Are the books on the list bad? No. They’re good books.
“I read those books when I was twelve!” Good job, you read smarter books than Lex Fridman. Here’s your medal.
Yes, his “book a week” schedule seems both arbitary and divorced from certain realities about books (for example, that they differ in length). He’s assigning the same amount of time to The Little Prince (a 16,000 word children’s book) as he is to The Brothers Karazmazov (a 356,000 word Russian realist epic). But that’s his funeral.
And yes, it’s depressing to see a humble everyday pleasure like reading books get smeared in Silicon Valley thinkfluencer slime. “My videos will deliver key takeaways with itemized action points! Follow along as I synergize my mindspace and growth-hack my quantified self with the ultimate disruptive tech…books!”
…but none of those criticisms really connect with the larger issue.
This is a terrible way to read books.
Unweaving the Rainbow
When I was a teenager, I listened primarily to metal bands. Upon turning twenty, I decided I needed to educate myself in classic rock.
But I wanted to do it fast. The Rolling Stones have twenty-nine albums? Bugger off, I’m not listening to all that. Can’t I just pick a highlight or two? I wanted to speedrun classic rock!
I dutifully acquired/downloaded a dozen classic “ok, boomer” albums, as ranked by lists like Rolling Stone’sTop 500 albums, including:
Pink Floyd, The Dark Side of the Moon
The Clash, London Calling
Marvin Gaye, What’s Going On
Bob Dylan, Blonde on Blonde
The Beach Boys, Pet Sounds
Across one week, I listened to them all.
I got nothing out of it.
When an album finished, I could not recall a single note. These were classic, career-best albums, made by great artists (only some of whom are now suspected to have molested children)…yet they just bounced off my skull. I didn’t even dislike what I heard; I just instantly forgot about it. It was as though I’d created a dozen little black holes in my life, or induced a dozen bouts of waking amnesia.
I was obviously missing something very important. But what?
Eventually I realized that I hadn’t given myself any context to understand the music. I was basically trying to read an advanced foreign-language textbook, without taking the time to learn the language.
An album is not an album. It’s a record of the world the artist lived in. You can try to understand it on its own…but what if you took the time to understand the artist, and the things they were reacting to or pushing back against? You’re denying yourself part of the experience if you don’t.
If you stare at a painting long enough, you’ll eventually see the entire world bleeding through behind it.
The blue robes in Giovanni Battista Salvi da Sassoferrato’s Madonna and Child would have produced awed shock once. Blue pigment – or ultramarine – was the rarest of colors, worth more than its weight in gold. It was derived from the precious gemstone lapis lazuli, which could only be found in a single mine in remote Afghanistan. Cleopatra used powdered lapis for eyeshadow. Tutankhamun’s mask was made from it. During the Renaissance, merchants would haul it overland (a journey that took sevearl months) before shipping it to Venice. Its piercing color and immense price made it both highly sought after and freighted with mystic significance. Vermeer bankrupted his family buying it. Some artists cheated by using cheap azurite, and then applying a single thin layer lapis lazuli. To a Renaissance painter, ultramarine was the equivalent of bringing out the big guns. “Playtime’s over, fuckers. We’re using blue.“
…all of that context vanishes when you try to speedrun your way to a cultural appreciation. You see a woman. You see a baby. You vaguely suspect it’s Jesus or something. Next.
Critical theorist Julia Kristeva said “any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another”[1]Kristeva, Julia. (1986). Word, dialogue, and the novel. She was talking specifically about intertextuality, but I think this is true of any meaning we take from art. They’re fragments of the world, refracted through the prism of an artist’s eyes and then into ours. They are not self-contained monadic artifacts, and it makes little sense to treat them as such.
We Could All Be Pierrots
When I listened to David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars as part of my exercise, it produced no emotional response.
But I didn’t know who he was: I didn’t know about the kid growing up in post-War Britain. First a mod, then a hippie, then a gay man. Spinning through wardrobes and identities, learning that “authenticity” is a mug’s game, that you can make a career out of being a well-heeled fake.
