I've always identified strongly with the The Onion headline "Oh My God, You've Never Seen Every Movie Ever Made?" Being a professional film critic means
constantly astounding people who simply cannot fathom why you haven't seen [X
film they care passionately about]. This was reinforced when we ran lists of
"Still Unseen" movies in our recent "My Favorite Movie Year" feature, and
caught flak from readers who were shocked, yes, shocked, that we hadn't seen a
personal favorite of theirs, yet didn't immediately resign in shame.
This gave us an idea for "Better Late Than
Never," a new feature where A.V. Club writers finally catch up with crucial blind spots in
their pop-cultural education. For some, this means moving out of their comfort
zones by, say, writing about a seminal hard-rock album instead of the new Pete
Rock CD (which is excellent, by the way). For others, it means immersing
themselves in canonical classics they inexplicably missed the first time
around. The idea is to revisit venerable pop-culture treasures with
fresh—even ignorant—eyes. It's all part of The A.V Club's sinister plan to overwhelm
readers with more ongoing new features than they can possibly handle.
For
the maiden entry in Better Late Than Never, I will momentarily take a break from
hipping and hopping to immerse myself in the Sunset Strip depravity of Guns N'
Roses' classic 1987 debut, Appetite For Destruction. I tend to have a backward
relationship with music: Most people follow a group for years, then read a book
about them. I arbitrarily read books about groups I have at best a passing
interest in, such as Mick Wall's W.A.R.: The Unauthorized Biography of
William Axl Rose; then
I think "Hey, I should check out this band's music." That's what led me to Appetite For
Destruction.
Regular readers of this site know me as a
hip-hop guy. But my tastes are wide-ranging and diverse. I like everything from
early Taylor Dayne to mid-period Taylor Dayne. (Okay, that isn't technically
true, but how refreshing would it be to hear someone finally describe their
musical tastes as narrow, nichey, and not at all diverse?) Alas, like 90
percent of humanity, I like all different kinds of music, but I definitely have
my pet genres. So the novelty here isn't so much a hip-hop guy writing about a
rock album, but a guy who favors rock of the effete, irony-saturated, quirky,
and/or political variety writing about a hard-rock album that isn't remotely
effete, ironic, quirky, or political.
When I was 19, I took exactly two
electric-guitar lessons from an old guy with a hearing aid who told me that he
didn't particularly care for heavy metal, but he respected Metallica because of
the complexity and intricacy of their guitar parts. Though I could care less
about the complexity and intricacy of a band's guitar playing, I understood
where he was coming from. I've never been particularly enamored of heavy metal,
but I respect that Metallica is really good at what they do. On a similar note,
it was apparent even at the time that while Guns N' Roses were unmistakably a
product of the L.A. hair-metal scene that eventually flowered into two seasons
of Rock
Of Love and
the Tommy Lee/Pamela Anderson sex tape, their music was plugged into something
vital and pure at rock's core. They were both of their time and timeless.
GN'R towered above their hairspray-addled
peers to such an extent that it almost seems unfair to associate them with the
hair-metal scene at all. The group deserves to be mentioned in the same breath
as Jerry Lee Lewis, heroin-era Aerosmith, The Rolling Stones, Sex Pistols,
Cheap Trick, and all the other hellions who ever pleased Satan with their
rockitude.
Axl Rose solidified GN'R's iconic status by
firing his band and pulling a J.D. Salinger. Nobody could complain that Guns N'
Roses' new albums paled in comparison to their classics, because there were no
new albums. Nothing becomes a legend quite like disappearing. Axl Rose became
the Howard Hughes of rock, a kilt-sporting hermit who divides his time between
recruiting/publicly firing new bandmates, disparaging old bandmates (yes, even
Buckethead), getting arrested under bizarre circumstances, and working on his
notorious, endlessly delayed comeback album, Chinese Democracy.
It's tempting to play amateur psychiatrist and
view Rose's obsession with power and control as an extreme reaction to a
traumatic childhood. As a bullied, awkward boy in Indiana, Rose felt powerless
and vulnerable. As an adult, he vowed never to feel powerless or vulnerable
again, even if it meant destroying every important relationship he had, and
willingly turning himself into a freak. Axl Rose and the band he ruled with an
iron fist became one of pop music's great "What if?"s. But before they flamed
out, they conquered the world with Appetite For Destruction, which catapulted Rose and company
into the rarified heights of rock superstardom.
Nelly Furtado once described The Roots song
"Pussy Galore" as sounding like "walking through a Thai whorehouse in bare
feet." That description describes much of Appetite For Destruction as well. The album luxuriates
in debauchery, sex, and sleaze: it just plain sounds dirty, from the buzzsaw
guitars of Slash and Izzy Stradlin to Axl Rose's leering, raspy howl.
