Sunday, February 6, 2011

The 100 Greatest Metallica Songs... out of the 95 Metallica Songs


Thanks Dave for bringing this to my attention. I did have to see it with my own eyes, to make sure he wasn't making a typo. It is indeed, a countdown of a hundred Metallica songs, not just ten. Ten is a nice countdown number, ten makes sense. It would actually probably take some careful thought to pick out the very best 10 songs out of Metallica's entire career. (Although I could save you some time and just hand you the album, Master of Puppets). I'm actually surprised to hear that Metallica even wrote 100 songs, nevermind that Guitar World Magazine was going to pick out the best 100 of the... bunch.

It took a bit of time and and elementary school mathematics, but I just had to satiate my curiosity. If you add all of Metallica's tracks together, (not considering Garage Days Revisited or Garage Inc covers), Metallica wrote 95 songs total. Hrmm. So now, I'm not anywhere near as curious about what 100 songs Guitar World considers the "greatest" Metallica tracks - but what 4 songs that aren't even Metallica's Guitar World is going to consider. Whiskey in the Jar, maybe?

If you add all the tracks from the Metallica albums that are worth dick, you get 35 songs total. That really puts into perspective how much bad music Metallica has written over the years as opposed to good. It also puts into perspective how the majority of this countdown is going to suck something severe, and you're probably going to find some good Metallica songs in places they shouldn't be, and bad Metallica songs way too high on the list. I predict "Enter Sandman" is going to be somewhere in the top 5. "Fuel" somewhere in the top 10. 

Edit - I originally screwed up on the math and accidentally added an album twice by mistake. Sorry about the confusion, I'm not foolproof. So it's not 106, it's actually 95. So now I'm even more confused....


Update: You can read the Guitar World list of the "Greatest Metallica Songs" here.