I didn’t know what came next. Glam rock. Success. Moving to America. Cocaine. Paranoia. Creating Station to Station, and nearly dying in the process. Moving to Berlin. Making three of the most critically acclaimed albums of the 70s. Reinventing himself again in the 80s, experiencing massive commercial success, along with an incredible collapse in artistic quality. Decades spent in the wilderness, before finally managing an inspiring comeback (Blackstar) before he died.
The narrative I’ve told you is heavily bullshit: partly a media confabulation by Bowie himself, and partly my own imagination. It ignores significant parts of Bowie’s discography (where does Diamond Dogs fit in the picture? What about Outside?), and distorts others (two of the fabled “Berlin” albums were actually recorded in other cities). But I finally had a Rosetta Stone. I could finally speak the language.
David Bowie is now my favorite musician. It didn’t happen because I listened to his best music. It happened because I listened to his worst.
Lex and Violence
I worry that Lex Fridman is falling into the exact same trap I did at twenty.
He’s shoving 52 unrelated books into his brain as fast as he can, like an RPG player grinding their third alt to level 55 in time to raid Molten Core. He’s getting none of the context in which they were written. None of the writer’s personal history. He treats books as a fungible commodity. 1 book = 1 learnin’. 52 books = 52 learnin’s.
I truly don’t believe you can speed-run a cultural education in this way.
Imagine Donald Trump decides, in his infinite wisdom, to climb every famous mountain the world. Everest. Kilimanjaro. Annapurna. But he doesn’t want to go through all the trouble of climbing mountains, so he just uses a helicopter to fly him to the peak. Then he steps out, takes some photos for TruthGabSocialGettr or wherever he’s on, and then has his pilot fly him to the next mountain.
We’d consider that a poor substitute for mountain-climbing. In fact, we wouldn’t consider that mountain-climbing at all.
You can’t just experience a thing just by standing at the peak. There’s also a landscape to explore. If you want to climb a mountain, you have to actually climb.
To be fair to Lex, I don’t know in what spirit he’s reading these books. He claims he’s taking notes. He says some of them (possibly the Dostoyevsky?) are re-reads of past favorites. So there’s probably some effort there. But it also feels like he’s treating reading like an RPG stat that can be minmaxed.
What should Lex do instead?
Here’s what I’d do:
I’d go for a depth-first search rather than a breadth-first. Systematically explore one world, and then exhaust it before moving on to another.
You could carve literature into different domains in all sorts of ways. Maybe do it by time. First, read ancient literature. Then the Greek classics. Then Medieval literature. Build an understanding, and then build things on top of that. Assemble a mental picture of the world one fragment at a time.
Or break the world into distinct domains. Western literature. Eastern literature. Try not to let them cross – you wouldn’t hop from Siddhartha to The Plague until you were ready.
Or you could trace the movement of literature by influences and connection points, following it from node to node. One of my favorite literary movements is decadence. It’s a fascinating genre, but a hard one to get into.
First: read some books in romanticism: the 18th century forerunner of decadence. Absorb their vibes (intense emotions, along with a stultified and didactic sense of morality), and you’d get an idea of the soil decadence came from. It has the same sensory intensity of feeling, but makes it perverted and insane and corrupt.
What next? The poetry of Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Baudelaire. Joris-Karl Huysmans’ À Rebours, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Then you’d read some later exercises in sensual perversion that verge on surrealism, like Guillame Apollionaire’s erotic work, or Octave Mirbeau’s The Torture Garden.
“But that would take a lot of time!”
Yes, that’s the rub, isn’t it? Hobbies take time. The temptation to speed-run things is always there.
But if time is your chief constraint, why read the books at all? Why not just read their Wikipedia summaries of these books, and be done in an afternoon? I don’t know. I’m not the book police. Lex’s List is an improvement on not reading books at all.
You have to decide for yourself. Is there value in reading books or not…and if there is, why not read them properly?
Wow! What a book! Prince Harry – whose prose can... | News | Coagulopath
Wow! What a book!
Prince Harry – whose prose can in no way be described as “turgid” and “unreadable” – takes us on a journey through the ups and ups and more ups of royal life. To get any closer to the insides of the British royal family, you’d need to be a car windshield in the Pont de l’Alma underpass.
Why it’s called Spare? Well, it references a common saying in the British royal family.
“A hair and a spare.”
