Gravestone in Rock:
"Metallica NOT Winning the Grammy in 1989"
In this series I will point out a few tide turning events that have done their best to kill rock’n’roll. Not so much albums and artists per se, but rather trends, phenomena and isolated events. The topic of this article is such an event.
It’s 1989 and Metallica is up for history’s first Heavy Metal Grammy Award. The band has even printed up 5,000 t-shirts saying “Metallica Grammy Winner” and the table is set for a giant in metal to collect some well earned praise. The announcer reads the nominees off the list and then we get the drum roll… and the winner is… drrrrrrr… Jethro Tull! Insert Gilbert Gottfried here saying “What the FUCK?” This trainwreck is a monumental episode in rock and metal for several reasons. It really has nothing to do with the fact that Metallica was cheated out of a prize, but we’ll get to that.
Up until this point metal had been a rather quirky side business for record labels. It was a genre that had its fair share of legions of fans, but the metal bands were not as commercially viable as the flash in the pan pop artists that the labels could style according to trends and release countless singles from, depending on where the wind blew. Metal and hard rock was just so hard to get a grip on. Who understood these sweaty haired head bangers in the offices of Elektra, Universal and Sony? Nobody. But they were there, and doing their fair amount of selling. Enough, at least, to keep both label and band happy. Why fix it if it ain’t broken? That sort of thing.
Then we have the 31st Annual Grammy Awards. For the first time there will be a prize in the category of “Hard Rock/Metal Performance” and Metallica is an obvious choice after the success they have reaped with their first ever video, “One”. It’s a bit symptomatic already at this point that a band that has slaved on the wrong side of tracks for all these years gets their first commercial recognition the second they go back on their word to “never release a video”, but MTV was a power factor back then and the deed was done.
The fact that Jethro Tull was even nominated, and even more shockingly WON, further goes to symptomize how clueless the industry really was about the phenomenon of heavy metal. The press that followed painted out the Grammy Academy to be a bunch of clueless bastards and reported that the award ceremony was a joke. Now, we have to understand that the people who give out the Grammies are all from a foundation called The Recording Academy. This is a “club” consisting of “Americans in the Recording Industry” which loosely translates to a middle weight “Music Mob”. This organization is then lobbied all year round by all the different record labels so their artists will be picked for the various categories. Champagne, caviar and hookers are sent out to assure certain desired results and many cloak and dagger meetings are held between Recording Academy members and record label representatives to iron out the details. In short, it's the music industry scratching backs.
The very second Metallica didn’t win, and the press made a stink about it, it reflected very poorly on the music industry for two reasons. First, they had not had the common sense to see how important Metallica had become, and second, they had also failed to see the immense potential that hard rock and heavy metal really had. It was time for the music industry to sink their teeth into a whole new genre and bend it to their purpose. Never again would they be made fools of. Never again would they be found with their dicks in the milk maid. Now started a veritable manhunt for talented, and not so very talented, bands to drag to the top and make spectacles of. Bands that barely had an album in them still released three videos and danced on the Billboard charts for months. What the hair metal bands had already been treated to was now applied throughout the metal community as a whole. Outfits like Fates Warning, Anthrax, Queensryche and Crimson Glory were bands nobody really cared about on the charts before, but, they too, could be styled into poodles and made to release endless videos and singles. From one record to the next these bands changed styles like they changed clothes. The rush of the moment made labels stress out their bands to produce more music, and faster, and the quality sank like a rock to the bottom of the ocean with every passing season. When it was obvious that metal had come to a stand still and there was only so much you could milk out of it, something had to be done. A new wind had to start blowing. So the music industry turned their coat to Seattle, to exploit the new sound that had been going on there for a long time before Nirvana smelled like teen spirit. This was the shit. Just like with all other aspects of pop- and chart music, the labels now decided what should be the trend. This shit was in, that shit was out. Just like that.
Said and done…
All the old bands were either dropped like yesterday’s fish or forced to adapt to the new trends. All of a sudden Skid Row sounded like Alice in Chains, Metallica depressed us with “Load”, and Kiss released a grunge album. The rest of the bands fell off the face of the earth - Badlands, Whitesnake and all the rest of them… Gone. Other bands like Megadeth and Anthrax tried to conform to newer requirements but failed and lost all their old fans, while gaining no new ones. Timeless classic rock or energetic melodic metal had no place in the new era. It was dated, something that never really mattered in the world of hard rock and metal before. Grunge was the new flash in the pan, and was milked to its last drop.
And thus it has continued. Hard rock and metal used to be the working class music of choice. It was a very naked and raw thing that catered to our need to vent aggression, energy, and emotions, but also catered to our fun and mystical sides. It encompassed so much for so many, only to be twisted and contorted in the hands of the Industry into something that anybody who used to love the genre didn’t care about. Look at the charts today. There is no longevity in hard rock and metal anymore. The bands they hailed as the next big thing yesterday are not even around today. The boundaries between metal and hard rock has been blurred into some Prefix Core Mass Mall Nu-Metal that all sounds the same, looks the same, and sells the same. They are ALL on Ozzfest this year. Next year they won’t be.
On the flipside... To make a counter-point, the underground metal scene went deeper underground in an attempt to balance against the commercial attitude of the main stream metal. Unfortunately this has had two major effects: First, the underground scene is very hard to get into at all for the middle of the road metal heads we talked about before, the music is just too extreme - rather than being original. Second, the music industry finally discovered the underground scene as well, and thus dug their claws into Black Metal, Grindcore and Death Metal while they were at it - making those genres more commercially accessible. The Paradox of the Metal Underground - faggified brutalities. Thanks a lot. Leave us nothing.
Rock and metal’s integrity was thrown out the window once the Industry sank its teeth into the genre. And it was all made possible at the very moment Metallica did NOT win the Grammy for “One”, as odd as that sounds. Look at what happened to them after the fact. They released a commercial giant with "The Black Album" and took home the next Grammy instead. After that they never recuperated and plummeted down the credibility scale until they became but a shadow of their former self. They could never find their old groove again afterwards. Metallica lost themselves in the flood. Just like all the other bands that relied on their own musical integrity and credibility to produce the kind of music that made them what they were, rather than on what was hot for the moment. They also relied on their legions of loyal die hard fans to remind them where they came from. Without it they all withered and died, at the mercy of the Music of the New Order, and thus served to drive another nail into the coffin of rock’n’roll.
The Gospels
of Grace
