Absurdity
Music Critic Furious Metallica Four-Minute Song Fails To Cover Every Chapter Of Hemingway Novel
By Jeff Garstein, . BSN Network. Satire.
A cultural commentary piece published this week has accused Metallica of producing what the author calls 'a structurally negligent adaptation' of Ernest Hemingway's 1940 Spanish Civil War epic 'For Whom the Bell Tolls,' on the grounds that the band's four-minute-and-fifty-three-second song of the same name fails to faithfully represent the source material.
The article, written by a freelance essayist who describes himself in his bio as 'a reader, a thinker, and someone who takes Hemingway personally,' opens with the sentence 'I was ecstatic,' and does not return to that emotional state for the remaining 2,400 words.
'The novel is a masterwork of restraint and masculine grief,' the author writes in paragraph three, before spending eleven paragraphs being neither restrained nor brief. He argues that Metallica, by condensing the five-day narrative arc of Robert Jordan's doomed guerrilla mission into a song that peaks at a tempo of around 220 beats per minute, have done Hemingway 'a disservice that borders on the criminal.'
Metallica, for their part, have not responded, presumably because they wrote the song in 1984 and have not been monitoring the situation.
The band's actual lyrical content, which consists largely of the phrases 'take a look to the sky just before you die' and 'for whom the bell tolls,' is cited by the author as evidence of 'a surface-level engagement with the text.' He notes, with visible anguish, that the song contains zero direct references to Pilar, the guerrilla leader widely considered the novel's moral center, and that bassist Cliff Burton's iconic opening riff, while 'admittedly powerful,' uses up forty-three seconds that could have addressed the theme of Republican idealism collapsing under Soviet bureaucratic pressure.
The author does acknowledge, in a parenthetical in paragraph seven, that he 'respects the band.' He then spends the next four paragraphs explaining why that respect has limits.
Hemingway himself, who died in 1961 and was famously not a man who wrote 2,400-word blog posts about other people's creative choices, is quoted twice in the piece, both times in ways that suggest he would have agreed with the author's thesis. Literary scholars contacted for this article said they had no particular evidence of Hemingway holding opinions about thrash metal, but that they 'wouldn't rule it out.'
Readers who commented on the piece were largely divided. Several agreed that the song 'barely scratches the surface.' One commenter wrote that the author had 'finally said what needed to be said.' Another asked if the author had considered that a song is not a book, and was replied to at length.
A spokesperson for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, where Metallica has been inducted, said the institution 'celebrates artistic expression in all its forms' and declined to comment on whether 'For Whom the Bell Tolls' adequately handles the novel's treatment of mortality, love, and the Spanish Republic's structural failures in Segovia province.
The author has confirmed he is working on a follow-up piece about how Led Zeppelin's 'Ramble On' failed to do justice to Tolkien's 'The Lord of the Rings.'
It is expected to be longer.
The story we are making fun of: https://thehardtimes.net/blog/why-metallicas-for-whom-the-bell-tolls-didnt-do-the-novel-justice/