You see, the House of Windsor has an old – and odd – tradition. Due to a genetic quirk, the entire family is bald – and I mean disconcertingly, freakishly hairless, like sphinx cats – except for one family member per generation, who grows hair at an accelerated rate. This excess hair is harvested, and used to make wigs, extensions, false eyelashes, and merkins for the rest of the family.
In effect, the male line contains a “hair” (who proudly displays his locks in public), and a “spare” (who grows those locks behind the scenes).
On page 32, Harry describes the day he learned the awful reason for his birth.
“Father escorted me into the geranium-scented quietness of the Balmoral Conservatory. Once we were alone, he bade me come to his knee, his expression grave.
“Harry, it’s time you knew the truth. You are a hair donor.”
“What?”
Father’s voice did not waver as he explained the history of our family. We possess a mutated CD572, or “anticapillus” gene. This allele is dominant: if you have one copy of it, your body will be hairless. But if you are homozygous (meaning, if both chromosomes have the corrupt CD572), a so-called “anti-overdominance” effect kicks in. With a double dose of the mutation, your follicle glands are hyperstimulated, and instead of being stunted, hair grows at fourfold the normal rate.
I didn’t understand most of this, but I wondered if it was the reason why I required such frequent haircuts. Or why I kept clogging shower drains. Or why I looked like I was smuggling six full-grown shi tzu’s inside my underwear. Or why, in Eton productions of A Winter’s Tale, I kept getting cast as the bear that chases Antigonus off the stage.
And could this be why my brother William’s body – which I’d frequently observed when we bathed together – was muskrat-bald? I had assumed that he was merely a pussy.
I gulped. My life was about to change forever.
p32
The odds of homozygosity for a given allele is 1 in 4, so generally, the royal family will usually have one hair donor per generation. If no homozygotic offspring are born, the couple duly continue pumping out children until they have one. And it seems it was Harry’s unlikely fate to become this donor.
Harry spares no detail on the horrifying surgery required.
“But I don’t want to give my hair to William!” I wailed as the steel forceps gleamed, capturing my tearstruck face. “He sucks!”
“Your locks will grow back,” the kindly doctor assured me, as he injected another shot of local anesthetic into my scalp. “Try to relax, Your Highness. This is less painful than it was in the pliers-and-corgi-fat days, trust me.”
The surgeon began the procedure, which involved removing hair follicles from the donor area and placing them, dripping with blood, onto an embroidered royal napkin, ready for grafting onto my brother’s scalp.
“This won’t hurt a bit,” he crooned.
He lied. It hurt a lot.
Through a crystalline storm of unbelievable agony, I heard Grandma’s kindly voice.
“Please leave enough hair for my new merkin,” she told the surgeon. “The breeze over the royal privates is dreadfully chilly, you know.”
p56-p57
He discloses further dynamite, such as the fact that the Royal Line is the last, degenerate strain of an ancient capillary-obsessed cult.
On the Isle of Man (where the royal line is believed to have started), folk believe in a mythical being called “Fenodyree” – a sort of hairy elf who helps humans with their chores (“Fenodyree” is a compound of the Gaelic words fynney, or ‘hair’, and oashyree, ‘stockings’).
The Manx brownie is called the fenodyree, and he is described as a hairy and apparently clumsy fellow, who would, for instance, thrash a whole barnful of corn in a single night for the people to whom he felt well disposed; and once on a time he undertook to bring down for the farmer his wethers from Snaefell.
Celtic Folklore, John Rhys, 1901
The Fenodyree is also mentioned by Milton under the name “Lubber fiend”.
Basks at the fire his hairy strength,
And crop-full out of doors he flings,
Ere the first cock his matin rings.
L’Allegro, John Milton, 1631
This odd hairy servant appears to be a mythical refiguring of the CD572 homozygote carrier, who has clearly existed for centuries in the royal line. There’s a clear level of symbolism here. The Fenodyree doesn’t just help with any chore. It serves humans by mowing and cutting things.
