METALLICA drummer Lars Ulrich spoke to Alen Balen from Javno.com recently about a number of topics. An excerpt from the chat follows:

Javno.com: What is it about heavy metal that makes it so appealing to fans?

Ulrich: "That’s a great question. All I can tell you is that from travelling all over the world the last couple of years, heavy metal is alive and kicking and it’s just unbelievable. Scandinavia, Eastern Europe, the Far East, I mean it’s unbelievable. I don’t know if it’s like, if it’s like a right of passage, you know when you’re thirteen you gotta get your first heavy metal kick. I don’t know what it is, but it seems that in the nineties, you know, all the kids were you know growing up on grunge and all that stuff, and whatever they’re called, the double zeros, they have, it was all about rap rock. And LIMP BIZKIT and all that type of stuff.

And now it seems like all the young kids are not only doing metal again, but they’re doing like seventies and eighties metal, it’s all about IRON MAIDEN, it’s all about Metallica, DEEP PURPLE, BLACK SABBATH. All that stuff. And it’s just unbelievable. I guess at the end of the day, the word timeless probably comes into play.

There’s a timelessness to metal, because it sits so outside of fashions, it sits outside of waves of popularity and ins and outs and all that kind of stuff, because it sometimes is, especially by the general mass media, is kind of considered the ugly step child or something like that, the urrgghhh, all the smelly heavy metal kids. It’s like, because we’re not ever associated with anything that’s in vogue, or you know, that it just continues and it’s just like, herpes or something, it never goes away!"

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