition King Diamond’s budget also finally grew to meet his aspirations. His 1988 Them tour saw the mystic metaler dragging a Broadway-like stage show to theaters across America. Incorporating an actress to play the dual role of scantily clad heroine Missy and her hobbling grandma, the ghostly production traveled with a two-story haunted house set, a wheelchair, a teapot, and many pounds of pyrotechnics. All of this entertaining hooplah was topped off by a ten-minute medley of Mercyful Fate songs—a strange treatment of sacrosanct metal classics later aped by Metallica. If thrash metal someday engendered a Las Vegas casino show, King Diamond would be the fake-blood-drinking emcee—wearing his black top hat and waving his trademark bone cross mic stand, like a showman’s cane.
The timing of songs about economic inequality and the justice system could not be better, as thrash metal continued to appeal to an America that was ready to face sober reality. As recession and covert wars came alive after ten years of relative prosperity, the country started to demand music that faced troubled times with strong emotion and spirit. Even the masters of fantasy were turning to lyrics that smacked of social realism. “I couldn’t tell people ‘go have a dream, it’ll come true,’” says Ronnie James Dio, “because dreams weren’t coming true for anybody.”
The social message of Metallica’s … And Justice for All was mirrored in another critically acclaimed 1988 album, Public Enemy’s rap music masterpiece, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. Vocalists Chuck D and William Drayton, aka Flavor Flav, depicted their own bleak impression of American justice, with the band staring defiantly from behind prison bars on the album cover. Public Enemy even name-checked Anthrax in songs with heavy-sounding titles like “Bring the Noise” and “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos.”
Produced by the innovative Bomb Squad, the music of Public Enemy showcased a nearly orchestral level of layered digital samples, including a bite borrowed from “Angel of Death” by their Def Jam labelmates Slayer. “The particular style of It Takes a Nation of Millions came from what [Def Jam founder] Rick Rubin had already done with Run-DMC,” says Chuck D. “We just upped the ante into even crazier music. We liked aggressive shit, and we could rock over anything. The Slayer sample in ‘She Watch Channel Zero’ put a forceful theme to it. My voice with its power and also Flavor’s voice with its power on the treble side were able to cut through the noise. We were never afraid of any sound or any type of music.”
Debuting in 1988 with Straight Outta Compton, the rap group NWA could be considered the Slayer to Public Enemy’s Metallica, advocating aggression instead of circumspection. Like Slayer, their albums required PMRC—approved parental-advisory labels, though NWA willingly recorded clean versions for wider sales. At least one NWA lyric reacted to a ban on the band by commercial black radio and MTV with familiar Metallica-style defiance: “Fuck crossover to them, let them cross over to us.” In heavy metal vernacular: The posers must die.
Like Metallica and its Megaforce Records colleagues, NWA first climbed to platinum sales via independent albums popularized through word of mouth. This harder-edged rap music was a reality check that paralleled the resistant stance of heavy metal in many ways, boasting angry lyrical content and prompting fearful response from the powers in control. “Megaforce was built on metal,” says Chuck D. “It would be defiant, and it would be against the status quo, and it would be, ‘Fuck that and fuck this.’ [Indie rap labels] Def Jam and Ruthless built themselves off different ideals, but they were similar. Independence, defiance … machoism. It’s like, ‘I ain’t gonna bow down and do things the way everybody else does. We’re going to make our own mark.’ I dug that rebelliousness.”
As heavy metal was frequently dismissed on the basis of its fluffy MTV personalities, rap music was widely mocked on the basis of Top 40 offerings by lightweights like MC Hammer and the Van Halen-sampling Tone Loc. Yet across these stereotypes the heavy metal and hip-hop scenes had long been eyeballing each other with curiosity and admiration. Wheels of Steel was the title of a Saxon album way before becoming common parlance for a pair of DJ turntables, and the hardest early mixes by Grandmaster Flash and DJ Afrika Bambaata were built on a foundation of essential breakbeats from Black Sabbath and AC/DC records. The 1987 Boogie Down Productions anthem “Dope Beat” consisted of leader KRS-One rapping over the familiar intro riff juggled from two copies of AC/DC’s “Back in Black.” As samplers became prevalent, rapper Ice-T based the title track to his 1987 debut, Rhyme Pays, on Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs” and later created “Midnight” on the ominous foundation of “Black Sabbath” itself. The influential Jungle Brothers based a track from their second LP on Bill Ward’s crisp drum break from “Behind the Wall of Sleep” on Black Sabbath.