The Fenoderee went to the meadow, To lift the dew at the grey dawn, The maiden- hair and the cattle- herb, He was stamping under both his feet. He was stretching out on the ground* ofthe meadow ; He threw the grass on the left hand, He caused us to wonder last year, And this year he is far better. He was stretching out on the ground of the meadow, Cutting the herbs in bloom, The bog- bean in the rushy curragh, As he went it was all shaking. The scythe he had was cutting everything, Skinning the meadow to the sods, And, if a wisp were left standing, He stamped it with his heel.
Manx Ballads & Music, Moore, Arthur William (1896)
Again and again, hair-obsession crops up in British history. Chaucer makes ribald references to beards and pubic hair. Lady Godiva rode naked through town, shielded only by her long hair. Henry VIII introduced a “beard tax” in 1535, meaning your tax burden increased in line with the length of your beard, ensuring it would become a status symbol. Indeed, St Edward’s Crown itself is a symbolic, Freudian substitute for a brilliant mane of hair. The nation is gripped by follicular-philia.
It would embarrass the nation if the King was known to be bald. And it was Harry’s fate to ensure that this never happened.
Yikes! You can see why Harry’s relationship with the crown is strained, with that kind of skeleton in their closet! Unfortunately, the House of Windsor has many claimants for hair, and their excessive demands would leave even Harry’s robust follicular system on the verge of deforestation.
We also learn the true reason for Prince Harry’s sudden 2008 recall from active commission in Afghanistan. We were told that his identity had been leaked by an Australian women’s magazine, and the Ministry of Defense feared he would become a target for kidnap or assassination.
What we didn’t know was that his all-important hair was at risk, too. As soon as Taliban uncovered his identity, they saw a chance to eliminate the British royalty at the root (literally), and began deploying illegal anti-follicle chemical weapons.
Rockets screamed over Forward Operating Base Delhi in Helmand Province. We were taking heavy fire.
As parallel lines of smoke arced toward us, I assumed they were were crude fertilizer bombs. But when they slammed into the cracked dirt, there were no fiery explosions. Instead, I saw little canisters bouncing on the ground, releasing clouds of sulphur-yellow mist.
As the clouds billowed out over nearby soldiers, I saw something that chilled my marrow. Their hair was falling out! Captain Murphy’s black tresses were coming out in twists and clumps. Squadron Leader Hopkin’s handlebar mustache was streaming away from his nose like so much liquified brown snot.
Horrified understanding dawned on me. The Taliban was using hair-dissolving chemicals against us! Against me! In clear breach of the Geneva Convention!
I staggered through the carnage, dodging flying canisters. I had to get out of here. If my hair was collateral-damaged, all was lost. The family was counting on me!
I dashed toward FOB Delhi, weaving around snaking trails of smoke. At the last moment, I tripped and fell, and the wind blew smoke over my left ankle. Fortunately, it was deflected by my battle dress. And though the hair over that area is now thinner, the rest of my body is unscathed.
“Close shave,” a NCO said back at HQ.
“That is not fucking funny!”
p580-581
But most disturbingly of all, he discusses macabre rumors which have long swirled about Diana’s death.
We all know what happened in that tragic night. MI6 operates whisked the Princess away, and embalmed her so hastily it nearly caused an international scandal. The rumor at the time was that they wanted to hide evidence of a pregnancy. In fact, this rumor was started by the MI6 itself.
Here’s the truth: they wanted her hair.
Upon her head, painstakingly extracted from mine, were over 100,000 individual follicles of hair, feathered and sprayed and colored straw-blonde. You think the “Princess Di” refers to her birth name? Guess again. It’s actually Princess Dye.
Her body was worthless to the Crown, but her hair was worth its weight in gold, as large numbers of bald family members were demanding my hair, and my body was about to enter septic shock from repeated rounds of surgery.
As far as I know, part of “Diana’s” hair (meaning, mine) was fashioned into the ring Father now wears on his finger, and another section was used to stuff a throw-pillow that is now in the possession of Andrew.
When I discovered this, it was the final straw. I would no longer be a hair donor for these evil, bald bastards.
p1412-1413
Damn! Talk about spilling the tea!
Harry’s decision would have far-reaching consequences. His family members were denied fresh hair implants, and soon, the paparazzi were noting that the royal hair was taking on a thin, careworn look. It seemed to be crumbling before our eyes, like old Christmas tinsel. Several members – most notably his brother – went almost entirely bald. Britain, it seems, no longer rules the waves.
