{"id":411,"date":"2004-07-11T12:41:06","date_gmt":"2004-07-11T16:41:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/riley\/wp\/2004\/07\/metallica_digs_itself_a_deeper\/"},"modified":"2004-07-11T12:41:06","modified_gmt":"2004-07-11T16:41:06","slug":"metallica_digs_itself_a_deeper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/riley\/2004\/07\/metallica_digs_itself_a_deeper\/","title":{"rendered":"METALLICA DIGS ITSELF A DEEPER HOLE"},"content":{"rendered":"

…The film takes for granted that rock ‘n’ roll, while it remains the soundtrack of youthful disaffection, has long since become a respectable middle-aged profession. Both Mr. Ulrich and Mr. Hetfield, the band’s founding members, who started playing music together in the early 1980’s, are married men with young children. They also behave, with each other, like a long-married couple who find themselves bored, dissatisfied and on the rocks…”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

After A. O. Scott’s inexplicable rave<\/A> in the NYTIMES, I feel honor-bound to warn people off Metallica’s SOME KIND OF MONSTER<\/A>. Not only is it overlong and tedious, (like Metallica’s music) it confirms all your worst assumptions about metal, its bizzers, and hack pretensions. That serious-minded folks can fall for all of this is beyond me. “Process” is already a pretty lame subject for a musical documentary, as has been proven over and over again (LET IT BE being the BIG exception, curious how nobody has ever used it as a template). How records get made can be pretty stultefyingly boring, any one-hit wonder will tell you that. The bigger story here is: how hard and expensive it is to make even mediocre music; how the market drives middle-aged pros towards maintaining, even cultivating, their mediocrity, and how metal has achieved a parity of “respectability” with rock itself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

…The film takes for granted that rock ‘n’ roll, while it remains the soundtrack of youthful disaffection, has long since become a respectable middle-aged profession. Both Mr. Ulrich and Mr. Hetfield, the band’s founding members, who started playing music together in the early 1980’s, are married men with young children. They also behave, with each […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-411","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-main","7":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/riley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/411","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/riley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/riley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/riley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/riley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=411"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/riley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/411\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/riley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=411"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/riley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=411"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/riley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=411"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}