JOHN THE OBSCURE ™

© 2010

Free Speech for the Dumb: How Metallica Sang—And Redeemed—A Racist Song

Metallica’s original set list included a blatantly racist song that had famed frontman James Hetfield barking “nigger.”

I don’t know which is more astonishing: that ugly truth, or the fact that virtually no one in the world-famous band’s 30-year history has remarked upon it.

My moment of musical awakening came metal-plated in the form of Metallica’s “Fight Fire with Fire,” a song of such fearsome new dimensions that my virgin ears literally could not comprehend how human beings made those sounds, leaping off a cheap, squeaky, pirated cassette tape borrowed from a friend of a friend. It was unimaginable to me that something so gloriously terrifying could exist any way other than this: as a subterranean revolution, a tribal secret, a bad influence the girls would never bring home to Mom.

Today, Metallica is one of the most famous and most accessible bands in history. My mom has seen and heard them on mainstream TV, and yours probably has, too. The band members’ personal lives were self-vivisected in a hit documentary movie. They break a string in Bulgaria, somebody will have it on YouTube within the day. What is unimaginable today is that Metallica could do anything vaguely noteworthy that would not be discussed around the world in tedious detail.

Yet the overt racism in “Killing Time”—a cover of a song by the Northern Ireland band Sweet Savage—has gone unremarked in books and magazines, and garners only about 20 Google hits of fan chatter, half of them in Russian.¹

Thus, also unnoticed is that when Metallica made “Killing Time” famous via an official recording a decade later, it did so with a discretely de-racialized version with altered lyrics. And now the reformed—literally and morally—Sweet Savage itself now performs this cleansed version of its belated hit without comment on its vicious past.

I discovered the secrets of “Killing Time” the old-fashioned way—by good, hard whim. Last week, I felt the immediate need to hear one of Metallica’s many cover songs, but realized that I have heard most of them umpteen times and am burned out. I quickly recalled a lesser-known one: “Killing Time,” which I first heard as the B-side to the “Unforgiven” single in 1991. (It became better known from its reappearance on the 1998 album “Garage Inc.”) YouTube to the rescue.

The lyrics of “Killing Time” tell an impressionistic tale of a bloody military retreat. The imagery is martial, but the lyrics make one allusion to street crime: “Like a killer kid with a switchblade knife/Nasty word, he’ll take your life.”²

Having refreshed my memory of this cheery little number, I realized that I had never heard the original version. No surprise; Sweet Savage was incredibly obscure in my day, and “Killing Time” was the B-side of an unobtainable 1981 single.³ Before Metallica gave it the share-the-wealth treatment, the band was known only as a footnote on the résumé of Vivian Campbell, the guitarist who went on to fame with Dio, Whitesnake and Def Leppard. But nothing is unobtainable in the YouTube era. Click click. Voila.⁴

With its buzzsaw rhythm, creative harmonics and rock-’n’-roll swing, the original “Killing Time” obviously had a significant influence on young Metallica. Equally obvious is that it had a very different rendition of the street-crime lyric: “Like a nigger kid with a switchblade knife.” And no doubt about the slur—the line is repeated once for good measure.

My jaw dropped. If you’re a fan of blue-collar angry music, you learn to hold your nose over certain slurs and idiocies—from others and from yourself. But “nigger” is strong and rare stuff even in the underground. My first instinct was to be grateful that Metallica altered the line.

But then another memory tickled my lobes. Didn’t Metallica record an earlier cover of “Killing Time” on one of its first demos? Those used to be untouchable, too. When I was a hardcore Metallifan in 1986, the demo lore hadn’t been sorted out and canonized with informal titles, aside from the fabled “No Life ’til Leather,” which in any case no one owned.

Today there is Wikipedia and YouTube, so I easily confirmed that Metallica indeed performed “Killing Time” on what is now called “Ron McGovney’s ’82 Garage Demo” (1982).⁵ And there was Hetfield singing “nigger.”⁶ That was far more shocking and disappointing than hearing the word from Sweet Savage.

