Oh Metallica, Give Up and Retire

Metallica dropped a new album this week, Live From the Rocking Chair. It features a collaboration track with Justin Timberlake and Timbaland. Britney is opening for them. Oh wait, maybe I'm thinking of Madonna's death knell, Hard Candy. Whatever, same difference.

Just kidding, it's called Death Magnetic, which I can only take to mean that, at their advanced old age, they're distinctly feeling death's magnetic pull.

I first suspected that Metallica was headed downhill when I read a story about them years ago wanting to work with Bob Rock because they thought the beginning of Motley Crue's Dr. Feelgood rocked so hard. What? Metallica aspires to be glam? Come on, now. Then came And Justice For All. I am probably the only Metallica fan in the world who saw this album as the beginning of the end. Overproduced, electronic, too precise...I stopped listening to Metallica when Lars Ulrich pitched his little Napster hissy fit. It's not that I don't believe that artists have a right to dollars for their music, it's that a band that owes its fame to bootlegged music shouldn't be all uppity about it when their fans expect to still be bootlegging their music...still, they were Metallica, for God's sake...until they went to marriage counseling as a group to learn to hold hands and get along. That was it. If I want to hold hands and sing, I'll join the freakin' Girl Scouts.

Also, it's not cool when a band I listened to in high school is still putting out music for my kid to buy when he's in high school. That's just weird (unless your name is Madonna). Anyway, I'm not buying it. Because it's lame. So there.