During Metallica’s residency at the Sphere in Las Vegas earlier this month, frontman James Hetfield told concertgoers: “Metallica is not here, like some other entertainers, to influence you with their bullshit, OK?” He then declared: “We’re here to forget about all the outside shit, OK? Metallica’s agenda is love, energy and heavy music, baby!”
The remarks arrived less than a month after rapper Macklemore was removed from Ed Sheeran’s US tour following his onstage call for a free Palestine. Many interpreted Hetfield’s words as a swipe at Macklemore; NME raised that exact question.
Indeed, the timing matters. Musicians are facing professional consequences for speaking out about Palestine, and one of rock’s most influential frontmen was ridiculing the practice of addressing audiences about political causes.
Whether it was directed at Macklemore or not, Hetfield’s comments were particularly rich coming from a member of Metallica because for decades, the band has sold millions of records filled with condemnations of militarism, political repression, and institutional corruption.
For Palestine solidarity activists, this highlighted the contradiction between the band’s professed ideals of justice and their behaviour when it comes to Palestinian oppression.
A history of mixing politics and music
Metallica did not become famous by pretending the world beyond the concert hall did not exist. On their album Master of Puppets (1986), their track Disposable Heroes critiques young soldiers as expendable instruments of military command. Blackened imagines the planet's destruction, and the song … And Justice for All attacks a legal order distorted by money and power. The band’s own anniversary retrospective described the latter as music that confronts broken systems and serves as a “battle cry for change”. Its power lay precisely in making listeners face the world around them – not hide from it.
The politics are even less ambiguous in the track One, which tells the story of a soldier catastrophically wounded in war and trapped inside his own body. In an interview republished on Metallica’s official website in September 2026, Hetfield called it “the anti-war song.”
Discussing The Shortest Straw, which references McCarthyism and restrictions on artistic freedom, he said it was “more political than any of the other songs”.
Not only does this history make Hetfield’s attack on other entertainers hollow, but the fact that so many of their anti-war tracks were then performed on the night that their fans were urged to forget the outside world makes it all the more so.
There is no difference between condemning war through song lyrics and speaking out against it on stage.
Several band members have also openly expressed political opinions. For example, guitarist Kirk Hammett urged people to defend American democracy and reject Donald Trump’s rhetoric of “American carnage” in 2017. He used his considerable platform to criticise the new administration and called on his followers to respond.
Drummer Lars Ulrich also publicly opposed Trump’s proposed wall on the US-Mexico border, and invoked Metallica’s ability to bring people across national and cultural divisions.
And during a period of rising racial tension in 2017, Hetfield made his opposition to division and intolerance clear during a performance in Edmonton.
As has been the case with many artists over the past three years of the attacks on Gaza, Metallica's response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine has also highlighted much hypocrisy. Through the ‘All Within My Hands foundation’, Metallica gave an initial $100,000 and then a further $500,000 to World Central Kitchen’s relief effort for Ukrainians displaced by the war. The foundation even turned the campaign into a mobilisation of Metallica’s fanbase, using merchandise, auctions, fan-club activity and matching donations to raise more money.
By June, the band announced that the drive had met its $1 million target.
Apparently, it’s not “bullshit” when artists use their influence to rally support for Ukraine…
Palestine
Palestine was hardly a new political question for Metallica. Already, in 2009, the Palestine solidarity movement urged the band to cancel its scheduled concert in Tel Aviv, warning that performing would help normalise Israel’s system of occupation, apartheid, and dispossession of the Palestinian people.
Activists published an open letter which started with a passage from “...And Justice for All”, deliberately confronting Metallica with its own denunciation of corrupted justice.
Despite the mobilisation, Metallica went ahead with the show, choosing to disregard calls for a cultural boycott from Palestinian civil society. Its official concert archive confirms that the band played at Ramat Gan Stadium in Tel Aviv on 22 May 2010, which was their third time performing in Israel.
Little has changed, clearly.
In reality, Hetfiled's tone-deaf comments earlier this month only fuel hostility towards those who dare to speak out during a time of political repression, in Donald Trump’s America – which the band was once all too willing to publicly oppose – and around the world. And given that their fellow artists have been targeted and censored for speaking in support of Palestinian liberation and calling for an end to the killing, their message puts them on the wrong side of history.
As Antonio Gramsci argued, ruling groups maintain power partly by making their ideas seem like common sense. This helps explain the political significance of Metallica’s call for disengagement at a time when Israel’s genocide in Palestine demands urgent international attention. Hetfield’s vague agenda of “love, energy and heavy music” ultimately amounts to a refusal to stand for anything meaningful. And that refusal is itself deeply political.
Shan Karemani is an independent researcher focusing on Islamophobia and nationalism. He holds a master’s degree in Russian and East European Studies from Indiana University and is the director of the documentary film Stories of the Kosovo War.
Follow Shan on Instagram: @GenghisShan
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