“Disposable Heroes”

Devin Townsend takes off his headphones. The final chords of “Damage Inc.”, the last song on Master of Puppets, still ring in his ears.

It’s his first time hearing the album. 

A natural synaesthete, he attributes specific colours to albums. 

After just one listen, he hasn’t yet had time to process the album’s meaning. 

But he knows its colour:

Especially throughout “Disposable Heroes”. 

It’s telling that the first songs written for Master of Puppets were “Battery” and “Disposable Heroes” – two of the thrashiest songs on the album. 

Metallica had been pioneering the Bay Area thrash metal scene since the release of their first album, Kill ’Em All. 

Ride the Lightning followed, another furious thrash album, but with sparks of “something” different (most notably on the not-so-thrashy metal ballad, “Fade to Black”.)

They had been playing – and listening to – thrash metal non-stop. 

It was now time to embrace the darkness of northern Europe.

Master of Puppets was recorded between September and late-December at Sweet Silence Studios in Copenhagen, Denmark.

During their three-month stint, the band quite literally did not see the sun:

They lived a nocturnal schedule, going into the studio around 7PM and finishing every night before 6AM:

The band rose every day to the dark red hue of the afternoon sunset. 

The same darkness sensed by Devin Townsend on his first listen. 

This red hue also permeates the album’s artwork.

Most metal fans – myself included – assume that the album artwork is inspired by two songs on the album: the title track, “Master of Puppets” and the anti-war song, “Disposable Heroes”. 

An easy assumption to make. 

Puppet hands (almost “godlike” in appearance) control the ordered lines of crosses, demarcating the soldiers buried beneath. 

One of the crosses is decorated by a soldier’s helmet. 

But here’s where it gets interesting: 

The cover artist Don Brautigam told Revolver magazine that he had never heard a note of music from the album before taking his brush to task. 

But from the title, Brautigam intuited that control and manipulation are the core themes explored throughout the album.

While Master of Puppets is typically considered a “thrash metal” album, only a few of the songs back this up (the most obvious being “Battery”, “Disposable Heroes” and the closing “Damage Inc.”) 

The other songs are much more sprawling, musical and, dare I say it, innovative than the outputs being released by the rest of the Bay Area thrash metal scene in 1986. 

The title track takes us through a full symphony: from downpicked fury to orchestral beauty.

“The Thing That Should Not Be” – maybe the heaviest song the band has ever recorded – plods in a progressive manner.

“Welcome Home (Sanatarium)” takes us on a deep journey in the heart of madness – whether we want to go or not. 

And “Orion” stargazes. 

“Disposable Heroes”, however, harks back to Metallica’s thrash roots. 

The song is unrelenting, brutal, and stands chug-to-chug with any track from Slayer’s Reign in Blood as a thrash opus.

In Justice For All: The Truth About Metallica (2005), Joel McIver notes that “for this writer at least, the best song on Master of Puppets is ‘Disposable Heroes’, a blisteringly fast, dexterously performed epic in which James addresses the horrors of war for the first time” (144). 

And while my mission with The Chug has never been to determine whether a song is the “best” on an album or not, it is important to note Metallica’s movement towards more “serious” lyrics. 

The song’s premise is simple, but well executed: a modern version of Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs”, where the generals remain safe while young men are tossed to their deaths on the battlefield. 

Yet despite the praises heaped upon it, “Disposable Heroes” is one of the least written about – and least played live – songs on Master of Puppets. 

Only two songs have been played less: “Orion” (112 times) and “Leper Messiah” (135 times). 

Compare these to “Battery” (981 times), “Welcome Home (Sanatorium)” (1005 times) and “Master of Puppets” (a whopping 1747 times.)

Listening to the Master of Puppets album, it would appear to be the perfect live song. 

The pre-chorus and the chorus both worm their way into your brain and the cries of “Back to the front” sound almost engineered to please large stadium crowds.

Lars brushes off the song’s absence:

But it’s likely there’s another reason for its absence on Metallica’s setlists: 

The technical challenge it presents. 

Producer Flemming Rasmussen pushed Lars beyond his own technical capabilities during the recording of Master of Puppets:

(And as a guitarist, I can confirm that playing it feels like a workout, particularly for the picking hand.)

Could it be that so little has been written about “Disposable Heroes” because it’s played live so infrequently?

To modern audiences, the song seems quite straightforward – a thrash metal song about the horrors of war. 

Yet, while many of us now associate thrash metal with anti-war rhetoric, for the most part, these bands were less likely to address the horrors of war until the late-80s and early-90s. 

The first waves of thrash metal bands were simply trying to be faster, heavier and more provocative than their peers. 

So while Metallica were not the first metal band in the thrash metal scene to evoke war in their music…

They used the theme to expand the scope of their sound and give more weight to their evolving musical taste:

“Disposable Heroes” announces itself to its listeners. 

Even to those of us without synaesthesia, it's clear that Metallica exploited the heaviness and speed of thrash to mirror the soundscape of war.

The opening riff evokes the sound of bombs falling.

Tension is built through the palm-muted downstrokes, and detonated with explosive, unmuted power chords at the end of each bar. The song opens in 6/8, which reinforces this staggered, lurching feeling of compression and release. 

Then the time signature shifts. The fast, alternate-picked riff that follows in 4/4 evokes the relentless “Barking of machine gun fire”.

There are two very distinct voices in the song: the voice of the boy soldier, and the voice of his generals.

The soldier's voice expresses his lived tragedy:

The generals’ voice is violent and unforgiving: 

This contrast is powerful. The repeated command throughout the chorus, “back to the front”, emphasises the vicious circularity of war. The 21 year-old soldier can’t escape the frontlines: “a servant ‘til I fall”. 

The command also forces the listener to be complicit. If you sing along to the catchy and anthemic chant of “Back to the front”, you too are condemning the young man to death. 

As such, “Disposable Heroes” brings its listeners deep into the band’s “crimson” darkness. 

Beyond the obvious anti-war sentiment, “Disposable Heroes” evokes Hetfield’s upbringing in a Christian Scientist background.

His mother refused cancer treatment because of her belief that God would heal her. She died when Hetfield was 16:

Compare this with the soldier Hetfield sings about in Metallica’s “Disposable Heroes”:

Hetfield too was “molded” from birth – by his parents’ background in Christian Science. 

His description of the church congregation mirrors scenes from war. Disfigured characters with broken bones that heal at awkward angles.

Writing in Newsweek, Andrew Whalen notes that “While several Metallica songs are more explicitly inspired by the loss of Hetfield's mother Cynthia Bassett, the theme was more often expressed through Metallica's repeated invocation of soldiers, buffeted by powers larger than themselves.”

The soldier wasn't just born into war: like Hetfield, he was born into a system that decided, before he could speak, that his body was not his own.

Under this interpretation, some passages from the song carry more weight:

The soldier boy “made of clay” had been molded since birth to “play soldier" on the battlefield until his death. 

He was raised to be an empty shell that kills without compassion or empathy. 

But just like Hetfield, he never had a choice in the matter.

At 62, James Hetfield has survived the religion that took his mother. The alcohol. Cliff Burton’s death.

The soldier in “Disposable Heroes” was not so lucky.

Both were moulded by an unsympathetic system. 

One never made it back from the front. 

The other found his way out through music.

Horns up 🤘

Shane O’Neill
Editor-in-Chief
The Chug Media