Heavy metal has a reputation for being loud, daft and a bit fond of skulls. Metallica’s “One” is loud, certainly, but it’s neither daft nor decorative, and it may be the most harrowing short story ever set to a double-kick drum. The meaning of “One” by Metallica is easy to state and hard to sit through: it’s the inner life of a soldier who has survived a blast but lost almost everything that made life livable, and who is trapped inside what remains of his body. It’s an anti-war song in the most literal sense. There’s no flag-waving and no heroics, only a mind alone in the dark, and the dreadful clarity with which it understands exactly where it is.
A Book From 1939
The story begins, as these things often do, with a novel. Johnny Got His Gun was written by Dalton Trumbo and published in 1939, and it follows a young American soldier in the First World War who is terribly wounded by a shell. When he wakes in a hospital he has lost his arms and legs and most of his senses, including his sight, his hearing and his speech. His mind, however, is intact. He can think, and remember, and he has no way of telling anyone that he’s still in there.
It’s a ferocious book, written by a man who clearly wanted readers to close it feeling a good deal less comfortable about war. One of its most famous passages has the soldier discovering that he can tap out a message in Morse code with his head against the pillow, and that scene is among the best-known in the film version too. James Hetfield was introduced to the story by his older half-brother, David Hale, who was also in a band. It stuck. In 1971 Trumbo himself directed a film adaptation, with Timothy Bottoms and Jason Robards, and that film would end up playing a surprising role in Metallica’s story.
What the Song Describes
The lyrics, written by Hetfield and set to music he composed with Lars Ulrich in November 1987, tell the book’s story from the inside. The narrator comes round, slowly realises what has happened to him, and struggles to understand why he’s still alive. There are no neat explanations and no comforting speeches. The song simply stays with him, in the dark, while his mind turns over its few remaining options. The title does its own quiet work. “One” can mean a single man, a single life, or the unbearable fact of being completely alone.
It’s important to say what the song is not doing. It isn’t endorsing despair, and it isn’t arguing for anything except the horror of the situation. It’s usually described as a song about helplessness, fear and the damage war does, more than a political speech, and I think that restraint is why it still works. It doesn’t tell you what to think. It just refuses to look away, and leaves you to draw your own conclusions about the people who send young men off to wars.
The Music Does the Talking
Here’s the clever part. The song begins quietly, almost tenderly, with clean guitar and a drifting, dreamlike pace that mirrors the way the narrator’s mind surfaces and sinks. Then the guitars turn heavy and distorted, and then back to clean again, a seesaw between numbness and horror that gives the first half its restless, haunted feel. It’s a long piece, running well over seven minutes, and it takes its time. Kirk Hammett’s guitar solos cut through the middle of it like flashes of panic, each one climbing for air and then falling back.
And then, in the final stretch, the band changes gear entirely. Ulrich’s drums turn into a stuttering barrage that sounds exactly like machine-gun fire, and the riffs lock in with it. According to the album’s producer, Flemming Rasmussen, the drummer blasted through that double-bass section in a single take. It’s thrilling and sickening at once, which is exactly the point: the music suddenly puts you in the middle of the war that, until then, was only a memory.
The Video That Changed Things
For years Metallica had resisted making a promotional video, worried that MTV exposure might compromise their credibility. For “One” they gave in, and they did it on their own terms. Shot in black and white by the director Michael Salomon, the clip intercuts the band performing with scenes from the 1971 film of Johnny Got His Gun, including dialogue, so you watch Metallica thrash away beside footage of the soldier in his hospital bed. It runs for nearly eight minutes and it isn’t remotely cheerful. Not many bands would have chosen to make their first video a short film about a man who can’t move.
It worked beautifully. The video began airing on MTV in January 1989 and soon ranked at number one on the channel, helping “One” become the band’s first single to chart and pushing the album into the American top ten. The band ended up buying the rights to the film outright, having grown tired of paying royalties every time the video was shown. Not many metal bands can say they restored a forgotten movie to public view.
A Grammy and a Grudge
Metallica performed “One” at the 1989 Grammy Awards, at the same ceremony where they lost the metal category to Jethro Tull, a result that metalheads still bring up whenever they want to prove awards are a lottery. They had the last laugh the following year, when “One” won the first Grammy ever given in the Best Metal Performance category. It’s a nice bit of poetic justice. And in 2014 the band played it again at the Grammys, this time with the pianist Lang Lang, which is the sort of pairing that sounds absurd until you hear it.
Why It Still Hurts
More than thirty years on, “One” remains the song the band has played more than any other from its album, and it’s easy to see why. The riff is magnificent, the solos are memorable, and the structure builds like a storm. But what keeps it alive is the thing at its centre. We can tolerate a lot of fictional violence, but this song makes us contemplate the aftermath, the person who lives on in the wreckage. That’s a far harder thing to shrug off, and it’s why people who came for the noise sometimes leave with something heavier than they bargained for. People who say they can’t abide heavy metal often make an exception for this one, and that’s no small compliment.
Conclusion
So, what does “One” really mean? At the simplest level it’s a story about a soldier robbed of nearly everything, told with such force that you feel the walls of his world closing in. At a deeper level it’s an argument about the real price of war, one that can’t be settled by medals or speeches. I’ve always found it a slightly astonishing thing that a band known for speed and aggression produced one of the most compassionate records of its decade. It doesn’t offer solutions. It asks you to listen to one man, which turns out to be harder, and more important, than listening to a crowd.