(Credits: Raph Pour-Hashemi)
Sat 7 March 2026 22:15, UK
For a band that personified the genre of metal so perfectly, Metallica were a bit of an outlier in their scene.
Not everyone in the thrash underground could have made ballads like ‘Fade to Black’ or instrumentals as dense as ‘Orion’, but they were always willing to try something new rather than going back to the same headbanging riffs that made you want to beat your skull against a wall. But when it came to the lyrical front, James Hetfield wanted to give his audience something a little bit deeper than the traditional sinister lyrics that you would get from everyone else.
Granted, it took a while for him to get there. A lot of Kill Em All was all about living the rock and roll lifestyle, and since a lot of his lines aren’t anything that you wouldn’t find in a biker bar or being said by some kid in a Black Sabbath T-shirt, they got the job done well enough when penning songs like ‘Whiplash’. But there were also areas that Hetfield never felt comfortable touching on whenever he made his songs.
He could always tell the listener a story with his words, but did you ever notice that none of his songs was about demons and dragons? Those were the road-tested topics that made metal badass, but Hetfield wasn’t interested in writing that kind of flowery fantasy stuff. He wanted to dissect the evil that exists in the world, and a lot of the time, the greatest villain in the entire world is what men do to each other.
This probably explains why a lot of their darkest songs revolve around war. ‘Disposable Heroes’ is all about people being thrown onto a battlefield to fight for a cause they don’t believe in, and even Hardwired…to Self Destruct has songs about people suffering from PTSD after spending years in the service. But long before Hetfield even knew what war was all about, Johnny Got His Gun was the first movie that scared the shit out of him more than anything else.
Most people would understand the kind of period dramas that depicted war in the worst ways, but the story of a man losing all of his senses and only feeling pain after being stuck in a coma was enough to chill the band to the bone. But if all you hear in the movie was the man’s thoughts, Hetfield thought that giving a voice to him on the song ‘One’ would have been the perfect topic for a metal song.
And even years later, Hetfield remembered the fear that he had hearing the story for the first time, saying, “[My brother] told me about a movie that he had seen, I think the book was from the 1930s. And it scared the shit out of me. I said, ‘But how does he talk?’ He said, ‘He doesn’t. And they don’t even know he’s alive. He is alive but he can’t tell people that he doesn’t want to be alive.’ It’s like the biggest trap. And it brought out a lot of emotion in me. So in the book, he couldn’t speak for himself, so I put a voice to him.”
Aside from giving him a lot more to say, though, ‘One’ is actually an improvement on the kind of darkness that the book and the movie imply. You can definitely hear the fear in the actor’s voice playing the role of the soldier in the movie, but when the song changes from a sad ballad into the heaviest riff on And Justice For All, it’s as if you’re going through the same mental process as he sees, at first looking around and lamenting being trapped here forever and then becoming so scared that you will be stuck in a world of pain for the rest of your life.
Sure, other bands like Slayer and Venom may have liked to talk about demons and the sinister side of literature, but ‘One’ is far more realistic in terms of what could happen to someone who tries to do the right thing for their country. He paid the ultimate price after jumping on a landmine, and now he’s going to spend the rest of his life under the care of people who really don’t give a shit about whether he’s alive or dead.