The death of the Queen in 2022 was a short-lived reprieve, as they were able to regain her hair and stave off the ravages of time. But the clock is still ticking. So far, no new double-CD572 homozygotes have been born. None of Duchess Sophie’s issue has the double-mutation, and neither do Princess Beatrice’s, Princess Eugenie’s, or Princess Alexandra’s. Windsor has to win Harry back, or they’ll disgrace Britain forever with baldness.
…unless they can somehow gain access to little Archibald Mountbatten-Windsor. Who is ironically named indeed, because the little tyke is rumored to possess a double dose of the mutation.
Megan claimed in her bombshell Oprah Winfrey interview that a “senior member” had asked her questions about her baby’s skin color. But it seems she misunderstood the line of questioning. They were trying assess if Megan has any history of CD572 in her family line.
So you’ll learn more than you’ll ever wanted to know about how the British royal family works in this biography. Get ready to have your understanding about the house of Windsor flip-turned upside down. Let’s not split hairs, Harry’s autobiography is a cut above the rest. No matter where you stand on the royalty and their place in contemporary life, you’ll find this book to be a breath of fresh hair.
Let’s talk about a subject that’s near and dear to... | News | Coagulopath
Let’s talk about a subject that’s near and dear to every Metallica fan: post-traumatic stress disorder.
The hippocampus is a region of the brain (embedded within the temporal lobe) involved in memory consolidation and contextualization. PTSD sufferers have reduced hippocampal volume, which means (neuroscientists conjecture) their brains are less able to instantiate past trauma as a memory, as opposed to an active, ongoing event.
Put more simply: where most people know that bad memories are in the past and cannot harm them, PTSD sufferers don’t. The mind endlessly relives horrors, spiraling around them like a record stuck in a groove. Again and again, the memory breaks free, pouring out of containment like corrosive acid. Fists clench. The breath hitches. The heart thunders in the chest. The blood seems to scream. They cannot move on and heal. According to their damaged temporal lobe, the traumatic event is happening right now.
Why do I mention this? For obvious reasons: it describes Metallica’s career.
All bands have a story – one partly based on facts, and partly based on public perception. But Metallica’s story stopped progressing in 2003. Yes, they kept on doing things. But for many of us, our subconscious image of the band is frozen eternally in 2003, like a PTSD victim’s memory of trauma.
Once, Metallica made sense. Their early career has a narrative arc so sharp and defined that feels almost written, like a Hollywood screenplay (soon it might become one). They exploded out the gate in 1981, four scrappy youngsters with something to prove. They went on a monumental hot streak, releasing four LPs now regarded as some of the finest ever made in heavy metal. They pioneered an exciting new style (Bay Area thrash metal), and broke it to the mainstream.
Tragedy struck in 1986, but they soldiered on (“back to the front!”), reaching still greater heights of mainstream success. The Black Album has sold an astonishing 22.7 million copies. To put that in perspective, if all of those albums were stacked in a pile, it would be a pile 22.7 million albums high.
Then the next arc of their story began: the collapse.
They cut their hair and lost the plot. They released discs of idiotic grunge rock, played said grunge rock with an orchestra, sued fans, went to rehab, almost tore their own band apart with infighting, recorded “Mama Said” and “I Disappear” and several other crimes against humanity, and generally alienated a lot of their old audience. They spent the entirety of 1996-2002 as a self-parody, stepping on rake after rake, becoming a bigger joke by the day.
They hit rock bottom with 2003’s St Anger, an album so profoundly and deeply hated that it’s actually kind of loved. People can step you through St Anger and point out all the terrible parts, moment by moment. There are fan projects on Youtube that “fix” St Anger with guitar solos and better production. I mean, come on. Nobody does that stuff for an album they don’t secretly admire, right?
St Anger was such an incredibly shitty CD that it hit Metallica fans like a hippocampus-shredding trauma event. No matter how many years (and new albums) pass, our collective image of Metallica remains “the band that just released St Anger, and now must redeem themselves.”
Read the Metal-Archives reviews of Death Magnetic or Beyond Magnetic or Hardwired…to Self-Destruct or Lulu. St Anger appears as an endless comparison. It’s become the reference point that all Metallica albums are judged against. In our hearts (if not our heads) Metallica is still a barely-functional clown-car disaster that sues Napster and steps on rakes.
