“It really doesn't have much to do with us. We gave this guy a couple of riffs and told him to run with it”: The WTF hip hop collaboration that Metallica don’t talk about any more

Say what you will about Metallica, but no other metal band has taken as many chances as they have over the last 40-plus years.

From helping to forge an entirely new sound with their landmark debut Kill ’Em All to changing things up on an enormous scale with 1991’s mega-successful Black Album to teaming up with an orchestra on 1999’s groundbreaking S&M album, challenging themselves is embedded deep in Metallica’s DNA.

Even when it seems like they’ve made a misstep, history has proved them right. The controversial mid-90s one-two of Load and Reload drew plenty of criticism at the time, yet all but the most dug-in haters have to admit that both those records are great. Some Kind Of Monster? One of the best music documentaries ever made.

Sometimes they haven’t got it right, but the intention behind their decisions is inarguable. St Anger isn’t the greatest Metallica album, but it’s the album they had to make at that time. Their Lou Reed collaboration Lulu is frequently derided, but how many other bands would be willing to step so dramatically out of their comfort zone? Even drummer Lars Ulrich’s much-mocked decision to take on Napster at the height of file-sharing looks like a prophetic warning about the greedy, self-serving nature of the internet and the gradual devaluation of music.

Short version: Metallica rarely ever make bad calls, even when it looks like they do. But there’s one notable exception – a howlingly bad rap-rock collaboration that even Metallica don’t talk about these days. Its name? We Did It Again.

Some background. the band had been approached to appear on the soundtrack to 1993’s Judgment Night, a so-so thriller whose mediocrity as a film was inverse proportion to the brilliance of its soundtrack album. The latter featured a bunch of killer collaborations between some of the biggest and best names from the worlds of rock and hip hop, from Faith No More and Boo-Yaa T.R.I.B.E’s menacing Another Body Murdered to Slayer and Ice-T’s Disorder, a fearsome medley of songs by mohawked Brit-punk hooligans The Exploited.

Whether Metallica regretted missing out on being part of that cross-cultural love-in isn’t clear, but they weren’t going to make the same mistake twice. When hip hop producer Swizz Beatz tapped them up at the start of the 2000s to appear alongside multi-platinum rapper Ja Rule on a song for Beatz’ upcoming compilation album, G.H.E.T.T.O. Stories, they seemingly jumped at the chance.

Some context is helpful. Metallica were in trouble at the time. The sessions for the long-awaited follow-up to Load/Reload had been torpedoed by the departure of bassist Jason Newsted in 2001 and James Hetfield’s subsequent departure for rehab to deal with alcohol and other issues, all of which is documented in painful detail in Some Kind Of Monster. So their heads may not have been in the game.

News of this unlikely collaboration began to trickle out in late 2001. “Rapper Ja Rule has entered the studio with Metallica to record a new song,” trumpeted NME.com, adding that Ja Rule said of the collaboration: “I spin two 12-bar verses with Metallica on their new big, huge record they got that’s crazy.” On any other day, that would have been huge news. But the story appeared on September 11, 2011, so it’s hardly a surprise that it slipped through the net.

Speaking to Radio104 WMRQ in Hartford, Connecticut in 2002, Lars shed light on how the collaboration came about. According to the drummer, Swizz Beatz had been given his own record deal on the back of successful singles with rappers DMX and Jay-Z, among others, and the Bronx-born producer had a “hard on” to do a rock track.

“He called up about a year ago and asked if we would give him an old Metallica song that he could sort of cut up and do all that kind of stuff with and then have somebody rap over it,” Lars explained. “This was just when we started doing the stuff for the new record [St Anger] and we were like, 'You know what, instead of just, here's somebody rapping over Enter Sandman or Sad But True or whatever, why don't you come to San Francisco and pick out some of the new material that we have been working on?’. And he couldn't believe it.”

Swizz Beatz met up with the band at their studio. “We were basically letting him have the run of the store,” said Lars. “And it was really cool, because it was just sort of like dipping our toes into a whole other world, and this guy, Swizz, he is such a sweetheart… none of this bullshit 500-member entourage and all that kind of crap. It was just another dare, you know what I mean?”

According to Ulrich, Swizz Beatz originally planned to use New York rapper DMX on the song before opting to go with Ja Rule, who had recently scored a US No.1 with his 2001 single Always On Time.

“[Swizz Beatz] wanted that riff from one song that riff from another song, and he was like, ‘OK, that’s it,’” recalled the drummer. “And then he went back to New York and he called us about a week later and said he got Ja Rule to rap on it… we heard some of this Ja Rule’s guy’s stuff and it was, like, ‘That’s really cool.’”

Outtakes from Some Kind Of Monster actually show the song coming together. Lars Ulrich, Metallica guitarist Kirk Hammett and St Anger producer Bob Rock meet Swizz Beatz and Ja Rule in the studio. “Now the thing is, everybody’s game for whatever you want to do,” Rock tells Swizz. “Let’s just see what happens here, rather than put any limitations on it.” Swizz seems up for it too. “You can play that at a party,” he says of an especially gnarly James Hetfield riff before beatboxing over the top of it.

Noble intentions for sure, and everybody seemingly wants it to work. “That’s really fucking cool,” says Lars of the song as it comes together. “That’s going to fuck with everybody when they hear our shit later.” Ja Rule is no less enthusiastic. “Ja Rule meets Metallica – it’s motherfucking history!” says the rapper as he lays down his vocals.

That’s a slightly optimistic view of how things turned out. It would be more than a year before We Did It Again finally emerged, buried at the back of G.H.E.T.T.O. Stories.

Little fanfare surrounded its release, which is pretty much what it deserved. We Did It Again is a shocker: a lumbering, Frankenstein’s Monster of a song that stitches together a handful of cast-off Metallica riffs, throws in a tough-guy Hetfield vocal that sounds like it’s been fished from down the back of the studio sofa, and leaves Ja Rule to try and hold it all together. It sounds like five different songs in one, none of them any good. (Lars’ drum sound also sounds suspiciously like the one he’d use on St Anger, so maybe we should have paid more attention).

Lars Ulrich seemed to be putting distance between Metallica and We Did It Again even around the song’s release. “It really doesn't have much to do with us, it's not our record label, it's not anything, we sort of just gave this guy [Swizz Beatz] a couple of riffs and told him to sort of run with it and then we have been sort of playing ball with him whenever he asks,” Lars said in 2002.

What’s frustrating about We Did It Again isn’t how bad it turned out to be, it’s how good it could have been. The combination of a metal band up for trying different things, a hot hip hop producer and a rapper enjoying major commercial success should have been artistic gold.

Instead, it turned out to be the worst thing the band ever put their name to. The only positive is that Ja Rule’s suggestion the song would appear on Metallica’s “new big, huge record” proved to be false, because, god knows, St Anger got enough of a kicking as it was.

Today, nobody brings up We Did It Again, not even as a punchline. It lurks on the furthest edge of Metallica’s back catalogue, peering glumly through the window and wondering what went wrong. It’s never been played live. and Metallica certainly haven’t dabbled in hip hop again. “Motherfucking history”? Not even close.