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u/Lombard333 6h ago
If Hayley Williams said she loved Trump, they would be salivating about how more people need to take that stance. They’re hypocrites, pure and simple. If a guy stopped a concert to yell conservative bullshit, I’d still think it was bullshit, but I wouldn’t be against him using his platform to make that stance.
As a side note, the whole “this new trend” thing is also bullshit. Artists have been making political statements onstage since the whiner in chief was a twinkle in his dad’s eye.
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u/drewpunck 5h ago
Woody Guthrie was singing political songs about Trump's dad when Donald was just a twinkle in his dad's eye.
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u/Azair_Blaidd 6h ago
Yeah, I wonder what these people think about Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan
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u/ChillaVen 6h ago edited 5h ago
They ignore their (Dylan’s & Cash’s) values and pretend they would’ve condoned bigotry. Historical revisionism at its finest.
(edited for clarity)
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u/cheshsky 4h ago
I can't even begin to imagine the mental gymnastics. Cash sang All of God's Children Ain't Free, for fuck's sake. It's in the songs. How tight of a blindfold does one have to be wearing?
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u/a__nice__tnetennba 3h ago
There are people in their 40s who grew up listening to Rage Against the Machine as teenagers and were genuinely upset to learn in the 2020s that they are political and liberal.
So I'd say the blindfolds are on pretty fucking tight.
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u/BrokenEyeReborn 4h ago
Heck, I'm nobody and the only reason I don't do political art is because I work so damn slow and by the time I finish, the current events I wanted to comment on have become recent history. Sometimes even before I properly start.
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u/tearsonurcheek 2h ago
Punk has been a thing since the 70s. Protest music for far longer than that.
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u/forlackofabetterpost 5h ago
Who is "They"?
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u/arkiparada 3h ago
Reading comprehension is hard isn’t it? Who do you think would be salivating if someone said “I love Trump”. Certainly progressives right? /s because clearly you’re a plank.
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u/ObscureOP 6h ago
good music is inherently revolutionary and anti-authoritarian.
We've known who Metallica is since Napster
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u/N0N0TA1 3h ago
Metallica is apparently the type of band that does not think those are the droids they're looking for.
Edit: ngl I fuck w a few of their old trax, but yeah...sad they're so easily swayed
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u/tearsonurcheek 2h ago
Not just early Metallica (anti-war, capital punishment, etc), but look at Robert Trujillo's work with Suicidal Tendencies (Lights...Camera...Revolution!, The Art Of Rebellion, Suicidal For Life).
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u/No_Aesthetic 5h ago
I thought we all love IP now because of AI being bad?
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u/justsayfaux 5h ago
The issue wasn't about IP protection - the issue was about suing the fans and the way Lars spoke about the issue.
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u/No_Aesthetic 5h ago
Fans were violating IP protections by stealing/distributing their IP. What the fuck do you think they were doing? Just suing people for liking them? And who cares how Lars was speaking about it? He was right! Album sales barely exist anymore! Artists barely making shit from Spotify!
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u/justsayfaux 5h ago
The point I'm making is that people weren't mad about the IP issue, they were mad that Lars Ulrich was suing kids and vilifying fans for doing effectively what people had been doing for decades.
I'm old enough to remember the record industry making a big stink with dubbing tapes and CD-Rs saying it would "destroy the industry" and it didn't. He was making the wrong argument and taking the wrong legal actions.
Now he (and everyone else) are stuck with Spotify and other streamers paying a pittance for spins and people still aren't buying records, but Lara is doing just fine. The music economy changed, and it wasn't (as Lars tried to make it) about the fans and kids sharing MP3s online.
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u/No_Aesthetic 4h ago
What did you think IP protection meant? Vibes? Essays?
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u/justsayfaux 3h ago
Let me simplify this for you:
People weren't mad at Lars Ulrich because they thought IP protection was wrong. They were mad at him because of his condescending attitude towards fans and his approach to suing kids.
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u/No_Aesthetic 3h ago
So you're not happy with vibes and essays and you're not happy with legal action. What are you happy with? What should he have done, exactly?
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u/justsayfaux 3h ago
What are you talking about? Vibes? Essays? I feel like you're arguing with yourself about a conversation happening somewhere else.
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u/No_Aesthetic 3h ago
I'm saying nobody has thought about how their opinions contradict on these subjects.
Lars defends his IP aggressively with public statements and lawsuits against people distributing it on the internet.
Bad guy.
NYT sues random AI companies for data that is being trained on, not redistributed.
Good guy.
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u/CedarRapidsDSA 5h ago
Album sales/streaming numbers have not made up the lion‘s share of artists‘ income for decades now, all the profits are in tours and merch.
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u/No_Aesthetic 5h ago
Metallica was still pulling millions from their albums at the time.
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u/16BitGenocide 5h ago
Weird how nobody was complaining when people were dubbing tapes.
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u/justsayfaux 4h ago edited 4h ago
Oh, but they were. "Home Taping Is Killing Music" was a whole campaign in the early 80s.The RIAA & labels were trying to bribe Congress to make laws about it - adding prohibitive taxes to blank media to be paid to the labels, and even suing the manufacturers of tape decks and blank.
You may remember the old FBI Warning at the beginning of VHS tapes - similar kind of thing.
They eventually got the AHRA passed to tax consumers for buying blank media, but most of their efforts to sue failed.
Many artists supported the ability of their fans to share music, maybe most famously the Dead Kennedys.
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u/kimmy_kimika 5h ago
I mean, people absolutely were, but there was no way to track that at all.