But that is so precisely because Metallica are not racists, as clearly demonstrated everywhere from the band’s off-stage lives to its own membership. The same year they recorded the “Killing Time” demo, Metallica employed a black Jamaican guitarist, Lloyd Grant, to invent a solo for a studio recording of their trademark song, “Hit the Lights”—a solo they liked enough to retain forever.⁷ On that demo, what we’re hearing is a young band respectfully (perhaps too respectfully) reciting someone else’s words.

In 1991, Metallica was hellbent on going pop, so it may well be that it bowdlerized “Killing Time” for the “Unforgiven” single partly out of commercial interest. But I think it was mostly a grown-up band’s genuine distaste for repeating such a vile word in such a pointless way. Tellingly, Sweet Savage itself tacitly agrees.

So powerful is a nod from the kings of metal, Sweet Savage found enough new fan interest to regroup in 1996 and issue its first full album, a cash-in affair titled “Killing Time.” The title track was a re-recording of the 1981 single—and it used Metallica’s “killer kid” version rather than the original racist lyrics.⁸ Sweet Savage is still touring today, and still using Metallica’s lyric, apparently without explanation or apology.⁹ (Sweet Savage did not respond to my request for comment.)

Indeed, “nigger kid” has been flushed down the memory hole. Look up the lyrics to Sweet Savage’s “Killing Time” online, and you’ll only find the “killer kid” version, in a monumental retconning of the Metalliverse.

I remain astonished that Metallica and Sweet Savage got away with this virtually unseen. Contrast with the shitstorm that erupted in the same era when Slayer (another prominent, but much less famous, metal band) covered Minor Threat’s “Guilty of Being White” and altered the lyrics to give them a vague white-supremacy air. It’s a different situation: Slayer made a song more racist, and drew condemnation rather than acquiescence from the original band.¹⁰ But Slayer has never said “nigger,” or anything close to it, on tape. Metallica has, and its alteration was a cleaning up of its own mess.

Did Metallica do the right thing in censoring “Killing Time”? My gut instinct is to say yes to that fade from black, and my only initial objection is aesthetic. Long before I knew the origin of the line, “killer kid” sounded off to me. A simile should refer to something familiar for comparison, and a killer kid is not something familiar. Despicable as it is, “nigger kid” at least makes it own kind of sense. Were I playing censor, I’d substitute with “mugger kid,” which preserves both the general sound and sense of the original. (Then again, perhaps it sounds too much like “nigger” and might be misheard in a way that actually creates controversy once again.)

But there is a bigger artistic question here, and one every band must ask when it performs a cover song. How much change is too much change? How much do you respect the original artists’ truth, and how much do you make it your own? Though we may not want to hear it, there is truth in “Like a nigger kid with a switchblade knife”—perhaps not an objective truth, but an impressionistic truth from white youths on the streets of Belfast in 1979.

The two extant Metallica versions of “Killing Time” both take essentially the same aesthetic tactic: homage. Musically, they are identical to the Sweet Savage version. On the 1982 demo, the lyrics are straight repeats. On the 1991 studio version, the lyrics are only slightly tweaked to cover the only artistic gap: Sweet Savage was a racist band, and Metallica is not.

An homage should keep the original intact, that being the point. If Metallica could not bring itself to repeat “nigger” again, perhaps it should not have covered the song at all, or done more to make it a Metallica song. But what really rubs me wrong is the dishonesty and sneakiness of the lyric change rather than saying, somewhere, somehow, that this used to be severely racist and no longer is. Metallica is a band that comments prolifically on its opus and its inspirations, and is vehemently anti-censorship.¹¹ Sweet Savage is a legacy act living off its past. If anti-racism is the new truth added to this old mix, then it is untrue to not be open about it.

