Metallica frontman James Hetfield gave a concert at the Las Vegas Sphere over the weekend, and kicked off with a few words about his band’s “agenda”:
Thanks for coming to celebrate with us. And I just gotta say: Metallica is not here, like some other entertainers, to influence you with their bullshit. We are here to forget about all the outside shit. Metallica’s agenda is love, energy, and heavy music, baby!
On cue, every activist on the planet lined up to denounce the band. My own former podcast cohost Katie Halper called Hetfield a “loser and a coward” and had former Pink Floyd lead Roger Waters on to deploy the obligatory talking points that not only is Hetfield spineless, but Metallica sucks and always has (“never heard anything so appallingly out of tune in my life… can’t play a note”). Waters added:
“I’m apolitical” is not an option. Nobody can step away from this. You are being killed. Gaza is just the first bit. They’ll get to you. Don’t you worry. They’ll either enslave you or murder you. Because that’s that’s their ethos. This goes back, you know, 500 years, to the beginning of European white settler colonialism.
This all takes place on the heels of a related speech controversy, in which the stadium tour of Ed Sheeran hit an iceberg after people like New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft objected to warmup act Macklemore’s “Free Palestine” speech at MetLife stadium in New Jersey. Kraft and Sheeran promoters the Messina Group were on the wrong side of free speech culture to cancel the show, and now Waters, Katie, Jimmy Dore, and all the Metallica-bashers are just as bad, if not worse, for declaring “all art is political,” “art must take a side,” and “‘I’m apolitical’ is not an option.”
In the Marxist conception art either exists in service of revolution, or, like religion (which Marx dismissed as the “sigh of the oppressed creature”), it exists to narcotize and distract the masses on behalf of the colonialist/capitalist establishment. That’s why every wannabe activist in the world today is lining up to denounce Hetfield as a rich twerp who’s a “lifeless,” “soulless” tool of people like Sphere majority owner Steve Cohen.
I grew up reading and listening to artists who came down on both sides of this argument, but was always more persuaded by the ones who believed a) art spoke to something higher than politics, and b) the enemy of all good art is certainty. Chekhov felt an artist’s job wasn’t solving problems but “posing the question correctly,” Auden eulogized Yeats by saying, “Poetry makes nothing happen,” Pushkin said poets were born “not for gain, not for battles,” but “for inspiration, for sweet sounds and prayer,” Wilde said “all art is quite useless,” MacLeish said “A poem should not mean, but be,” and Keats said “we hate poetry that has a palpable design on us.”
What sane person looks back at any of these people and sees reactionary tools and political oppressors? No one. Since they all dedicated their lives to art, they obviously weren’t saying art is meaningless. All of them, and countless others from Baudelaire and Blake to Moe Howard and Louis Armstrong and Weird Al and a million others, saw their vocation as being about making people laugh or inspiring or lifting spirits, and they’re remembered for producing art that belongs to everyone, in a realm above politics.
Of course, to see that, you have to believe there’s something in life more important than politics:
