While it’s specifically about the Spanish Civil War, Ernest Hemingway’s 1940 novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, thanks to his evocative, spartan prose, becomes a universal, almost mythological hymn to the primary conflicts of the human experience. The individual and the group. The life force and the death drive. Knowing when to hold ‘em, fold ‘em, blow up a bridge, or make yourself cannon fodder in a fit of PTSD and hypermasculintiy.

The book’s philsophical scaffolding feels older than time, a reminder that, in a sense, no art is ever truly created or destroyed. Hemingway cribbed his title from John Donne, and there’s no reason conscious rappers, ambient composers, and one of the greatest American rock bands shouldn’t be able to take it and run with it.

Appropriately, today’s contestants are all sharp contrasts to each other, with little in common save their absolute refusal to have fun.

“The world breaks everyone and and afterward many are strong at the broken places.”

In 1984, it must have sounded like a revelation. With its blistering intensity, symphonic complexity, dark and undeniable themes, and pervasive current of populist rage, Ride the Lightning remains Metallica’s creative peak (there’s also an argument for Master of Puppets) and firmly in the conversation for the best American metal album of all time.

Metallica’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls” is track three, side one. Sandwiched between a mini-epic about capital punishment and a devastating dirge about suicide, it’s a stomper that borrows elements of Hemingway’s story and extrapolates into a grim meditation on mortality and existential horror. It remains one of the band’s longest-running live staples, and it served as conclusive proof that, after the self-referrential decadence of the ‘70s, rock music could still have something big and heavy to say. 

Compared to the rest of Ride the Lightning, as well as the rest of the songs in this contest, it almost seems fun, or fun-adjacent, if only by contrast.

“But what is dignity?”

The Austrailan pop group the Bee Gees has one of the most remarkably diverse artistic legacies of the 20th Century. Their baroque pop hits of the ‘60s were so striking and sophisticated that some nutjobs thought they were an undercover Lennon/McCartney side hustle (B.G. = “Beatles Group”), which is at least high praise. While other ‘60s acts scrambled to keep up with the explosions of funk, punk, and disco, the Bee Gees became the most recognizable ambassadors for the latter, lending mainstream creedence to a historically subversive sound.

By 1993, they had every right to rest on their laurels, and that’s exactly what they were doing. Size Isn’t Everything marked the group’s formal transition away from the dance music that gave it a second life, which would be fine if they had anywhere to go except into the dull, depressing doldrums of adult-contemporary resignation.

“For Whom the Bell Tolls” is the album’s dubious standout, a maudlin would-be torch song that became an unlikely hit for the band in the UK. It makes Phil Collins sound like Metallica, to say nothing of the Bee Gees’ genuinely difficult ‘60s ballads such as “New York Mining Disaster 1941” and “I’ve Gotta Get a Message to You,” which put its narrators on the brink of death over a decade before Metallica existed.

There’s nothing offensive or otherwise memorable about “For Whom the Bell Tolls” by the Bee Gees, and there’s no reason to revisit it outside historical curiosity or the fact that you’re trapped in an Ekckerd Pharmacy during the first Clinton administration. In the weird way unique to old heroes resigning themselves to irrelevance, it is less fun than Metallica or Hemingway.

“There is no friend as loyal as a book.”

In the 2010s, the North Carolinian rapper J. Cole claimed the enviable position of both commanding an intensely devoted and obnoxious army of online stans and quietly becoming one of the most commercially bankable acts in hip hop. This, despite the edgy eccentricity and vulnerability of much of his work and the fact that, next to any other rappers including Debbie Harry, MC Skat Kat, and the Chicago Bears Shufflin’ Crew, he comes off as a massive dork.

Cole’s 2016 LP 4 Your Eyez Only is his most self-serious, least accessible work, created in the wake of a friend dying violently at 22 and a SWAT team raiding Cole’s home for no goddamned reason. It features a rotating cast of narrative personae, including one very much caught up, in the manner of a Hemingway hero, with the Hamlet Question. 

“For Whom the Bell Tolls” is the opening track, and it is every inch an intro. The hunger for deeper meaning in the shadow of looming mortality (“Tired of feeling low even when I’m high / Ain’t no way to live / Do I wanna die? / I don’t know”) makes it a worthy of its titular reference, but it doesn’t stand by itself without the album, and its jazzy flourishes, in context, feel needlessly un-stoic. It is both oddly slight and, like J. Cole’s entire oeuvre, a little too extra.

“There is no one thing that is true. It is all true.”

William Basinski’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” on the other is, is an opening track that makes a fucking statement. 

The bicoastal avant-ambient composer William Basinski is best known for The Disintegration Loops, which he created while watching the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 WTC attacks and is pretty much what it says on the label (and yet gloriously mournful beyond words).

Lamentations doesn’t get the same love, but it is one of two or three records that epitomize my experience of the early-COVID era. The album is constructed from old tapes from Basinski’s collection, yet feels almost precisely of its morbidly peculiar moment in its profound, aching melancholy and ritualistic grief.

“For Whom the Bell Tolls” by Wm. Basinski is a ominous, pitch-dark rumble that both perfectly sets the table for the hour-plus bum trip to follow and is in the conversation for the most metal-as-fuck ambient composition of the decade. For what it’s worth, I recommended Lamentations to a metalhead friend who reported that she got in her car after work, put on Basinski, and rapidly broke down crying.

“The world is a fine place and worth fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.”

While Basinski’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls” is a painfully, beautifully significant sentimental favorite of mine, if there’s a song with that title that belongs in a time capsule, it’s obviously Metallica’s. Honorable mention to J. Cole for demanding that his fans listen to entire albums. And here’s hoping that, when we are kissed on our foreheads by the great equalizer and feel the sweet release of death, we can finally relax and get silly or something.

Recommend If You Like is not owned or funded by a billionaire or even a millionaire. We do have a Patreon. If you can’t afford to become a patron, please sign up to our mailing list. It’s free and we’re asking here instead of a pop-up. Pop-ups are annoying.