That being said, Metallica faced a unique challenge with “Killing Time,” which may be the only mainstream-ish rock song to use “nigger” in an unironic, casually racist way. The word “nigger” is extremely rare in white pop music. Barring the deep underground of white power bands, the only examples I can think of are self-consciously political. Patti Smith’s “Rock N Roll Nigger” and John Lennon’s “Woman Is the Nigger of the World” have been banned outright, but no one would think of changing the key word in cover versions—the songs’ meanings would evaporate.

Perhaps the closest comparison is the punk band Dead Kennedy’s “Holiday in Cambodia.” A scathing indictment of the crypto-racism and -classism of white liberals, it includes the lyric, “Braggin’ that you know how the niggers feel the cold/And the slum’s got so much soul.” Like most of the DK’s shocking sarcasm, that line went over the heads of fools and cowards. “Holiday in Cambodia” has been covered on albums by several bands, which invariably censor “niggers.” Ironically, that now includes the Dead Kennedys themselves, who—sans original singer/lyricist Jello Biafra—sanitized the word to “brothers” so that the song could be pimped to a video game soundtrack. (Biafra himself is sanitizing the line to “blacks” in recent live performances, as I have witnessed firsthand.)

I have covered “Holiday in Cambodia” myself in my rock-band days, and damn straight I kept the “niggers” line intact. Truth be told, “brothers” is much more akin to what a white liberal would actually say in one of their blush-worthy fits of fake camaraderie. But “niggers” stings exactly because it dredges up the subtext, the condescension that dare not speak its name. Granted, I offended a number of people, to whom I always offered an explanation and a cheery, “You’re welcome!”

I could never make that stand behind Sweet Savage’s song, which says nothing more than, “Black kids are criminals and murderers, y’know?” I think Metallica never had to explain it because they used to bury Hetfield’s crappy vocals in the mix back in the day. And when it came time to explain it to themselves, I certainly don’t fault them for changing it.

Ultimately, the cleansed version can be seen as an aesthetic culmination. “Killing Time” is a song about a retreat, and that’s exactly what it has done—retreated from its own deplorable racism.

Rock on, killer kids.

¹ There was an ’80s California hair metal band also called Sweet Savage that had no connection to the Belfast band.

² It is unclear if this line refers to the mentality of the troops in retreat, their pursuers, or both.

³ The single was “Take No Prisoners” (Park Records, 1981).

⁴ On YouTube at www.youtube.com/watch?v=weh1q_rUl5I.

⁵ On YouTube at www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZwEju_9QBY.

⁶ Due to poor production quality, Hetfield can be heard clearly saying “nigger” only on the first use of the lyric; the repeat is buried but presumably the same. Metallica also performed “Killing Time” in its live shows at this time, including its very first show on March 14, 1982, according to a set list reproduced in the CD booklet for the 1998 album “Garage Inc.” Metallica presumably used the “nigger kid” line in those live versions as well.

⁷ “Damage Incorporated: Metallica and the Production of Musical Identity” by Glenn T. Pillsbury, via Google Books.

⁸ On YouTube at www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygiW0L0pTUA. The regrouped versions of Sweet Savage are sans Campbell.

⁹ See videos on Sweet Savage’s official web site at www.sweetsavage.co.uk.

¹⁰ “Guilty of Being White” is a naïve but well-intentioned song protesting the idea that contemporary whites be held accountable for the fallout of the African slave trade. At the end of its cover version, Slayer tweaked the meaning by changing the main line to, “Guilty of being right.” Former Minor Threat singer and lyricist Ian MacKaye later blasted that as “offensive.” The original version is on Minor Threat’s “In My Eyes” EP (Dischord Records, 1981). Slayer covered the song on “Undisputed Attitude” (American Recordings, 1996).

¹¹ E.g., “Freedom of speech/Speech is words that they will bend,” lyric in Metallica’s anti-censorship song “Eye of the Beholder” on “…And Justice for All” (Elektra Records, 1988).

Posted Nov. 20, 2010. Updated Feb. 3, 2011.

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