The fourth and most recent season of Netflix 's Stranger Things arrived making a lot of noise on the internet and bringing new popularity to at least two great songs from the 80s.
One of them was the hit “Running Up That Hill” by Kate Bush , used in the fourth episode of Volume 1 of this season. The other was “Master of Puppets” by Metallica , which has seen a surge in searches on streaming platforms since the ninth and final episode aired this Friday, the 1st.
Warning: Contains spoilers for episode 9 of Volume 2 of Stranger Things .
During the final episode of this season, headbanger Eddie Munson picks up his guitar and needs to play a solo to create a distraction while his friends try to defeat the villain Vecna . The song Eddie chooses is "Master of Puppets," and the track ends up providing the soundtrack for a sequence of frenetic events involving several characters from the series.
According to Variety Stranger Things ' music supervisor , Nora Felder , revealed that the track was chosen by producers Matt and Ross Duffer during pre-production and no one has considered changing it since then.
“It was another one of those ‘this has to be the song’ moments,” Nora explains. “That part of the story was meant to be crucial and a hair-raising scene with Eddie taking a heroic stance to fight the fight of his life. I think the Duffer brothers felt that playing ‘Master of Puppets’ during that extended scene was the obvious choice. No other songs were discussed afterward; we just did it right away.”
Regarding the details involving copyright, Nora says that the team responsible for the series received direct permission from the members of Metallica to use the music in the final episode.
“I spoke with Metallica’s management and explained the scene carefully, as well as the intention behind it. I knew the release would be taken seriously because we used another of their songs (“The Four Horsemen”) in the second season and I learned at the time that they were fans of the show. 'Master of Puppets' is an important song in their catalog and I think it’s considered a favorite at live shows. I wanted to be respectful and ensure that Metallica understood the entire context in which the song would be used, and also how integral it was to the scene and to this incredible new character, Eddie Munson, who no one had met yet.”
In the fourth season of Stranger Things , the character Eddie Munson plays a central role in the plot, which revisits the days when the United States was experiencing a wave of moral panic or Satanic Panic. At the time, it was common for unsolved heinous crimes to be attributed to heavy metal fans and RPG players due to conspiracy theories that pointed to these individuals as part of supposed satanic cults.
Last Friday, Wikimetal launched our bi-weekly column on the Omelete , where we explain in more detail what Satanic Panic was and where heavy metal fit into all of this. Read it now.
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