Success Quote by Kirk Hammett

Hammett’s line is a classic rock-star tightrope walk: admit you’ve “made it” without sounding like you believe your own press. Calling the band “lunatics” is doing double duty. It’s funny, sure, but it’s also a preemptive strike against the idea that fame equals refinement. Metallica didn’t get big by becoming respectable; the brand is extremity, volume, and a kind of joyful self-ruin. “Lunatics” signals authenticity in a culture where “selling out” is the mortal sin.

The deeper move is the insistence that success hasn’t changed “us as people.” That’s less autobiography than contract. Fans don’t just buy records; they buy continuity. When Hammett says they’re not “on a higher level,” he’s flattening the hierarchy that celebrity creates, reframing the band-fan relationship as a shared identity rather than a marketplace transaction. It’s parasocial intimacy, but with calluses: not “we love you,” more “we’re still the same weirdos you bet on.”

Context matters. Metallica’s career has been a long argument with its own scale: underground legitimacy colliding with stadium domination, controversy over money and control, the constant suspicion that the machine has swallowed the people. This quote reads like a corrective to that narrative. It reassures the crowd that the power gap is logistical, not moral. They might be on the stage, but they’re not above it.