Perhaps the worst aspect of rap music was that in the 1990s its enormous success began to lure talented African-American musicians away from heavy metal. Though stereotyped as “white music,” heavy metal itself was a voice fro
m outside the dominant culture, and in its world race distinctions would always be secondary to talent. The original drummer of Judas Priest, Chris Campbell, was a black Englishman. Thin Lizzy’s revered leader, Phil Lynott, was as black as he was Irish. Metallica’s first lead guitarist, Lloyd Grant, the only band member who could play the guitar solo for “Hit the Lights” on Metal Massacre, was Jamaican. Needless to say, the race of performers was only one aspect of the equation—never especially relevant to the metal spirit.
The multiracial influence on metal’s development was remarkably diverse, if not entirely color blind—even guitarist Slash of the proud rednecks Guns N’ Roses had an African-American mother. Two black musicians from Chicago helped found that city’s thrash metal scene: towering seven-foot guitarist Ian Tafoya of Znowhite, and denim-bedecked bassist Calvin Humphrey of Zoetrope. In Cleveland, Ohio, a revered all-black power metal band crushed posers under the tongue-in-cheek name Black Death.
Underground legend Katon W. DePena of Hirax—a one-man letter-writing hurricane—kept his unusual soaring vocal attack as Hirax developed from power metal to metalcore style. When asked about his unique voice, he cited the 1950s soul singer Sam Cooke as a primary inspiration. On the commercial front there was L.A.’s Sound Barrier, and later the platinum-selling New York group Living Colour. The technical shred-master Tony MacAlpine was among the elite members of the 1980s guitar-god pantheon, inspired by the fretboard voice of Jimi Hendrix.
Naturally, metal musicians in the United States began to explore rap music—taking creative risks alongside foreign bands Voivod and Celtic Frost. Once again, Anthrax arrived at this critical juncture. Anthrax could never seem to resist a new diversion—besides dabbling with punk in S.O.D., the band loved to show off outside interests like skateboarding and comic books. Amid the band’s pile of gold albums, the sole platinum success was Fm the Man, a 1988 novelty EP of metal-injected rapping that followed a lower-profile collaboration with R&B rappers UTFO. Anthrax was aware of the surrounding musical climate “almost sometimes to their disadvantage,” says later singer
HARDCORE RAP
Coming at heavy metal from a different angle, hardcore rap acts in New York and Los Angeles were building tough records from scraps found on Black Sabbath and AC/DC slabs. Rappers were initially toastmasters, who entertained crowds at street parties in the late 1970s while DJs spun records together to form new songs. By the late 1980s the approaches of the MCs and the DJs had become much more sophisticated, turning to digital-sampling technology and opening up a new world for recording. Public Enemy sampled Slayer, and The Geto Boys soon introduced murderous lyrics lifted from the same splatter movies as death metal.
Sounds of the Streets
Boogie Down Productions, Criminal Minded (1987)
The Geto Boys, The Geto Boys (1990)
Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, The Message (1982)
Ice Cube, AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted (1990)
Ice-T, Power (1988)
Kool Moe Dee, Kool Moe Dee (1986)
NWA, Straight Outta Compton (1988)
Onyx, Bacdafucup (1993)
Public Enemy, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (1988)
Schoolly D, The Adventures of Schoolly D (1987)
John Bush. “They were rapping, and they did [the Native American protest song] ‘Indians,’ which merged two different types of music together when that wasn’t a trendy thing to do. They’re always ahead of popular thinking—that’s what happens with people who are overly intelligent.”
But the brainiest union of thrash metal and rap influences was San Francisco’s Faith No More, featuring a black front man, a gay keyboard player, and a gun-toting guitarist who had grown up with Cliff Burton. Faith No More’s sarcastic 1987 college radio hit, “We Care a Lot,” was an oddity that dared bridge the gap between S.O.D. and lighter funk music. The strange synthesizer-based band benefited tremendously from the patronage of local allies Metallica, who trumpeted the band’s unorthodox appeal at every opportunity. One critic joked that James Hetfield sporting a band’s shirt on stage—or, in Faith No More’s case, on the back cover of The $5.98 E.P.—was worth 100,000 record sales.
Tiring of a regime of speed and violence, other San Francisco thrashers adapted mosh music to make it suitable for less violent forms of dancing. Exodus released a cover of War’s funky “Low Rider,” and some Exodus members dabbled in drum-machine jams with Jason Newsted. As Tres Gringos, they prepared a never-released side-project record called Funk You. With the syncopated rhythmic orientation of thrash metal, the transition was surprisingly easy. Leaving progressive thrashers Blind Illusion, bassist Les Claypool recruited Possessed guitarist Larry Lalonde for the party band Primus, a vehicle for Claypool’s vast repertoire of quirky cartoon voices and banjo-style bass playing. Though he had been deemed too proficient to join Metallica, Claypool now found an eager audience as he quick-fired popcorn bass riffs in a Slayer-like flurry.
