For Veterans Day

From Luke Lewis of NME:

"There is a US record label, To The Fallen, that specialises in releasing music recorded by war veterans and active service personnel. Proclaiming themselves "the world's only military record label", To The Fallen have issued folk, country and hip-hop albums – but the vast majority of their output is heavy metal. Which raises the question: is metal the only medium that can truly express the horrors of war?

Popular music is littered with anti-war protest songs, from the thrillingly direct (Edwin Starr's 'War') to the oblique (R.E.M.'s 'Orange Crush', inspired by the US army's use of Agent Orange during the Vietnam War). But hardly any of them detail the visceral effects of warfare as experienced by soldiers themselves.

The shadow of nuclear Armageddon hung over much 80s pop – even Prince's party-fantasy '1999' imagined a populace "running everywhere" beneath a purple sky on the eve of destruction – yet only a very few songs, such as Kate Bush's 'Breathing' ("Chips of Plutonium are twinkling in every lung") dared examine the physical effects of nuclear war - radiation sickness, the voiding of blood, birth deformities.

I believe a truly great war song is one that offers an unblinking, soldier's-eye view of conflict. And by that criteria, Metallica's 'One' surely deserves the crown – especially when experienced in tandem with its harrowing video.

Released as a single in January 1989, 'One' is sung from the point of view of a World War 1 veteran who wakes up in hospital a prisoner in his own body, having lost all his limbs and senses in a mortar attack. Inspired by the novel 'Johnny Got His Gun', the lyrics paint a terrifying picture of living death ("Darness imprisoning me, all that I see, absolute horror").

The real master-stroke, though, came with the video, which used dialogue and footage from the film-of-the-book to ratchet up the despair even further:

By the end, as the guitars reach peak velocity and the narrator realises the helplessness of his situation ("Inside I'm screaming, nobody pays any attention"), you're left with, not just a peerless evocation of the human horror wrought by war, but also a profoundly disturbing metaphysical conundrum: without access to our senses, how do we know if we are alive or dead?

Admittedly, there are other songs that vividly capture war's effects – Dylan's 'A-Hard Rain's Gonna Fall' prophesises a world poisoned by nuclear fallout, while Eric B & Rakim's 'Casualties Of War' finds its narrator crouched in the hot sand of Kuwait as the bullets whistle overhead – but none does do with the unflinching potency of Metallica's 'One'."