A LOT OF PEOPLE OWN THE BLACK ALBUM

From Classic Rock:

“Metallica still have the biggest selling album of the Soundscan era in America.

“Since 1991, when the Soundscan system was introduced to provide more accurate information on record sales, The Black Album has sold 15,620,000 copies.”

So, uh, I guess I’m just happy that a metal album tops the list (the only other semi-metal album mentioned in the article is Creed’s Human Clay, which apparently comes in at number eight on the list with 11,547,000). And I’m not one of those people who hates The Black Album — yeah, it was a precursor of the shittiness to come, and it sounds nothing like the band that made Master of Puppets, but the songs are catchy as fuck, and there’s plenty of riffs that, if the metal community had first heard on a Pantera album, I think people would love.

The problem with The Black Album, then, isn’t really that it sucks — it’s that the band’s subsequent forays into pop metal (the Loads) and attempts to re-capture the zest of their glory days (Def Magnetic) didn’t produce any songs nearly as good as, well, pretty much anything on The Black Album. That’s my opinion, at least.

Or maybe I’m just being sentimental. I dunno.

Discuss metal’s most minor (and meaningless) of accomplishments in the comments section below… and be grateful that Creed haven’t sold even more records.

-AR