"I am the root/I am the progress/I am the aggressor," James Hetfield bellows like vengeance itself in the thundering spaces between Lou Reed's dry, unpitying harangue, in this song of destructive passion from Lulu, the strange-bedfellows record of the year. The full album runs the gamut of Reed and Metallica's respective extremes: his literary violence and love of drone, their wild-boy thrash and crushing power chords. But "The View" – with its crippled-march rhythm, sudden jump to double time and smeared-blues guitar outbursts by Kirk Hammett – is an effective introduction to the logic of this collaboration. Metallica are as raw and punishing, in their Motörhead-loving way, as the original Velvet Underground, while the sadistic need in Reed's lyrics and you-dare-to-fuck-with-me? voice, in this setting, are real doom metal. "Pain and evil have their place sitting here beside me," he sings, armed with the badass band to make you believe him.

Listen to "The View":

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“Karma Chameleon”

Boy George has said this song was about standing by what you believe in. However, at the time, he was involved in a secret affair with Culture Club drummer Jon Moss. "Now people can understand the songs better," he said. "They were written about my relationship with Jon, and they were also written about being a gay man in a homophobic world." The lines "If I listen to your lies, would you say/I'm a man without conviction/I'm a man who doesn't know how to sell a contradiction," described his life at the time, he said. "I was selling this big lie."