In the Eighties — when big hair and small ideas dominated heavy metal — Metallica’s blend of brains and brawn gave the genre a much-needed charge. As their career wore on, the band’s lyrics took on war, censorship, and other political issues metal didn’t typically address, and the group sharpened their focus as songwriters, with singles like the horror-movie stomper “Enter Sandman” becoming huge rock anthems. Fans responded to in droves, buying six million copies of the group’s fifth full-length album, Metallica, and elevating their previous LPs to platinum. In the process, grim-faced guitarist-singer James Hetfield became not only a hero for the nation’s largest fraternity of misfits — suburban metalheads — but also a critically respected songwriter and bandleader. Metallica ended the decade as the biggest-selling rock act of the Nineties.
