Life & Mortality Quote by Kirk Hammett

Death obsession, in Kirk Hammett's mouth, lands less like a cry for help and more like a backstage tour of metal's inner decor. The punchline is the stuffed two-headed sheep: grotesque, yes, but also proudly kitsch, the kind of thing you’d expect from someone who’s spent a career turning darkness into spectacle you can sing along to. He’s not confessing morbidity so much as curating it.

Hammett’s intent is partly mythmaking. Metal has always traded in skulls, apocalypse, and the theatrical flirtation with the taboo; collecting death-adjacent artifacts takes that aesthetic off the stage and into domestic life. It’s a way of saying the music isn’t just a job or a costume. The fixation is lived-in, tactile, even humorous. That matters, because it reframes "death obsessed" from clinical to cultural: less pathology than performance, less despair than craft.

The subtext is control. Death is the one subject nobody gets to master, so you surround yourself with symbols of it, weird them out, make them yours. A two-headed sheep is literally an error in nature, a reminder that bodies fail in unpredictable ways. Taxidermy freezes that failure into an object you can own, display, and laugh about. It’s mortality domesticated into oddity.

Contextually, this fits Hammett and Metallica’s long relationship with death as narrative fuel: war, extinction, judgment. Here, the horror is defanged by collector energy, a wink that says: the darkness is real, but so is the absurdity of staring at it for decades.