Guns 'n' Roses - Devoted to hard rock

Hard rock, ever since rock itself has existed, has never really gone through a true crisis, but has always been rekindled and more or less updated to the dominant sounds of each decade. This, perhaps the longest-lived species of the rock genre, has nonetheless kept its original stance and its own peculiar values without exception. Within sonorities made of cadenced, blues-derived rhythms, guitar and drum solos, a repetitive compositional structure of soft-loud-soft or loud-soft-loud or soft-loud-in crescendo, and performative rhetoric delivered through "technical" and "high" vocals and guitar riffs, these "values" amount to a hedonism that is an end in itself, a petulant, adolescent and petty morality, a self-destructiveness as ostentatious as it is a pretext for the real use of alcohol, drugs and sex: the very hedonism mentioned above. As seasoning we have a rhetorical and bloated attitude that hammers and re-hammers, with blind faith, on the same themes, which can moreover be summed up in the female sex organ, the supreme goal of every action/reaction. Hard rock is a state of neither flesh nor fowl, yet reactionarily convinced of its own being: neither metal nor blues, neither destruction nor survival, a nonchalance bordering on the stupid and inconclusive in its a priori fossilization into an X that is a state of mind of self-satisfied rebellion, fundamentally because it is merely hedonistic rather than aesthetic in its attachment to life.

In order: Deep Purple, Aerosmith, Kiss, AC/DC, Van Halen, Def Leppard, Bon Jovi, Guns N' Roses. Even if to a lesser extent, 1991 can also be considered the year rock died because it's the year of the last truly "original and significant" hard rock album. And it's a Guns N' Roses album, the band that were themselves the last true diehard upholders of the hard-rock Creed.

Drug addicts and alcoholics from a very young age, Guns N' Roses stood out in mid-80s California as the most "punk" of all the hard rock acts; indeed, they were perhaps the first strictly hard-rock band in history to embrace a punk ideology (i.e. a punk extremism). Punk and hard-rock are usually poles apart, in terms of how they relate to life and, by extension, to music. There's no greater split than the one within this same context: hard-rock and punk inhabit the same state of "malaise" and "rebellion", but they do so with opposite approaches, and so end up at odds with each other. In between, as far as hard-rock is concerned, lies the blues, which punk programmatically disowned. And so the most immediate predecessor to Guns N' Roses turns out to be Motley Crue: savages who, like Guns N' Roses, paired melody and slow ballads with extreme sonic outbursts and explosions, but who leaned more toward metal (which in some of its dynamics they helped found) than toward hard-rock. It's punk ideology and irreverence that led first Motley Crue and then Guns N' Roses to favor the (extreme) metal side over the (compromise-prone) hard-rock side of their "art". The two bands are also united by their reputation as "beautiful and damned", managing to win over the most varied slices of audience with their neglected, worn-out model looks, their clothes that inevitably set trends, their misogynistic and sexually perverse attitudes, their ballads and their outbursts, their romanticism and their devastation. The comparisons end there, though, because Motley Crue (by virtue of a far smaller success than Guns N' Roses) ended up, by way of compensation, with a longer career and an objectively greater importance (just think of Tommy Lee's drumming feats); reaching extremes that are more extreme than those of their imitators Guns N' Roses.

Guns N' Roses, however, were no joke either. In fact, in the years they were active, they were among the truly and not merely ostentatiously most depraved and unyielding bands around. And they were so programmatically and incurably (with a particular fondness for sexual violence, vandalism and heroin).

Guitarist Slash (born in England in 1965) came from a decidedly well-off family: it was his father (a graphic designer who, among other things, worked on album covers for Neil Young and Joni Mitchell) and his mother (a designer of clothes and sets for film productions) who brought him to Los Angeles, where, not yet of age, he left his family to take up vagrancy and petty crime (to survive, he even worked as a human guinea pig for Philip Morris: he had to smoke three packs of cigarettes a day and then undergo various tests, and with what they paid him he bought food and little else). Singer Axl Rose (1962) came from a far more degraded situation (sexual abuse suffered as a child, etc.) and stayed in it, only changing location: from Indiana he moved (along with hundreds of thousands of others who made the city the one with the highest short-term population growth in history) to Los Angeles. The second guitarist (but author of most of the music, and the true, though overshadowed by the other two, Guns N' Roses man) Izzy Stradlin (1962) alternated his wayward life with an unconditional devotion to old-school American rock music. Bassist Duff McKagan (Seattle, 1964) was a car thief. Steven Adler (Ohio, 1965), on drums, was a Tommy Lee epigone.

