Today songwriting and popular music are rubbish, they are «crap», or rather «KRAP». Kirk Hammett says this in an interview given toIrish Times. The Metallica guitarist is not referring to pop in the strict sense, nor to a pop star in particular, but to all popular music, a definition that embraces non-classical, non-folk and non-jazz styles, therefore including rock.
In fact, Hammett's reasoning starts from his own musical education. «I started by learning from records, trying to sharpen my ear and learning songs and solos by listening to the albums over and over again. It's a monotonous and laborious process, especially when you do it by listening to records, but I learned a lot. All my friends did the same thing. We didn't have tablature, we didn't have music books. We only had our ear and the records. And it was a challenge, because if you asked three different guitarists to play I'm the One since the first Van Halen, each of them did it differently and this is fascinating.”
Hammett misses those days «when you had to work hard to learn, because it is precisely from hard work that everything is born. It is determination and inspiration that, combined, force you to invent something of your own and, in the end, to find your own sound and style.” And instead today for the Metallica guitarist «everything is perfect from the point of view of musical technique. It's great that all these guitarists have such a wealth of technical knowledge at their fingertips. But I wonder where all this will take us.”
He then goes on to talk about intense pop as popular music: «I hope it leads to better pop music, popular music in general and, above all, better songwriting. Because right now it's songwriting and pop music crap (rubbish, shit, ed). I hope that all these great musicians who learn for themselves thanks to the Internet will take the next step and put all that knowledge and all that inspiration into the service of creating new things, new songs, the future of music, and with higher standards than today. I repeat: it's KRAP. Crap. I'm sorry to all the pop fans out there.”
Even if Hammett's is a general discussion that starts from rock guitarists, the reference to pop inevitably brings to mind when he went on stage with Metallica in Budapest last June 13th wearing a t-shirt with the writing “Taylor Swift is a CIA psyop”, a hopefully ironic reference to the American right-wing conspiracy theory that emerged two and a half years ago according to which the pop star is part of a psychological war by the system to orient the masses towards progressive ideology in the election year that saw Donald Trump and Kamala Harris as opposed to one another (curiously that a certain American left instead considers Swift an enemy, a tradwife that defends traditional family values).
Fun fact: last Friday, after the photo with the t-shirt went around the Internet and after the insults of the Swifties, the guitarist fell from the stage in Dublin while playing Seek & Destroy. His comment in Instagram stories: «Slip and Destroy!!!!». Swifties comment: «Karma is a god».
