It was a cruddy, unsightly world that most writers "glossed over", or never understood. Or simply took for granted like so many postmodern essences in the marketplace that catered to privilege and a few nods to the drug-dropped American promise like so many duped mp3 digital player files that swirled around in a short-changed vanilla-heroin ecstasy. Poking around like a stork with a micro-cassette recorder, acquiescent-to-a-fault in a den of scowling men where the deeper reality of the cracked asphalt and chain-link fences of a ruined industrial jungle would keep out their soft step and grinning 1960's "rock journalism" ideals like L.S.D. trying to reconcile a brass F.I.S.T.

The early origins of Metallica were harsh and cheerfully vulgar, when irony and violence are the weapons of "the downtrodden". Or it splurges out into doom, occult fantasy, vandalism, and petty crime like a spreading oil stain of black feeling and raw, red aggression channeled into flying-V guitars and a tumultuous drum kit with crunching flurry and pitchers of piss-warm beer off to the side in oak-paneled dressing rooms. A crowd of jean-jackets, mullets bopping, fists pumping in the cigarette smoke when it was the heavy duty reality of speakers and amps and delays between acts on the bill when sometimes bands got lost and didn't appear at all with a hit n' miss proposition of burned gas, angry managers, and empty hands.

Everyone would "try to act like a big-shot", like they were remotely in charge of themselves with the fake ease of "cool characters", if not the nervous sweat of hyper-speechifying, before you retreated off into the murk of self-consciousness "as if you had other business". For out there was the poverty of cracked concrete, stripped trees, stooped-over old men. . . . . weather-beaten, sun-drenched emptiness, if not the scalawag who owned a muscle car and kept handguns in the house as a buxom, beautiful blonde slammed the screen door behind her. It was the pathos of grimy, pop-eyed misfits and the Green Beret mystique of "the killer instinct" as the pipsqueaks gogged and took off down the street and subliminated it all into tapes, records, and zines that had a fixation on "POWER", if not barbarians and phantom lords and demon-swords and crushed skulls.

Pretty gnarly, man. . . . . and no one ever went broke underestimating the wretchedness of the American public. These former teenagers are now very rich men. Oh, the humanity!