I Am The Table

About

"I Am The Table" refers to a lyric sung by James Hetfield in the 2011 song "The View" from Metallica's alternative metal album Lulu, in collaboration with Lou Reed from Velvet Underground. The lyric garnered notoriety due to its nonsensical nature and would later be the subject of mockery and memes online.

Origin

On September 17th, 2011, EdgarTMCC leaked the first song from the upcoming collaborative album by Metallica and Lou Reed, Lulu, titled, "The View" to YouTube^[1] (shown below). The video gained over 1,900 dislikes against just 282 likes in roughly 9 years. On September 27th "The View" officially released as the lead single for Reed and Metallica's collaborative album.

Near the end of "The View", Metallica singer James Hetfield sings the lyric "I am the table" a number of times. This can be heard starting at 2:05 in the song or official music video, released on December 3rd, which was re-uploaded to the Metallica YouTube^[2] page in 2020 (shown below).

I am the view!
I am the table!
I am the view, I am the table!
I am all this!
I am the root!
The progress!
The aggressor!
I am the table!
I am the ten stories!
I am the table!
I am! I am! I am! I am!
I am!

Spread

Shortly after the song's official release, listeners began posting memes referencing Hetfield's "table" lyrics, including image macros. On September 26th, doctordalek posted^[9] a Rage Comic referencing how bad the song is to FunnyJunk (shown below, left). On the same day, /u/Rodh257 uploaded^[10] an image macro referencing the song to /r/metal (shown below, right).

On September 27th, Peter Hodgson made a post to iheartguitarblog^[4] comically arguing that Hetfield is not a table. Sometime that same year, someone changed Hetfield's Last.fm profile image to a photo of a table (shown below).

On September 30th, chrisx8x23×95 uploaded a video to YouTube^[5] of Hetfield singing "I am the table" on loop for 23 seconds titled "I AM THE TABLE" garnering over 17,000 views in roughly 9 years (shown below, left). On October 4th, iamthetable1 uploaded a video slideshow to YouTube^[6] of several different tables along with the same song, garnering over 260,000 views in a comparable span of time (shown below, right).

On October 31st, 2011, Lulu released to largely negative reviews, holding an average review aggregate of 1.8 of 5 stars on Rate Your Music^[3] based on over 5,700 reviews. The release of the album lead more listeners to discover the table memes, increasing their popularity.

On November 18th, Aher belste uploaded a roughly 5 minute long video to YouTube^[7] consisting of Hetfield singing the lyric over an image of the singer as a table, garnering over 664,000 views in around 9 years (shown below).

On December 9th, Ultimate-Guitar^[8] published a satirical piece titled "James Hetfield Is Officially A Table" to their site, along with an image of Hetfield's Wikipedia page edited to identify him as a table (shown below).

On April 21st, 2020, Anthony Fantano uploaded a video in his "LET's ARGUE" series discussing the worst lyrics of all time, mentioning "I am the table" (shown below). The video garnered over 1.8 million views in 9 months.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References