Soon the eclectic mingling of aggression and grooves became a trend, as the likes of Limbomaniacs and Mind Funk issued less welcome adventures in funk metal. Formed and named in the mid-1980s after a King Arthur character, the lightweight thrash act Mordred later rerecorded Rick James’s “Super Freak,” adding turntable effects and scratching by Aaron Vaughn, aka DJ Pause. Though seemingly incongruous, his tough rapper garb—Chess King black leather jacket, skullcap, and heavy gold jewelry—was not that different from the leather and spikes of a hardcore headbanger. Regardless, the outcome was painfully undercooked, lampooning the clichés of rap and metal instead of forging the two into anything worthwhile.
Early missteps aside, the convergence of rap and metal was a likely eventuality. If approximately 20 million metal records and 8 million rap albums were sold in 1989, many were landing on the same record players. No matter how major-label marketing departments tried to slice up the demographics, listeners were not living in a vacuum, nor were they limiting their musical choices. The coming decade would see a vast development of groove-oriented metal in America, culminating with immense mainstream popularity in the late 1990s. At the close of the decade, however, Faith No More was enough to demonstrate that many thrashers had outgrown their denim and leather jackets and were changing into something new.
While enjoying multiplatinum sales of its thrash opus … And Justice for All, Metallica widened the focus of contemporary metal, bringing on the road innovative metal hybrids like Faith No More, the Cult, Queensryche, and Soundgarden. Save for Queensryche—the Seattle band whose brainy exploits were already a far cry from its black leather origins—these were bands from entirely outside the metal pecking order, largely unknown to the underground. None played metal in the spiked-wristband sense of the term. “Some people think heaviness is distortion, loud volume, or kicking drums,” Soundgarden’s Kim Thayil told Sheet Metal. “They all may have a place in warranting a heavy sound, but above all it’s got to be mind-bending.”
The real thing: Faith No More in 1989 (Concrete)
Soon Kerrang! felt it needed a new mandate befitting the changing times, and countless pages once dedicated to Saxon and Iron Maiden were revamped
FUNK METAL
The syncopated rhythms of thrash metal mixed well with the layered drum rhythms of hardcore rap music. For anyone inspired to overlay the two, the pair was a match made in heaven. In the rush to recombine the differing styles, however, funk metal often became a slipshod fallback for bands tired of copying Metallica. Primus, whose complex songwriting advanced over several humor-laced albums, survived the brief trend. Faith No More leaned more heavily on its rock side over time. The glad-handing Mind Funk, Limbomaniacs, and Mordred all bit the dust. But ten years later MTV viewers would learn that those who do not learn from history are doomed to tune down and repeat it.
Dancing Fools
Anthrax, I’m the Man (1987)
Faith No More, Introduce Yourself (198)
Fishbone, Truth & Soul (1988)
Infectious Grooves,
The Plague That Makes Your Booty Move (1991)
Limbomaniacs, Stinky Grooves (1990)
Mind Funk, Mind Funk (1991)
Mordred, Fools Game (1989)
Primus, Frizzle Fry (1990)
Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Uplift Mofo Party Plan (1987)
24-7 Spyz, Gumbo Millennium (1990)
and surrendered to Metallica, Faith No More, and occasionally Napalm Death, the pulse of the underground. As the introduction of new singer Mike Patton in 1989 ushered in a more streamlined sound, Faith No More’s The Real Thing became a sleeper hit, sneaking up on Billboard one year after its release. Wrote Kerrang!, “It was finally the album to smash down the walls after a decade of generally average banality. Faith No More had made Metal something great again.”
Faith No More was certainly opening the windows and airing out the castle, but its panoramic perspective was founded on ten years of amazing, fist-waving advances. Kerrang! did a disservice to its heritage by throwing the baby out with the well-used bathwater. “Kerrang! in the early days was important, because it focused only on heavy metal music,” says Ronnie James Dio. “They embraced Dio rapidly, and we were on the cover quite a few times. Then they decided we’d had enough success. Eventually Kerrang! became Kerrap! to a lot of people. I know the feelings Iron Maiden have about them. I don’t think they’ll play in England at all, just because of the British press. I think the good writers went away, and the guys who had been making the tea became the writers.”