The problem: all that stuff happened at least twenty years ago.
Metallica has existed for forty-two years. Imagine a timeline of their career: all of the classic albums are packed into the first 16.667% of that line. Cliff Burton died at the 11.905% mark. The Black Album came out at the 23.81% mark. Load/Reload came out at the 35.714% mark. St Anger came out at the 52.38% mark.
Doesn’t that hurt your brain? In what universe is Load an early Metallica album? How can St Anger, the definitive example of a shitty late Metallica album, be at the exact middle of their career? Surely it’s not possible that Robert Trujillo has been Metallica’s bassist for longer than Cliff Burton and Jason Newsted combined? It doesn’t make any sense, yet this is the world we live in.
Time is moving on, but the Metallica story isn’t. Nobody can let that 2003 image go. Metallica will forever be the band that made St Anger.
But moving on from trauma requires accepting that it isn’t your fault. If Metallica’s narrative isn’t progressing, that’s on them. They have to give us a reason to actually update it, and so far they haven’t. For twenty years, they’ve offered up ghosts and hints of former glory (and another terrible album in Lulu), but they still haven’t come back.
With that in mind, does 72 Seasons do the job, and finally end the St Anger trauma cycle?
Well, it’s easily the best Metallica album of the decade so far. But since it’s their only album of the decade, it’s also the worst. So maybe that’s a bad angle of analysis.
It has a shitty title, a bad cover, and music that falls well short of expectations a fan of the classic albums might hold. Like Death Magnetic and Hardwired…to Self Destruct, it avoids colossal miscalculations like nu metal or country music, yet it’s still not a return to thrash metal.
Its basic tonal characteristic is “Load, with some thrash riffs and fast songs”. And even if you want that, this is a flawed presentation of that idea. 72 Seasons is basically ruined by three problems.
Problem #1: The songs are far too long
Straight off the jump we get “72 Seasons”, an absolutely killer track. No, I’m not being sarcastic. It’s one of the best things they’ve recorded in decades. The band is simply on fire here. The riffs crush and slash. It’s energetic as hell, and there’s real drama in the dynamics and performance. Even James Hetfield’s vocals are awesome, and I’ll be damned if that’s a sentence I planned on writing in 2023.
…but after it finished at 7:39, my thought was “that song could have been 4 minutes long”.
This was a troubling premonition of things ahead. The whole album has an unedited feel, like a padded student essay. Riffs repeat more times than they need to. Bridges devolve into unfocused jam sessions that nobody seems to know how to end. At least “72 Seasons” is strong enough to survive overexposure. This can’t be said for most of the rest.
Tracks like “Screaming Suicide” and “If Darkness Had a Son” just meander around, getting steadily more lost in vague chuggy gloop. The riffs are unmemorable, and the band has seemingly forgotten how to write a chorus. “Sleepwalk My Life Away” has an interesting intro, full of coiled menace, like a snake about to strike. Then the song starts, and it’s the most complacent, self-satisfied drivel you’ve heard this side of Load. Just bland groovy mainstream rock that goes on for 7:30 and would have been overlong at any length. “You Must Burn!” sounds like “Sad but True”, stretched out on a rack. Seven more minutes of groove riffs.
Then we get “Fixxxer, part II”…or “Inamorata”, as I believe it’s called. Is that chorus worth eleven minutes of your life? Is any of it worth eleven minutes of your life?
Not all the songs are duds. “Too Far Gone?” is a vocal-driven punk rock song akin to Bad Religion, and “Room of Mirrors” is an uptempo thrasher. Both of these songs have solid hooks and strong performances from James, but even here, there’s unnecessary flab. The band is too big to need to edit, but they should have considered it.
Roger Ebert once described a boring movie (I don’t remember which one) as being like waiting for a bus in a part of town where you’re not sure there’s a bus line. That’s a great way to put the album. Sometimes inspired ideas come, other times not, but it’s always a chore waiting for them.
Problem #2: The production is awful
The album disagrees with my ears in a way that’s hard to articulate. It’s clean and polished and technically “good”, but there’s a cheap nastiness to it, too. Trust me: you will get sick of how the album sounds after seventy-seven minutes.
