People usually say they prefer Megadeth over Metallica because of Megadeth being more "consistent" (shit, even Rob Halford said this!), but if you listen to Megadeth's '90s stuff, it's as similar to Metallica's departure. Metallica had Black Album - St Anger; Megadeth had Countdown - World Needs a Hero. Hell, all 4 bands had albums that nearly alienated their fanbases (Slayer had Diabolus in Musica, Metallica had St Anger, Anthrax had Stomp 442, and Megadeth had Risk.)
I guess my unpopular opinion there is that Metallica wasn't the only one that tried to alienate their existing fanbase. All of the "big 4" bands went through a time in the '90s - early 2000s when they went through significant changes in their sound.It was only when I really sat and thought about it that I realised he had a very fair point. Like it or not, all of the members of the big 4 of thrash metal have released albums that challenged their relationships with fans and aimed to appeal towards the mainstream. With Megadeth, it was Risk that was undeniably the furtherest the band had gone from their thrash metal roots, although you could fairly argue that everything after Rust In Piece up until Risk was an increasingly greater attempt to appeal towards the mainstream if you wanted to. With Slayer, we have the somewhat experimental Diabolus In Musica and (if you want to count it as a proper studio album) the punk covers album Undisputed Attitude which caused a bit of a divide among metal fans. And with Anthrax, we have most of the John Bush era of the band, which caused more of an aim towards grunge and alternative metal (if not groove metal). Yet none of these bands get the same level of flack as Metallica do.
Granted, there are reasons I have neglected to mention so far: first of all, Metallica slowed down their work rate on albums to a rather sluggish rate (five years between the self-titled and Load, five years between Reload and St Anger and five years between St Anger and Death Magnetic), meaning that it's easier to get more annoyed at the band for taking their time to release albums. Secondly, they are one of the most high profile metal bands out there and only really gained that status thanks in part to the impressive sales of the self-titled album, so it's perfectly possible to get sick of seeing them all of the time. Thirdly, Metallica made some...rather questionable decisions in the 90's and early 00's, to put it politely (and I refuse to talk about Lulu for any reason!). All of these do make it easier to want to deal a blow against the band. But it gets ridiculous when you realise that Metallica are often receiving HUGE amounts of hatred for stuff that, if you took out the overblown hatred (and, admittedly, the overblown hype), would actually be really cool. Take their gig in Antarctica: when I heard about that, I will admit I thought it was a somewhat daft idea at first! But, once I thought about it, it struck me as a really cool idea! Some comments I found about it, though, would have had you convinced that some people had come to that bit of news just to make the obvious digs against the band instead of actually talking about the news itself (including the ever popular "Don't care, this band has released nothing worth listening to in over 20 years" from quite a few people...which invites the question of why they bother to read news about Metallica if they don't care about the band and just want to make comments about the quality of their material, but hey, this is logic we're talking about here, a thing which seems to disappear very quickly upon the internet...).
This gets worse when you realise the hypocrisy that I've implied earlier: a lot of the time, Metallica are being given flack for stuff that a lot of other bands have attempted and only returned to their more loved sound after their attempt at mainstream success failed. To highlight the obvious example, look at Megadeth's 90's material (aside from Rust In Piece). Is there a higher ratio of quality songs on those albums compared to Load and Reload? Yeah, I'd say so. Yet it's worth bearing in mind that, while Load and Reload were the band just trying something different (the self-titled, admittedly, was confirmed by the band themselves as being a sell out move: they wanted to earn enough money to pay their bills), Megadeth's 90's stuff was a deliberate attempt to dial down the thrash influence in their music in an attempt to gain mainstream appeal. You want to know who said that (if, admittedly, not in those words)? Dave Mustaine himself. In the liner notes for one album (I forget which one, but I think it might have been in the liner notes of Cryptic Writings and it was talking about Countdown To Extinction), Dave admitted being very disappointed that one of the band's albums hadn't made it to the top of the albums charts and admitted that he just wanted an album at the top of the album charts. This drove the band to increasingly aim for a more mainstream sound and eventually lead to getting outside writers, which resulted in Risk. After Risk, the band rebounded to their thrash sound and, at least until they tried a return to their 90's sound with Super Collider, were much loved for their devotion to thrash by a lot of fans, who seem to have swept the undeniable selling out by the band in the 90's under the rug. Yet Metallica's attempt to return to metal with Death Magnetic has done little to stop the vitriol that a lot of metal fans can draw upon for them with a distressing amount of ease.
This all, understandably, seems to me to be horribly unfair to Metallica. I'll admit, I am a bit of a Metallica fan (if, admittedly, not as big of one as I used to be), but it just seems to be unfair to treat Metallica as irredeemable commercial whores when other bands did what Metallica did just as much as (if not more than) what they did and yet seem to get a free pass for it. If people were to say to me (without any anger, of course: yelling in my face is not exactly the best way to get your point across...) "I just can't forgive Metallica for what they did", I'd be happy to back off: I know I don't forgive some people for things they've done to me in my life that, when I think about them now, weren't a big thing and, as such, I understand that sometimes it's hard to let go of anger and hatred when you've held on to it for so long. But it's the hypocrisy of this that drives me up the wall more than anything else and it's one of the big things that stops me from completely embracing the metal subculture beyond the music, as I just don't want to associate myself with the people who do stuff like this. If the only way to become a metalhead in most people's eyes is to be a hypocrite (among a few other things, like denouncing bands just because they're popular or blindly bashing styles of music because I don't like them), then I will refuse to consider myself a metalhead and will, instead, say "Fuck you" to those who promote this kind of behaviour.
So yeah...if you do see someone giving Metallica flack for their mainstream success, you should probably do everyone a favour and point out they weren't the only metal band who tried to get mainstream success and a lot of the other bands have had their attempts to appeal to mainstream success under the rug just because they failed to work. It probably won't turn the tide in the slightest, but, if there are more people willing to call out the hypocrisy inside the metal scene, the scene might stop tearing itself apart and we might find that metal as a whole starts to take more risks with combinations of music styles that will give the scene more of a chance to develop. Because, contrary to what you'd think, metal has not done everything it can do yet. However, a lot of subgenres get a lot of flack for apparently not being "trve metal" (which is, frankly, one of the dumbest justifications I've ever heard for why someone doesn't like something: metal isn't a clean cut genre which can easily be decided as to what is metal and what isn't!), which gives the idea to a lot of people (including fellow metal fans) that the so called "trve" metalheads won't respect anything that isn't extreme metal or by a legendary band. If we can work to getting rid of this concept of so called "trve metal", we might be able to encourage a better view of the scene to people who avoid it due to the rampant elitism of the fandom and maybe find a willingness among the scene to experiment more with music that isn't traditionally associated with metal music.
I can only hope it does happen...I don't think it will, but I hope it does!
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