Text written by Luiz Pimentel
On July 30, 1991, the music video for "Enter Sandman," the single from the Black Album . It became the best-selling metal album in history and made Metallica the biggest band in the world at the time.
It's strange to think it's been so long. But it's even stranger to think that the world Metallica reached the top in was completely different.
To begin with, the internet didn't exist (at least not as we know it), so you can imagine what to expect from a Polaroid snapshot of planet Earth at the time.
You had to have patience to consume anything. And for the premiere of Metallica's music video – if I'm not mistaken, only their second video, with "One" being the first – there was a premiere announcement on MTV, which we watched while biting our nails.
The music possessed this ritualistic characteristic, of complete consumption of the content with preparation, appetizer, main course and dessert.
The setting was also conducive to communion, because you knew that all the lovers were doing the same thing at the same time. It may seem silly, but it conveyed an energetic, astral message, a vibration because we were savoring something very much desired in common.
I believe that this was the only way it was possible for a band that, four or five years earlier, was a niche within a niche of an underground movement, to become the biggest band on the planet across all genres and styles.
It was much more complicated being a music fanatic. Seriously. But it was way more fun. I guarantee it.
READ ALSO: Metallica releases live and unreleased version of “Through the Never”; listen here
