Could Lars have scored with Nico? Wait, that's not a fair question - everybody scored with Nico

From Pitchfork:

Here's one nobody was expecting: Metallica and Lou Reed have gotten together and recorded an entire collaborative full-length album, Metallica announced on their website yesterday. The LP doesn't have a title or a release date yet, but they finished recording it last week, and it's 10 songs long.

Here's my problem with this whole enterprise. It is not the likelihood of this project's failure or success. It is not the age difference between Metallica and Lou Reed, whose window for being in a thrash band closed sometime around the Eisenhower administration.

No, what I'm struggling with is that Metallica and Lou Reed could not have come from more opposite points of origin. Reed and the Velvet Underground cut their teeth in Andy Warhol's Factory collective, which to my understanding had lots of artists, models, filmmakers and junkies that set the bar for cool in the New York of the 1960's. I don't really know, because unless my mother really got lost while on a sightseeing trip to New York in the '60s after I was born, I never went to the Factory. Suffice to say, my general impression is that it was driven by equal parts art, fashion, contemporaneousness, average-to-excellent quality junk, and a relentless quest for apathy.

Metallica came from a garage in L.A. They drank beer in those dayz. Dave Mustaine drank lots of beer. Someone probably had acne.

And the vision I'm contending with is very simple: Can you picture James Hetfield waltzing around Warhol's Factory in the '60s? If by chance you can, here is the unanswerable question I just raised on my Facebook page: If Hetfield had wandered around the Factory and encoutered its denizens -- who would beat up who?

You can't answer that question. It cancels out. You can't say whether Hetfield would kick Paul Morrissey's ass, or whether Edie Sedgwick would kick Hetfield's ass. It is an infinitely repeating question that has no answer and only manufactures hypothetical agony. You will go crazy and will not be in any shape to ride lightning.

Maybe - just maybe - this is the kind of question the Metallica-Reed album will answer. Maybe that's the point. Or maybe Cliff Burton just had celestial milk come out of his nose, and he and Ronnie James Dio are having the laugh of their lives right now.

Lester Bangs, in the meantime, is probably shaking his head so hard his halo is dislodged.