Master of Puppets was the album that brought thrash metal band Metallica to wider attention, while its title track is one of their most anthemic headbangers. Vocalist James Hetfield’s exhilarating call-and-response shouts of “Master!” are enough to get any crowd of metalheads in the world on board.
At over eight and a half minutes, ‘Master of Puppets’ is also one of the band’s most expansive songs, with space for a bright Kirk Hammett guitar solo to burst through the wall of sound, while Hetfield relies on raw power for his own guitar breaks. There’s even time to reference an early David Bowie album track for good measure.
Overall, the song is a piledriver of relentless guitars, yet it’s often as melodic as it is ferocious and as much about the lyrics as it is about diving into a mosh pit. Hetfield sings from the point of view of the piece’s titular character, telling his audience, “I’m pulling your strings”. This feels entirely appropriate in a packed-out Metallica gig when thousands are hanging on his every word.
But there’s a deeper meaning behind the lyrics. Hammett has explained that the concept of the Master of Puppets album is essentially “various forms of manipulation”. But which form of manipulation does the title track discuss? And who is the master manipulator?
Do they have a particular puppet master in mind?
In fact, there’s no personal manipulation involved in ‘Master of Puppets’. That’s because it’s not really a person pulling the strings. It’s a substance. As Hetfield has previously explained, the song is essentially about how drugs take over the life of a drug addict. “How things get switched around, instead of you controlling what you’re taking and doing it’s drugs controlling you.”
The singer was going through his own struggles with alcohol at the time of writing the song, while his bandmates were previously habitual users of cocaine and heroin. Lines describing “veins that pump with fear” and urging the listener, “More is all you need”, give away the track’s real subject matter.
Hetfield is clearly channelling the addictive tendencies of others he’s close to. Hammett and Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich both had a proclivity for spiking smack into their veins during the band’s early years, although it’s debatable whether their heroin use ever developed to the level of a physical addiction. Ulrich has claimed that his drug-taking was “always more of a social thing”, but ‘Master of Puppets’ would suggest otherwise.
We could read the song as an anti-drug statement by the band rather than a reflection of any of their personal experiences. When Thrasher put this idea to Hetflied, though, he rejected it “because we don’t want to tell anyone what to do”. On the other hand, Hammett expressed concern about excessive drug-taking among Metallica’s fanbase. “Someone ODed at the L.A. show”, the band had played prior to the interview, explained. So the song clearly acts as some sort of comment on the subject, even if it isn’t a deductive form of anti-drugs propaganda.
Its song’s lyrics could be applied to various other themes, from political demagogy to abusive relationships or sexual roleplay, but in the end, they only meant one thing to Hetfield. For him, psychoactive substances can puppets out of us more easily than any human being. Chemical dependency is the real master we serve if we’re not careful.