People love bandwagons, they LOVE them. The thing with Lars' once-chastised past outlook in 2014 is, he was completely right. Ulrich saw the shift in the way business in the music industry could take hold all the way back in 2001 and set about trying to voice his opinion about downloading music being bad, yet because of the overwhelmingly negative media spin on the whole thing, he was roundly trounced for speaking out against the public-loved Napster service. Lo and behold where are we now? What do we keep hearing? That the music industry is trying to stymy the flow of album sales it's haemorrhaging over the last decade. Lars remains a phenomenal artistically-minded individual and it's far too easy to look at a man who spends his entire life playing physically-demanding songs, just to say 'Oh hey he missed a beat'. You need only watch any of the backstage meet-and-greets or the film Mission to Lars to get a much better idea of how the person who powers Metallica relates to his fans and the things said about him.
17. When Kirk Hammett Nails A Solo It's Euphoric
It's quite easy to fall into the apologist camp when it comes to 'defending' Metallica against the mainstream opinion of them as waning rockstars, but try thinking of a band who play music as taxing and varied as Metallica's, yet who can still deliver after 30 years. There's not many, if any, and those that are still going are almost unanimously doing it for reasons other than the love of performing. Back to Kirk though, and yes as with anyone who set their precedent bar at a certain level through the power of youth, it's going to be hard to match up to such a standard once Father Time starts catching onto your antics. At the time of writing though, on the current tour - with the help of plenty backstage videos - Kirk is sounding phenomenal. Everything from his warm-up runs up and down the neck, to his newly-reworked version of Fade to Black's solo that still incorporates the final smattering of notes at its climax, he slays the entire thing like he just penned it the week before.