They all found each other in Los Angeles, and after a couple of years living together in an underground brothel-cum-studio, populated day and night by hundreds of different people who flocked to watch the band rehearse (nonstop: or interrupted only by sex, drugs and alcohol, in an indecipherable whirlwind), after this "total", desperate, relatively brief period, when the oldest member was 25 and the youngest 22, Appetite For Destruction came out. It was 1987, and the album (admittedly, a bit slow to catch on at first) took off in a huge way. Had the band stopped there, it would have made no difference to the history of rock music. And in fact the band would stop there (creatively, at least), living off the legacy of that primal initial energy ever after.

Already on their very first try, Guns N' Roses said everything they had to say; they did everything they were capable of doing; and they stand as one of the very last (chronologically speaking) rock bands in history. Guns N' Roses were born classic already: partly thanks to Slash's "English" touch (Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, Motorhead and Sex Pistols were all English), and partly, above all, because of their revival of the blues roots of American rock. Anyone with an interest in classic rock will find something to love in Guns N' Roses, a classic-rock-blues band par excellence. One of those (relatively few: a dozen or so) bands to enter the collective imagination of half the world, and of America in particular. Guns N' Roses seemed like a destiny fulfilled, much like the Rolling Stones, among the least "manufactured" bands in history. They knew how to go along with this force of nature.

"Welcome to the Jungle" is already a classic (and the song that best exemplifies the album cover, itself a classic that thousands of teenagers would sport on T-shirts and posters at least until the mid-90s); it almost seems redundant to talk about it; it sounds like one of those tracks that, like it or not, are now part of the collective imagination. Musically it's as perfect as hard rock can be, embodying the genre's essence as filtered through the 80s backdrop of post-metal and post-punk (and later death-metal and grunge). The lyrics are the quintessential Guns N' Roses autobiography, telling of their stray and depraved life, violent and so deliberately chosen: set in the "catastrophic" metropolis that Los Angeles was (even more so then than now) in the mid-80s.

"It's So Easy" enriches the hard rock mix with a dragging, bluesy mood that rises into one of the most affecting (least rhetorical) choruses Guns N' Roses ever wrote. Axl Rose's voice here runs through pretty much every register, backed by various effects and plenty of artistry. The track is, more than soft, steady in its pace. A must to rediscover, for its primal and "total" quality; melancholic like certain grunge, dark like other kinds of blues, unshakeable like metal.

"Nightrain" makes what's just been said more explicit, by simplifying it. It comes across as rougher (then again, Guns N' Roses are an extremely rough band, and not just deliberately so, but naturally: hewn with an axe, bending without breaking, coarse, grandiloquent in its quiet moments as much as in its loud ones), but no less effective. Let's give some causal weight to the era in question too: the 80s. A "sunny" record couldn't and shouldn't have existed in that extraordinary, all-consuming, all-enveloping, all-encompassing decade.

"Outta Get Me" is a lesser track, though meticulously crafted in every detail. It starts out AC/DC, moves into blues territory, and lands on a chorus and riff that are basically an AC/DC rip-off.

"Mr. Brownstone" ventures into experimentation with a fast, tribal, half-spoken chant backed by fluid guitar phrasing. Then the chorus. The innovation Guns N' Roses brought to hard rock (one that went unnoticed by everyone) lies in the length of the lyrics and of the vocal lines (which run through almost the entire instrumental fabric); Axl also makes use of near-rap delivery and, here and there, rambles through floods of spoken words: until the chorus arrives, sung at the edge of falsetto. The track in question is dedicated to heroin (Axl's favorite sustenance). On other albums, a "minor" song like this would be hailed as a masterpiece.

"Paradise City" is as famous as it is akin to "Welcome to the Jungle": the whistle that separates the slow introductory verse from the band's choral eruption (especially live) will go down in the annals. Then there are some wise and original drum cadences, stepping into the spotlight only when needed. Everything is cleverly calculated. Every instrument takes the lead exactly when its turn comes: and does so with scorn and violence. At over 6 minutes it's arguably too long not to drag a little, but that's part of the game and of Guns N' Roses' grandiloquent way of being.

