David Lepe
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Photo: Courtesy Netflix
Being an ambassador of a metal genre song is an unusual mission, almost messianic. The shrill sounds of distorted guitars and powerful drums, accompanied by screams that carry dark messages, are not for everyone.
Recently the series stranger things managed to give us one of the best gifts in recent years. I mean to include in one of the most daring and moving scenes of its fourth season Master of Puppetsone of the most emblematic songs of Metallica.
But this Netflix production was not the first feat I have witnessed.
Perhaps the scene in question may not be of great importance to the plot, but its execution is perfect, so the writers are more than forgiven. Thanks to this, the clip of this scene on Youtube, as well as the new Metallica lyric video, have more than 2 million views each. Also, there are already hundreds of videos of kids playing guitar and learning the chords from Master of Puppets.
But this production Netflix It wasn’t the first feat I’ve witnessed about introducing metal songs to people who aren’t familiar with this genre of music.
In the mid-nineties, during a summer morning at the school where I was studying, all of us young people were waiting for the Playback Competition. More than a dozen outgoing students walked dressed as their favorite artists to fight to be the best musical playback performer.
Already on stage, a boy with Afro-American roots dressed in a military green suit and encouraged the audience to dance along with him, to the rhythm of “move it move it/how tasty/move it move it/how do you do it?”.
Later, two girls chose one of the most handsome students and, while they danced next to him, he sang: “It itches/it itches a lot, it itches/and the more I scratch/the more it itches”. The female audience couldn’t stop shouting compliments at the handsome vocalist, who just smiled and rolled up his sleeves to show off his shapely biceps.
I headed to the bathroom as the show continued. Inside I found Natas, a young marketing expert student and heavy metal lover. He was putting on a tousled wig. “We will play Master of Puppets. The whole gang deserves to know it because it is one of the best songs in the history of thrash metal”, he told me, very sure of that decision.
His two stage companions came running and with bad news. One expressed suffocated: “Natas, my brother can’t come to lend us his electric guitars”, while the other, more tired than the first, managed to stammer: “The original Master of Puppets cassette was stolen, I can’t find it in my backpack”.
I froze and thought that Natas, out of frustration, would hang his friends. But not. The leader limited himself to looking up and muttering: “Today that song thunders even if it is necessary to bleed.”
(This story will continue, in this space, in 15 days).
