Salon.com > Brian Lew http://www.salon.com Wed, 30 May 2012 09:00:00 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 Metallica, how could you? http://www.salon.com/2000/05/09/metallica_fan/ http://www.salon.com/2000/05/09/metallica_fan/#comments Tue, 09 May 2000 16:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/log/2000/05/09/metallica_fan "We'll never stop, we'll never quit/'Cause you're Metallica!"

That's the war cry of fan camaraderie Metallica's James Hetfield conjures up
when the band performs their anthem "Whiplash." In 18 years href="http://www.salon.com/ent/feature/2000/04/24/only_ones/index.html">Metallica
has risen from an obscure underground band to one of rock's most
perennially successful groups.

Today, "indie" doesn't mean much of anything; back then, it did. In the early
1980s, before Metallica even recorded their debut album, the band had
established a worldwide following via an underground tape-trading network.
In modern parlance, we would call it illegal and unrestricted copying and
distribution of their songs; the recent announcement of Metallica's lawsuit
against href="/tech/col/rose/2000/02/04/napster_swap/index.html">Napster
and various colleges on the grounds of copyright infringement by users of
Napster's software struck me as stunningly ironic in light of the band's
history.

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