PrettyFakes

When Metallica revealed the cover art for its latest record, Death Magnetic, a few hardcore fans and metal watchers celebrated the apparent return of the classic Metallica logo, with the eye that it signaled a “return to form” after a few years of wandering in Armani-clad, Serrano-covered wilderness.

I was record shopping yesterday and picked up the package, thinking about buying the record; it’s a pretty dang cool looking album, and listen—I love that logo. I love it. I doodled it dozens of times growing up, and it even made a guest appearance in the first Sandusky Review, based on this cartoon, and I even ripped it off recently for the alternate cover to the second issue.

I know that logo, y’all. It’s part of my history.

Which is why I knew when I looked at Death Magnetic that they ain’t using the real logo.

The original was hand-drawn—by James Hetfield himself. I know it was hand-drawn because the letterforms are all crazy. First off, there’s nothing like the beginning M and ending A in the world of fonts. They’re hard to emulate (if total fun to draw) because it’s a personal style, even though there’s some rudimentary perspective in play.

Look closely at that awesome, forward-leaning A, the dovetailing T right up next to it; the strokes on the A don’t match up, and the top part of it is squinched together so close there’s no crossbar. Similarly, the strokes on the M and the ending A don’t match; they’re weighted differently.

The hanging T and middle A as seen intaglio on the (awesome) cover of . . . And Justice For All, and bas relief on Master of Puppets:

It’s not upscale graphic design with perfect lettering (even if expertly rendered on their covers) and it wasn’t meant to be: it is most literally and honestly do it yourself, a perfect logo meant for the covers of biology notebooks and upper left shoulders, back when a logo was just as much a statement of purpose as was the music. That logo is metal, as much as the thundering roar of “Welcome Home (Sanitarium).”

Cue the new logo:

Look closely at the A in the middle.

Listen, I know why they did it; the designer was slapping the album title on there (with the cute magnet D and C), and realized the A was all crazy, and “fixed” it to look like the font they were using. I know what they were thinking.

But that ain’t what I want. The guy who played guitar drew the last one, and basement masters like Pushead ran with it, layering increasingly vile and twisted images on it like Dr. Frankenstein stitching down rotten muscle on greasy bones. It was real, made on paper, not a .tiff file in some nerd’s Mac at Warner Brothers HQ.

Metallica ain’t back, any more than my senior year of high school’s back; they just slapped on a new coat of old-style paint, complete with some graphic designer hack “fixing” their old logo, just in time for old folks like me to buy in. I know what you’re thinking: so what? Isn’t it just a logo? What about the music?

And the answer is, it isn’t just about the music, it’s about the damn guts of it all.

First time ever I haven’t bought a record because of an abandonment of DIY ideals as demonstrated in their logo. Doubt this one’ll come up again. I’ll stick with Metallica’s earlier catalog (which cuts off for me in 1988), in all its lunatic, metal, technical, visceral glory. Busted A’s and all.

Update: PFavorite This Crrash points me to Brand New’s comprehensive analysis of the logo overhaul, complete with the insight that a design outfit who worked for Coke, Palm, Amazon and Dolby, performed the overhaul.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 16th, 2008 at 4:31 pm and is filed under Gorjus, The Rock and The Roll. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.