"My Michelle" is an absolute track. The best thing Guns N' Roses ever managed to produce. "Your daddy work in porno/ Now that mommy's not around" is one of the most expressionistic opening lines (in terms of lyricism) in the history of rock. For the rest, it's an uncompromising track (and free of rhetoric: a lean, essential 3'39"): the best of AC/DC's syncopation without their chauvinism. An Axl in full ascent within his violent, delinquent mysticism (which here finds, without self-indulgence and in its own way, a core of sincere compassion and an invitation to endure by openly affirming one's own catastrophic existential state).

"Think About You" is garage-rock in the school of Marc Bolan and Billy Idol; it would be destined to go unnoticed, were it not for the affecting vocal trail-off in the chorus, which makes Axl Rose a classic hard rock singer who managed to carve out a place among Plant (Led Zeppelin), Tyler (Aerosmith) and Scott (AC/DC), absorbing all the stylistic traits of the genre without, when he shows his least rhetorical side, slipping into the bombastic routines of his masters. It's punk nihilism that allows him to hold his own vocal talents in contempt, so as not to revel in them in a self-celebratory, unpleasant and unattractive way. That same punk nihilism that made Guns N' Roses the last hard rock band in the history of rock (the last able to personally reinterpret the hard-rock genre); that same nihilism whose absence, in the wake of Guns N' Roses, spawned pop-hair-metal abominations (which understood nothing of the mother band's lesson) such as, just to give one example, Bad English.

"Sweet Child O' Mine" (and this holds true for the opening riff alone) may, 16 years on, come across as off-putting: like a cult that's been abused and overused. If they could talk, the walls of thousands of basements where, in the late 80s and early 90s, young and not-so-young people nurtured their rock 'n' roll dreams would recall this song as one of the most slurred, mangled and, at best, lovingly practiced of the era. Now, either cultural conditioning counts for nothing and the track in question can still thrill the way it once did; or, if it counts for even a little, today that must-listen, like a prostitute, but also like the sun we take for granted in the sky every day with total indifference, has been so thoroughly internalized that it no longer has any innocence, any pleasure, any interest left to offer. If this is the fate of "classic" tracks, it might be more accurate to call it death than immortality.

"You're crazy" leans, in terms of its sonic backbone, toward the boogie-heavy sound of Motorhead. Then Axl's voice flares up into retro high notes à la Joe Elliott (Def Leppard). The track is a dud. It would have been better left off the album, for which (and I'd almost say, for which album wouldn't it be?) 57 minutes and 33 seconds are decidedly too many. Then again, man cannot live on bread alone.

"Anything goes", yet another sign of the fundamental crudeness of hard rockers (I use the term hard rock in its proper sense, as defined at the outset; so let the critics who don't take this into account hold their fire), thinks it's being experimental and "fun" with trite funk gimmicks, breakdowns, as many echo effects as you like. More than being awful, it simply manages to be boring (which is worse).

"Racket queen", even though there was no need for it, proves beyond doubt that Appetite for Destruction should have stopped at track 9. Forty-seven minutes would have earned it several more points in the critics' rankings (those not afflicted by the mania for quantity) compared to the 57 it actually runs.

1988 saw the release of Lies, which is supposed to be an album but in fact (both for its acoustic nature and for its inconsistency) has never really entered the essential Guns n' Roses discography; a Guns n' Roses who, thanks really only to their first album, would spend the years between 1987 and 1990 touring the world, letting people get their hands (quite literally, through the sheer scale of the tour) on what millions had already come to love on record.

