When I was in graduate school in the Midwest in the 1990s, I taught a freshman rhetoric class. One of my students shared that he had a friend in the Ku Klux Klan. Another student wrote that he had no respect for any woman who would get an abortion. One day, I made the mistake of bringing up homosexuality, something I knew full well that my students were uncomfortable with; by the end of the discussion, my only out gay student was so unnerved by what some of his classmates had said that he never came back to class.
What I’m trying to tell you is that my students scared the shit out of me. And yet we had something in common: Like me, they loved Metallica.
Back then, whenever I came across a Metallica member saying something politically enlightened (it was more often than I would have thought) in a print interview or on TV, I felt some relief. If my students liked Metallica and Metallica was a force for good, my thinking went, then there was hope for the world.
What I’m trying to tell you is that my students scared the shit out of me.
Now, in the wake of an ongoing rash of mass shootings in this country, I’m starting to think there isn’t any hope left. As it happens, I read Jelani Cobb’s New Yorker piece about American gun culture on May 29, just a few hours before I walked over to see Metallica headline Boston Calling, the annual music festival held near my home. Cobb’s piece stoked a perverse fantasy that I’ve been harboring ever since I heard what happened in Uvalde, Texas: What if James Hetfield, Metallica’s front man, came out as an advocate for stricter gun laws?
Just hear me out.
While Hetfield has always been cagey about which political team he plays on (maybe none?), he gives off an unmissable libertarian vibe. I was crushed when I learned that one of the reasons he moved from the Bay Area to Colorado some years back was to get away from liberal smugness; to me, that meant the left had lost him for good. As he told Joe Rogan in 2016, “I kind of got sick of the Bay Area—the attitudes of people there. . . . They talk about how diverse they are, and things like that. It’s fine if you’re diverse like them, you know? But showing up with a deer on the bumper doesn’t fly in Marin County, you know? My form of eating organic doesn’t vibe with theirs. . . . I felt that there was an elitist attitude there.”
Hetfield has also spoken of his measured skepticism about the COVID-19 vaccine, which, again, aligns with the don’t-tell-me-what-to-do ethos of libertarianism—and heavy metal, for that matter. And yet this isn’t the essence of his persona the way it’s the essence of, say, Ted Nugent’s. Unlike the similarly libertarian-ish Nuge, whose prevailing emotions seem to be rage and disdain, Hetfield nowadays radiates something closer to—what’s this?—warmth and goodwill.
In recent years, Hetfield has shown a blossoming inclination to speak out when he thinks something needs to be said—a perhaps unforeseeable development that’s been interesting for longtime Metallica fans like me to watch. Hetfield agreed to be interviewed for Absent, Justin Hunt’s 2010 documentary about the wounds inflicted by a dad’s absence from a kid’s life. (Hetfield’s father abandoned the family when his son was thirteen.) Hetfield has also been public about his battles with addiction and made a reassuring short video for Road Recovery in the middle of the pandemic.
His plug for a Little Kids Rock benefit may be objection-proof, but Hetfield is not unknown to weigh in on thorny issues. He participated in another Justin Hunt project, this time providing narration for 2017’s Addicted to Porn, a documentary arguing that excessive porn use is harmful. Hetfield may have gotten blowback for that, as he says he did for writing “The God That Failed”—about how his mother’s medical-intervention-forbidding religion, Christian Science, didn’t save her when she was dying of cancer when Hetfield was sixteen—but he lived to rock another day.
Let us remind ourselves that James fucking Hetfield isn’t obliged to be a force for good. He doesn’t owe us more than the occasional decent album and rollicking live show, the likes of which I caught at Boston Calling.
But at some point, Hetfield exchanged metal’s signature nihilism for moral centeredness and all the self-awareness that comes with it. At a recent Metallica show, he admitted to his audience that he’d had pre-gig anxiety about performing for them. This confession led to something that isn’t on any page in the hard rock playbook: the all-band hug.
Let us remind ourselves that James fucking Hetfield isn’t obliged to be a force for good.
And the Papa Het sobriquet seemed especially apt at Boston Calling when, during a break in the rapturously bleak “Fade to Black,” he asked the crowd “Do you feel the struggle every day?” and encouraged everyone who did to look to their friends and families for support. Was this a coded effort, five days after Uvalde, to head off the sort of desperation that would lead a person to kill someone? Maybe or maybe not, but either way, I know what I saw at that show: a crowd in Hetfield’s thrall.
So, we know that Hetfield is principled, has things to say, and sometimes says them publicly. We know that people listen to him. We also know that he’s a smart guy—well-spoken and quick-witted in interviews and an agile lyricist. I would be truly surprised if he didn’t register the inanity of the go-to Republican position that good guys with guns can stop bad guys with guns. They didn’t in Uvalde or in Buffalo, New York.
Something else we know: Hetfield isn’t completely synced up with gun-nut thinking. He said this in an interview back in 2013:
I love my guns. I love that my dad handed them down to me, and I’m taking care of them. To me, though, some of the gun laws definitely don’t make any sense, but also the Second Amendment is very important to me. Somewhere in the middle lies the truth. Both sides are operating on a fear base. As an NRA member, I don’t think we need to be afraid that if we compromise on some things, [they] are going to change so much. I don’t want to make it easier for someone to have an assault weapon, but I also want to be able to protect my family.
What would it take, I find myself wondering, for Hetfield to say precisely this—that this country should seriously shore up its rules around gun buying—the next time he finds himself in front of a microphone?
He wouldn’t be violating the “No one should tell anyone else what to do” libertarian talking point because it hinges on the idea that what’s being done (hunting, getting an abortion, not getting a COVID vaccine) doesn’t hurt other people; what does is shooting them.
I’d rather it not be true that celebrities have more influence than the rest of us, but this is our world.
And he wouldn’t have to pick a team, red or blue; he’d just have to call bullshit—and what’s more metal than calling bullshit?—on some politicians.
I’d rather it not be true that celebrities have more influence than the rest of us, but this is our world. In 2018, all it took to get 65,000 people to register to vote was an Instagram post from Taylor Swift. Likewise, I’m convinced that if wild-game-hunting rock star James Hetfield took a “pro” position on, say, raising the required age to purchase an assault rifle from eighteen to twenty-one, it would persuade at least a few of his fans in states with the loosest gun laws to vote against candidates on the other side of the issue.
The Senate’s proposed bipartisan gun safety deal is a start, but it doesn’t go anywhere near far enough. And Matthew McConaughey is great for speaking out, but remember: Although he’s from Texas, a lot of people see him as part of “liberal Hollywood.” Off hand, I can think of no one else with Hetfield’s multigenerational sway over the very communities that most need to see the light on gun control.
When my students in the Midwest were eighteen—the age of the shooters in both Buffalo and Uvalde—they weren’t listening to Democrats like Bruce Springsteen; they were listening to James Hetfield, and they most likely still are, as I am.
Some of them probably see him as one of them—he did, after all, move to Colorado in part because he felt like an alien in the land of the libs. But the more I pay attention to Hetfield, the more I also see him as one of us.