Hetfield’s guitar tone is overprocessed dogshit. Again, it’s hard to explain what’s wrong, but for guitar nerds out there…you know the sound you get when you plug your guitar into a Tubescreamer, set the gain to 0, dime out the tone and level, and plug it into a high-gain amp? Congrats, that’s the 72 Seasons guitar tone. Really thin and dull, with no depth or chunk or sustain to the sound. Has James blown out his hearing? Even the St Anger guitar tone was better than this.
Once again, Lars Ulrich is mixed far too loud, if we are kind enough to assume it’s even him playing (the drums on “Lux Aeterna” are either programmed or so robotically performed that they might as well be). I don’t hate Ulrich as much as some do, but he’s not the kind of musician you want to hang your entire sound around.
He stands out as a particularly insufferable presence on “Inamorata”. The bridge has a nifty talk-and-response interplay between the guitars and Trujillo’s bass (it reminds me of “Orion”‘s bridge), but I can hardly hear what’s happening, because Lars’s hi-hats are mixed so fucking loud.
Most of the blame belongs to Greg Fidelman, one of metal’s biggest hacks. He ruined Slayer’s World Painted Blood, he helped ruin Black Sabbath’s 13, and now he’s here to deep-six Metallica too. A Rick Rubin disciple to the core, his style is smooth, commercial metal with zero edge or balls. I am convinced he a covert K-pop operative on a mission to sabotage as many metal bands as he can, and I’ll be damned if he isn’t succeeding.
Problem #3: the band has no identity anymore.
St Anger was no misunderstood gem, but at least it was bold and decisive. It picked a direction and stuck to it. But 72 Seasons, like Hardwired before it, is very uncertain about what it is.
Thrash metal does not sound good when mixed with modern rock, and when the two styles are combined in one song it almost tears the song in two. The excessive length ruins the fast songs and further deadens the groovy rock tracks. The attempts at going back to their roots are undercut by the shiny modern production. Everything in this album is at war with everything else.
“Lux Aeterna” is a song I’ve avoided discussing at length, because it exhibits the album’s divided character the best. It finds the band in full Diamond Head parody mode. The riffs and energy and speed are beamed straight in from 1980, and it’s thrilling to hear.
…But the old-school style songwriting clashes horribly with Greg Fidelman’s production job. The mix needs to be rough and raw and drenched in reverb, like old-school NWOBMH. But all you can think about is how obnoxiously slick it sounds, and how fake and processed the drums are.
The lyrics are just word salad that sound like they were written by ChatGPT. Once, Metallica’s songs were about things. Even instrumental tracks like “Call of Ktulu” and “To Live is to Die” had little filaments of meaning trailing off them, inviting you into a world beyond the song. Now, it’s just James issuing portentous mumblecore at you. “Traumatic! Dogmatic! Volcanic! Psychotic!” Shut up.
So that’s 72 Seasons. It’s long, it’s a slog, and it’s only occasionally worth the effort.
Metallica is so associated with dramas, scandals and stupidity that they really need to regain some semblance of their former greatness. Makeweight efforts won’t cut it. If they want to retain their title as metal’s biggest band, they can’t merely just be okay.
It’s just a continuation of the two albums before it, and presents a picture of a band floating in limbo, unwilling to commit to a sound or a style. Death Magnetic and Hardwired…to Self-Destruct run for a combined two hours and thirty minutes, and have about eight or nine good songs between them, most of which are still flawed in some way. 72 Seasons adds perhaps three more to the pile. It’s probably the worst of the post-St Anger releases (aside from Lulu), and unlike that album, it lacks even the bravery to be truly and memorably bad. This is just another milquetoast effort, doing what it needs to do – barely.
As future decades roll by, Metallica’s discography will be forgotten in reverse, starting with their later releases, but with some of their earliest albums being the last to disappear from memory (and St Anger, of course.)
This will not make the cut. The band still hasn’t found a way outside its self-inflicted trauma loop. As noted psychologist J. Alan Hetfield astutely observed in his seminal 1997 text, “Fortune fame, mirror vain, gone insane / But the memory remains”.