"Welcome To The Jungle" gets the album off to a supersonic
start, with Rose theatrically playing the role of a demented rock 'n' roll
barker with a leering, sinister, seductive spiel. Destruction is lifestyle porn, pure and
simple, an invitation to spend an hour vicariously experiencing a world where
the drugs are free, the girls are easy, and the party doesn't stop until
someone ODs.
It's a glorious exploration of the adolescent mindset that
touches upon such beloved teen themes as drugs and alcohol ("Mr. Brownstone"
and "Nighttrain"), how girls, especially hot girls, are all fucked-up ("You're
Crazy," "My Michelle"), how adults be all hasslin' you and shit ("Out Ta Get
Me"), idealized romance ("Sweet Child O' Mine"), and the eternal quest for
transcendence ("Paradise City"). Oh, and on the album-closing "Rocket Queen,"
there's the sound of real, live, in-the-studio fucking, which is terribly
transgressive and naughty in a 13-year-old kind of way.
In case anyone doubts that Appetite For Destruction is the product of a
wonderfully blinkered adolescent mindset, the liner-notes thank-yous end with a
shout out to "all those who taught us hard lessons by attempted financial
sodomy, the teachers, preachers, cops, and elders who never believed." (To
paraphrase Woody Allen, financial sodomy is my second favorite kind.) Elders?
Are Guns N' Roses secretly stuck inside M. Night Shyamalan's The Village? Who else hath forsaken
them? Hath someone stoleneth their butter churn? Think of the "teachers,
preachers, cops" line as Rose's version of 2Pac's "Picture Me Rollin'" roll
call.
2Pac and Guns N' Roses could scarcely have
less in common, musically. Gangsta rap celebrates consequence-free drug use,
sexual promiscuity, the subjugation of women, lawlessness, and wanton hedonism. Appetite
For Destruction, in
sharp contrast, celebrates drug use, sexual promiscuity, the subjugation of
women, lawlessness, and wanton hedonism with loud guitars and pummeling drums.
There's a world of difference, really.
The lyrics of Appetite For Destruction frequently blur the line
between "stupid" and "transcendently stupid," and Rose's debauched frontman
routine constantly goes way, way, way over the top, as when he howls "Now
you're clean and so discreet / I won't say a word / But most of all this song
is true / 'Case you haven't heard" during "My Michelle," a portrait of a
heavy-metal casualty-to-be etched in acid. I can't help but laugh out loud
every time I hear Axl Rose end "Mr. Brownstone," an incongruously funky song
about heroin, with an ecstatic cry of "Yowza!" At first, this annoyed me, but
after a while, I couldn't envision ending the song any other way.
Incidentally, the Wikipedia entry for "Mr.
Brownstone" describes the song's origins: "[Slash] states that [he and Izzy
Stradlin] were sitting around, complaining about being heroin addicts, when they
started improvising lyrics and music ('Brownstone' is a slang term for
heroin)." Inspired, I wrote the following, extremely short play about the
song's genesis.
Slash: Man, being a heroin addict
sure sucks.
Izzy Stradlin: Tell me about it. It's like,
I shoot up some heroin, then I totally want to shoot up even more heroin! It's
downright meshuggeneh, is what it is!
Slash: Whatever dude, pass the
heroin. Oh, incidentally, my lawyer says that if we write a song about Mr.
Brownstone, I can write off all my heroin purchases as a business expense.
Izzy: Sweet!
[End Scene.]
It took me a little while to warm up to Appetite For
Destruction. At
first, I found the singles way too long, especially the nearly seven-minute
"Paradise City," which initially struck me as a kick-ass chorus in search of a
song. I similarly
found a lot of the album tracks flimsy and inconsequential, little more than
ramshackle filler. Upon my fourth listen, however, I surrendered and gave
myself over to the rock completely. Things got so crazy, I even took to lightly
drumming my fingers over my computer keyboard in appreciation. I hope I didn't distract
any co-workers with my crazy rock 'n' roll shenanigans. The album tracks I
initially found wanting suddenly seemed like the product of the world's
greatest bar band. I mean that as a compliment.
By a strange coincidence, I reviewed Thriller, another unimpeachable staple
of the pop-music canon, while reading W.A.R. That got me thinking about the unexpected parallels
between Axl Rose and Michael Jackson, two Indiana boys made good, then bad.
Somehow I imagine that when Tom Petty sang about those "Indiana boys on an
Indiana night" that helped Mary Jane grow up tall and grow up right in "Mary
Jane's Last Dance," Axl Rose and Michael Jackson weren't what he had in mind.
Like Jackson, Rose was liberated by music and
ruined by money, power, and fame. Both men peaked early and transformed
historic careers into chilly mausoleums to wasted talent and squandered
potential, Xanadu-like monuments to arrogance and delusion. Like Thriller, Appetite
For Destruction earned
Axl Rose a lifetime's worth of "fuck you" money. But a lifetime spent screaming
"fuck you" to everyone and everything is bound to feel awfully empty.