I owned both albums but I don’t think I ever got all the way through either – I had bought the first four ’80s albums by that point and ate them all up so Load was just the haircut-sellout album, and I was firmly on the long-hair side of the culture war. Looking back, I really ought to revisit them, as they were quite a bit more experimental than the hard-rock-radio singles indicated.

The black album omission wasn’t intentional; I was at the mercy of whatever was in stock at the used record store, which was always shifting. (It’s the same reason I’ve never heard With the Beatles, A Hard Day’s Night, Beatles for Sale, Help!, or Let It Be.) I have a copy on my hard drive, but by the time I pirated it I was a good 20 years past peak Metallica fandom. “Enter Sandman” is the theme music for my favorite radio show and it never gets old, though. That was the only song off the album that was still getting played in 1998, though they’ve released no fewer than four fucking versions of “The Unforgiven” (the original of which I still haven’t heard in full.)

I had moved on by the time St. Anger came out but I generally approved of the more death-metal-tinged sound after the bluesy Load/ReLoad. Death Magnetic was the first new Metallica album I unambiguously accepted, and by then the ’90s sound was in retrospect merely a detour.

My parents were still religious-right into the Bush years but they never hassled me about what I listened to – they were cool that way; they were both into music as kids and my grandmother put masking tape over the boobs on my dad’s copy of Abraxas as a teenager (speaking of tits) so they didn’t do that bullshit. Still there was no way in hell I was showing my mom the cover of Kill ‘Em All!