(This post is also on my Substack page, but i posted it here as well. Thanks for reading!)

When i was 14 years old i was introduced to Metallica.

By the time i turned 15, they were my favorite band. Exactly one month after the day i turned 15, i saw them live. While i may have not been the only one, i was the only African i saw in the entire audience, and one of the few who was not a guy. While i headbanged and danced with the best of them that night, i still kept not one, but both my eyes open in the middle of Buffalo, NY, in 1991.

From deathly glares and stares, to ‘What are you doing here??!!”‘, 1991 was a time where people like me were made fun of (and sometimes attacked) for listening to punk and metal. As i pushed on, i engaged a barrage of, ‘Why are you listening to that White people music??!!’ A teenaged me was not confident or astute enough to push back and tell them about Sister Rosetta Tharpe, (arguably) the architect of the sound which birthed the music i was made fun of for listening to. i didn’t think fast enough to tell them about Bo Diddley (who inspired everyone from the Rolling Stones to Jesus And Mary Chain) or Detroit-based Death, one of the architects of what soon became known as punk rock. i was too busy trying to protect myself to remember to big up Betty Davis, Sylvester Stewart, or George Clinton, who had a hand in moving rock forward to the future, while still honoring its roots.
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34 years later (and one year closer to 50); amazingly, i am still here.

i feel happy to have been alive to see a shift in consciousness regarding the music i was heavily made fun of for listening to. You are seeing more acknowledgement of those who had a hand in its creation. Undoubtedly because of the positions bands have increasingly taken, you are also seeing more ethnic, geographical, gender (and i’m sure ideological) diversity at shows.

And here is where we return to Metallica. The band’s general message has been fairly similar since the late 1990s (and even more fine-tuned in later years): We do not care who you are; we are all here in the name of unifying through music. We are all the Metallica family. This message could not be more evident, as i’ve gone to the shows on their latest M72 tour, and as i’ve seen Metallica Saved My Life, the Jonas Åkerlund-directed documentary covering the lives of folks in the community- a documentary i had a chance to participate in.

The documentary highlighted a diversity of map locations, economic experiences, gender expressions and identities, disabilities, and more. While a band like Metallica has vocally expressed that they “don’t care” who you are; that sentiment holds much more weight when expressed through, for example, a documentary which they greenlit.

Having met all of the band members before; while i won’t get into it much here, it was briefly meeting them at the Tribeca Film Festival showing of the documentary which honed in on this meaning for me. In a way, it was the many eras of my life, flashing before my eyes. It was taking in the moment of seeing the culmination of the needed internal work all of us have done (and continue to do). It was seeing the evidence in some way, of that message.

While people have looked at women going to shows as either ‘tagging along with their boyfriend’ or a way to ‘get to the band’; i think about Kirk Hammett consistently supporting women and girls in music over the years, always exclaiming that “Girls kick ass!”; i think about what Lars Ulrich said in the infamous 2001 Playboy interview, regarding homophobia in metal: “The metal world needs to be fucked with as much as possible.”

i think about how much Rob Trujillo contributed to moving the band toward an emotional balance. i think about the journey of maturity and vulnerability James Hetfield has taken, and his perspective of how everyone on this earth was “born good”.

i also think about how there are some in the Metallica community who do not share these perspectives; there are some who have not taken the same journey of maturity and vulnerability. In fact, there are those who would rather see the upholding of the ‘Alcoholica’ and ‘Live Shit’ eras of the band, as opposed to a group of people who are fathers, loving partners, and let’s be honest- men who are representing a particular brand… a brand which expands into all seven continents. There are people who openly acknowledge they’d rather see these men drunkenly spout homophobic slurs from the stage, as opposed to soberly acknowledging their vulnerabilities and need for connection from that same stage.

Some of these people will smile at you in your face (and consider you ‘one of the good ones’) while writing a hate-fueled social media post about your people.
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If we are to call what exists a ‘Metallica family’; there are members of said family who want to ensure it stays a certain way. Despite there being people from these respective communities in the ‘family’; i have seen the spouting of racism, Islamophobia, queer and trans-antagonism, misogyny and western chauvinism among the ranks. i have seen everything from “Cisgender/Heterosexual white men are the most oppressed in our society right now,” to comparing people from the 3rd world to “animals.” i’ve even seen the take that undocumented folks do not pay taxes, which, if the people who continually echo this actually do homework, would see this as wholly inaccurate.

There are people who angrily type onto social media and forum posts, lamenting the diminished influence of patriarchal norms, and complaining about an imagined ‘gay/trans agenda’,. There are those who harbor animosity (or worse) for anyone not performing a ‘peaceful march of a controlled order’ in response/reaction to the inhumanity of ICE raids and kidnappings, and the inhumanity of capitalism itself… and whether or not they agreed with the actions of January 6, 2021; i am sure more than a few who are harboring said animosity currently had little or nothing to say regarding outright destruction of property in Washington D.C. There’s perhaps little that was said whenever property was destroyed after a team lost a football or basketball game.

There are those among us in the Metallica community who feel that anyone who has ‘escaped’ the country they were born into should be more than grateful to be in the U.S… while they ignore the reason they may have ‘escaped’ is directly due to the imperialist policies of the country they ‘escaped’ to. If the U.S. (for example) funds a fundamentalist group in a particular country in order to prevent (in particular) socialist formations and governments from occurring (aka ‘regime change’)- thus making conditions unbearable for the population; one is going to ‘escape’ to wherever they can.

There are those who look at folks considered immigrants in the U.S. as ‘lesser than’; specifically/singularly the more indigenous and African populations who were born in the Spanish-speaking and Creole parts of the Americas/Caribbean. Whether you were born in Mexico (which is 1/3 of NORTH AMERICA, by the way), Peru, Haiti, Chile, Venezuela, Colombia, Bolivia, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Cuba, Panama, Costa Rica or Ecuador (and more) , you are an ‘animal’ and a ‘predator’.

Some folks who love to simultaneously fly the flags of the confederacy and the U.S. (despite those flags being in direct opposition to one another) look at someone flying the flag of the country they were born into (specifically those flags of the above named countries) as being ‘traitorous’; while laws are being penned and signed by politicians, deeming it illegal to critique a country thousands of miles away enacting a genocide (with the economic assistance of U.S. dollars).

i will reiterate what Bad Bunny says, regarding flags, via the song ‘LO QUE LE PASÓ A HAWAii’:

No, no suelte’ la bandera/ ni olvide’ el lelolai/Que no quiero que hagan contigo lo que le pasó a Hawái

No, don’t drop the flag/Nor forget the lelolai/Because I don’t want them to do to you/What happened to Hawaii

The one thing i have to say is: the very band you are a fan of was founded by an immigrant. The same immigrant who, for many years, proudly attached a Danish flag on his drum set. Given the amount of western chauvinism and xenophobia heavily laced with racism in the sentiments of some members of the community, i can only conclude that the lack of pushback of Lars Ulrich’s status as an immigrant is because he is European.

i do wonder if Robert Trujillo (whose roots are in Mexico) and Kirk Hammett (whose mother is Filipino)- two people who have no shame in their respective heritages- were men without notoriety, would they be seen as ‘animals’ by some of the same people who claim to love the band they are in? i wonder if they will come to terms with the fact that notions of gender expression have never been universally based on western values- and in many cases, those places that do hold similar mores as the west were brought on by the force of colonialism.

i do wonder if these same people will eventually mature, along with the people who make the music they claim to love.

(i should also not have to remind people, but just in case i will: NO PERSON ON EARTH IS ILLEGAL. A DOCUMENT DOES NOT DETERMINE YOUR HUMANITY.)