The Tyranny of Tradition

In testimony before Congress today, National Security Agency Director General Keith Alexander testified that surveillance of nearly every single person in the United States has not only helped to thwart over 50 terrorist attacks, but has yielded the added benefit of stopping an album featuring the members of Metallica and U2 frontman Bono.  While Americans are torn about surrendering civil liberties in order to prevent potential terrorist attacks, almost everybody agreed that a Metallica/Bono album had to be stopped under any circumstances.

Alexander was frank when he discussed the possible effects of another miserable Metallica album with the House Intelligence Committee.  “We survived the whole Metallica/Lou Reed “Lulu” disaster, but another horrible album featuring a celebrity hipster warbling embarrassing vocals over metal riffs was something that threatened to tear this great nation apart.”

In a Gallup Poll, 98 percent of Americans agreed they would be willing to give up any of the Constitution’s protections in order to avoid a sonic atrocity on this scale. “Hell, I’ll give up freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly.  You can search my home, take my guns, make me testify against myself.  I’ll even quarter soldiers.  Just for God sakes, don’t let Bono appear on a Metallica record,” said Helmholtz Watson, a professor of Heavy Metal Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, in a statement that echoed the sentiments of nearly every American.

According to Alexander, Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich contacted Bono last November in an attempt to gauge his willingness to be part of a project.  The NSA had been monitoring Ulrich, who has been under investigation for trafficking in donkey thyroid glands, for the past 2 years.  When NSA agents heard Ulrich utter the phrase “adult contemporary sounding metal album” they immediately went into action.

Ulrich was arrested and questioned for 12 hours the next day.  While he failed to discuss the Bono/Metallica plot, he did confess that Enter Sandman sounds way too much like Excel’s Tapping Into The Emotional Void to be a coincidence.  He was released, but detained and questioned again when he was spotted late that week in a Sam Goody’s in Venice Beach trying to buy a copy of U2’s 1993 album Zooropa.

Authorities say that the conspiracy never got past the planning stage and, in spite of their desire to “beat Bono like a redheaded stepchild”, the NSA believes that no actual criminal activity took place.  Still, as a precaution, they are continuing to monitor the phone calls of every American who owns a Metallica or U2 album, as well as several Pakistani nationals living in Michigan, Ohio, and Florida.