Dear oh dear, this morning Maidenfan100 was subjected to a rather unstructured rant from me about Metallica fans
Now, before I start - I don't consider Metallica a BAD band, personally I don't consider them anything special, but I'm not going to go round calling them crap.
When I'm bored I will occasionally read the news articles over at ultimate-guitar... although weeding through all the reposts and rehashes is frustrating, the sheer number of Metallica related news that seems to be spammed there is phenomenal. When you read the comments on these you find there is a reasonable mix of Metallica fans and Metallica haters, as you'd expect... but the Metallica fans are so amazingly over-zealous, they act like it's some sort of religion.
I found one reviewer of Metallica albums who no matter what he said in the review (such as "The lyrics were bad" etc) voted 10/10 in every category, on every album. He even went so far as to say St.Anger "proves once again why Lars Ulrich is the greatest drummer in the world".
What has always baffled me about the fans though, both online ones I see and the people I know in real life, is they refer to Metallica as the greatest band on the planet and leagues ahead of everyone else, but when you ask them about the material they say "Kill Em All, Ride the Lightning and Master of Puppets are amazing".. followed by "Load, Reload and Garage Inc sucked" and "St. Anger doesn't exist, Death Magnetic makes my ears bleed and the less said about Lulu the better" ... so basically, they think Metallica are the best band ever, but don't think they've released anything good for 25 years.
My ex-gf was a huge Metallica fan, but never really mentioned them... I figure part of it was because she knew I didn't really like them and wanted to avoid argument, the few times I mentioned them she got frustrated as she felt like I "Wouldn't leave the topic alone"... although all I was trying to do was find out WHY she liked them so much in the hope I may start to appreciate them more... but she didn't seem to have an answer, she didn't even have a Metallica song in her top10, but still considered them her favourite band.
So yes, I don't see them as a bad band, I do think they are overrated... there is a very long time between studio releases and for the most part the past decade is treated like it doesn't exist, and so it baffles me to see people praise them the way they do.
Whilst this post is fairly similar/hypocritical, I think that link you gave just goes to show the type of thing I mean... over zealous support of their favourite band. I'm not even making this post to say "Maiden are better" etc, unlike him I'm not doing a comparison of bands, just bashing one (or actually not even the band, the fans
). Fact is they are different bands different styles, comparing them is a hard thing to do.. but sheesh, their fans make Metal fans look pretty dumb at times.... (although I do wish the band themselves would stop trying to look 'mean' in every picture they get
)
His attempt to justify songs as being "harder to play" with tablature examples is horrendous, sure, especially as his whole thing of not having to move your hand for that solo then gives an example of a 'tallica song which I can play those bars without moving my fret hand... furthermore complexity isn't everything. I like some thrash material (More of a Megadeth fan, bet you saw that coming) but I think melodies are a more 'artistic' thing to hear in music. Speed and 'heaviness' aren't everything.
Err yes... sorry, I'll stop ranting about the table and his friends.