Famously, I believe Dead Kennedys put out a cassette tape with a blank side so you could record whatever on it as a Punk pushback to the bitching about recording from the radio.
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u/16BitGenocide 5h ago
Metallica's early success was enormously helped by people trading tapes. This is pretty well known to all the oldhead thrash fans.
Hell some of those early bootleg tapes are worth a small fortune to collectors now
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u/kimmy_kimika 4h ago
Exactly, which is why their hard stance against Napster sort of felt like a betrayal to their roots.
In the modern day I get it, it's very difficult to make money as a band unless you're touring and selling merch, as streaming pays a pittance, but at the time of Napster, most of us were still buying albums, and Metallica was one of the biggest bands in the world.
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u/ObscureOP 1h ago
Kids getting to listen to your art is different than corporations profiting off your art
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u/No_Aesthetic 1h ago
Bullshit. You're special pleading here because you hate AI and Metallica. If anything, AI companies are doing a lot better because they are not literally taking your IP and giving it away for free to literally everyone, costing you money. NYT has never lost a dime on ChatGPT text. Not one.
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u/ObscureOP 59m ago
Oh yeah, people surely didn't write all those articles or draw all those pictures on Google before OpenAI indexed and regurgitated them. Silly me, what am I thinking.
Please don't cry. I'm so, so sorry daddy
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u/No_Aesthetic 57m ago
You can't reproduce a NYT article from prompting ChatGPT anymore than you can do it from prompting me.
People were literally costing Metallica (and the rest of the music industry) sales.
So let's reconcile this bit: IP protection for all (Metallica and NYT) or are we throwing IP out the window (kids and AI)?
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u/inputrequired 6h ago
These guys wrote Disposable Heroes, Holier Than Thou and …And Justice For All btw.
It’s a hard life being a woke leftist supersoldier Metallica fan 😔🤙🏻
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u/Prtyvacant 6h ago edited 6h ago
I'm honored to say that I own every Metallica album but I haven't given them a dime.
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u/chernobyl_pondwater 5h ago
Of course, they had to depict Hayley Williams as an unpleasant shrieking harpy while Macklemore looks relatively normal. Typical with these types, the moment a woman doesn’t stay agreeable to them, the first thing they attack is her appearance.
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u/Ortegzin 6h ago
I guess Dolly Parton sorta avoided talking about politics too, but at least she let her actions and advocacy speak for themselves.
It's kinda funny though that their silence on matters is signaling complicity to a group that desperately wants celebrity support for their views.
Reminds me of that time Chance the Rapper tweeted that black folk can be Republican too, and then had to really clarify that he doesn't fuck with Trump when people thought it meant he was politically conservative
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u/DarthVader808 5h ago
This the same band who played “Master of Puppets” “one” “leper messiah”? Those seem political.
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u/Thamnophis660 5h ago
I mean Kid Rock. That's the only counterpoint that needs to be made.
Hetfield's larger point is he wants to make more money. He's not going to take a stance because he's rich enough to be shielded from most political outcomes that affect commone people, and he'd like to keep it that way. So of course he's gonna act "above it all." Music in general and rock in particular has always been one of the more political art forms. Like it or not.
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u/curtmandu 4h ago
He said that, as a member of the band whose most popular singles are political?? One is based off of an antiwar novel written by a communist ffs!
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u/themurderator 5h ago
'growing trend' is hilarious. what a novel thing it is, musicians using their art to protest or promote things they disagree or agree with.
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u/Maaaat_Damon 5h ago
Uhm is anyone going to tell him about the story they told of the horrors of war when they wrote One? Or how Justice For All is saying that justice is lost, graped, and gone?
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u/modsuperstar 6h ago
If you’re not willing to take a side, or are embarrassed to do so, we assume MAGA.
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u/The-F4LL3N 5h ago
We stand for nothing. Fuck yeah! Woooooo! THIS IS HOW I DISAPPEEEEEAAAAAAAHHHHHHH boom wayaaaooww boom boom waaayaaaooww
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u/qosthanatos 5h ago
Metallica hasn’t been heavy for at least 20 years, lol
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u/16BitGenocide 5h ago
35 years by my count. They sold out in 1991.
All they care about is money. It's always about the brand, not about the music.
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u/dinkmoyd 3h ago
all these “keep politics out of art” are seriously the stupidest and illiterate people alive
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u/Reckless_Waifu 1h ago
Rock, punk and metal are famously apolitical, right? Especially thrash metal which is the genre that gave rise to Metallica...
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u/lemurcatta85 4h ago edited 4h ago
What’s funny is “Christian nationalism is the biggest threat to this country” is VERY similar to a quote from a DHS publication that I cited in my dissertation. I’m just too lazy to go search it out, and I suspect the site got taken down.
ETA: 2023 DHS threat assessment, which is no longer listed here
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u/SomeGuyNamedJason 2h ago
Fuck that hypocrite. Imagine saying dumb shit like this when you have one of the most famous political songs in rock history in your repertoire. Fucking moron.
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u/vadvaro10 1h ago
I'll bite. What's the song?
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u/SomeGuyNamedJason 1h ago
I'd wager they have others, but the one I was talking about is One, it is one of the most famous and powerful anti-war songs of all time.
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u/stopped_watch 6h ago
"We're not going to do anything political. Anyway, here's our anti-war song Disposable Heroes from our anti-war album Master of Puppets, with the anti-war art depicting crosses of dead soldiers held by strings!"