Getting exposed to old Metallica while being interested and keeping track of contemporary Metallica in the mid/late 90s was not easy if you had no people/elders that could show you the way and you had no money to indiscriminately purchase the back catalogue. This goes on to every "true" metal thing. If you were left to watching telly and listening to radio you just weren't exposed to it.
IMHO, metal returned to grace in European media with Brave New World. The Wicker Man is the first metal song I heard on rotation on "normie" channels such as VIVA 1 and MTV. Then the said channels started "discovering" industrial metal, swedish melodeath, black metal crossovers, featuring stuff such as In Flames or Kovenant. VIVA 2 started covering different kinds of acts when covering festival, and things shifted to true metal alltogether. VIVA 2 was the non-mainstream channel but they were commercial as fuck. Before resurgence of metal in media, they did not show any old Metallica, just constant rape with the contemporary singles. They had a late night metal show called Virus, where you could catch old Metallica, Sepultura, Bruce, Maiden, and the rest of the heavy classics. After 2000, Virus was doing extreme metal proper. The difference in exposure of metal that came in period of a few months was enormeous, as it did not follow the true demand of the people but some CEO spreadsheet that says how much of what goes to air.
Why write this? I'm pretty much sure I did not know who Cliff Burton was until year 2000. Because the shitty hair gel Metallica is the "Metallica I knew". I had no venues of discovering music outside of what it's broadcast to me by the music industry. Obviously the people there did not want me to know the Metallica of before. I liked that 90s Metallica initially but it fell dull after some time. And boy was I glad to rediscover the old stuff, the dry aggressive sounds I heard when I was very young but couldn't figure out back then what it was.
Or perhaps, in this case, the Metallica they know, if we want to embrace the Metal Community - how ever one defines it.
