As Antonio Gramsci argued, ruling groups maintain power partly by making their ideas seem like common sense. This helps explain the political significance of Metallica’s call for disengagement at a time when Israel’s genocide in Palestine demands urgent international attention. Hetfield’s vague agenda of “love, energy and heavy music” ultimately amounts to a refusal to stand for anything meaningful. And that refusal is itself deeply political.

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[–] cobysev@lemmy.world 34 points 5 days ago

Metallica infamously got Napster (the original music download site) shut down, which empowered the RIAA (and later the MPAA) to go on an anti-piracy crusade, which locked down access to a lot of media.

Granted, the RIAA has been fighting that fight for decades, but it was the legal justification they needed (and public support from one particular band) to start targeting individual people to make examples of. I remember they sued some grandma who didn't know how computers work because her teen grandchild downloaded an MP3 to her computer. They put her in debt for the rest of her life. They went after children too.

And this was around the time that torrenting started, which was a convenient way to download data on the Internet without over-taxing a singular computer. But because media pirates were using the new format to share music and movies, the RIAA and MPAA targeted torrenting itself as a tool of piracy, which limited its use professionally. To this day, thanks to them, torrenting is pretty much exclusively viewed as a way to pirate illegal content.

Fuck Metallica.

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