Then (and in this "then" lie all of Axl's tantrums, the drug problems, the run-ins with the law, the women, the existential malaise — in short, sardonically, those 3-4 things that every self-respecting rocker, at least since the days of Jerry Lee Lewis, though the comparison with the Rolling Stones might fit even better, is required to have) comes the blockbuster album. A preliminary note: in the meantime, keyboardist Dizzy Reed had joined the band, and drummer Steve Adler had been replaced by Matt Sorum, ex-Cult. This is significant: keyboards in hard rock = silly, saccharine pseudo-romanticism, and in any case rhetorical posturing; Matt Sorum in Guns n' Roses = more professionalism, but far less involvement-passion-recklessness. Also in the meantime, producer Mike Clink (or the Geffen establishment behind him) had steadily and predictably gained more influence. If Guns n' Roses, like the Stones, were born as the ultimate not-manufactured-in-a-boardroom band, they ended up, like the Beatles (who had been that way from the very start), becoming exactly that. This wouldn't mean much in itself. The Sex Pistols too were a "calculated" band, programmed and then deactivated by Malcolm McLaren. And yet they gave us "Nevermind the Bollocks". Too bad Guns n' Roses gave us Use Your Illusion. Use Your Illusion, which actually wouldn't even be bad — in fact I'd call it excellent (and what technical progress the band shows compared to the first album...) for the genre, if only it weren't split in two. Let me explain. Around this album there are (not only among philologists and their "intertextual collations", but even among music critics, for heaven's sake!) "separatists" and "unitarians". Indeed, in September 1991 (alongside Nevermind), Use Your Illusion I and Use Your Illusion II were released. Meant to be bought separately, yet with obvious cross-references in the artwork (besides the titles, of course), in the songs (right away a double version of "Don't Cry", which, having been planned that way, was meant to be an era-defining hit), and so on. The result (a little, and who would have thought it, like with Helloween's Keeper of the Seven Keys, Pt. 1 and Keeper of the Seven Keys, Pt. 2) was that the first album sold enormously (complete with the usual scenes of lines outside record stores: something that, thankfully thanks to better distribution, no longer happens today), while the second, usually regarded as a side offering for die-hard fans, a sort of collection of bonus tracks, was relegated to near-oblivion (and besides, it didn't have the classic tracks, expertly promoted via video).

Over time, if not from the very start (helped along, perhaps intentionally, by the project's mastermind), a great deal of confusion arose, with debates between "separatists" (who consider the two albums as distinctly individual works) and "unitarians" (who view the second as a kind of "leftovers collection" put out to cash in on the first's success, and who are the same people who, regardless of the fact that the quality is in fact identical and of the same kind across both Use Your Illusion albums, still insist, for instance, on treating Metallica's Load and Reload as a single double album).

I am a staunch "separatist", and I will behave accordingly. Use Your Illusion I and Use Your Illusion II are two mega-albums, 74 minutes each. This is their cross to bear: a redundant grandiosity that echoes through the excessive length of their relatively few tracks (16 and 14 respectively); a lot of smoke and very little fire; tons of overcooked, indigestible pasta smothering even the precious sauce that is indeed there. A single album, 45 minutes long, and it would have been another masterpiece on a par with Appetite for Destruction (note the rhyme between the two titles). But that would also have sacrificed the actual purpose of the operation (regardless of the record-label interference and intrigue behind it): a "total" and definitive summation of rock of every era and form, as if to leave to posterity (or to Martians), as the sole interpreter, the sole expression, and the highest value of the rock song, the name Guns n' Roses. Not only does the band clearly fail in this aim and slip into the ridiculous, but, alarmingly, it also manages to be deeply boring.

In short, these albums — or either one taken on its own — whether because of the length of the tape and of the individual tracks, the hammering of the performance, the redundancy of the vocals, or the sense of formless extremity that pervades them, end up unlistenable in one sitting. And the trouble (the real flaw) is that this doesn't stem, as it does with Soft Machine or Captain Beefheart or Royal Trux, from the complexity of the content, but from its sheer "heaviness": a squared-off, indigestible laboriousness, a brick of a record that's unchewable unless crumbled first. Lots of twists and turns. Little substance (or at least too little relative to the "too much" into which it's abandoned). And yet, like a cathedral in the desert, like a conceptual, cerebral, grandiose, overwrought, bloated and overflowing poem from late antiquity, it retains its own fascination. The fascination of the sad despair of being unable to escape, despite all the effort and everything put on the line, from nothingness or emptiness. The conclusion is inconclusiveness itself.

Use Your Illusion I

"Right Next Door to Hell" has a bass intro that could pass for Krist Novoselic of Nirvana. Otherwise, a great track; one of the high points of the Roses and of Axl's voice (sublimely poised between punk, metal and hard rock). A meticulously calculated orgy, total and relentless. Explosive, like a baptism (given that we're at the opening of an album whose first pressing came with a sticker reading: "This album contains language which some listeners may find objectionable. They can F?!* OFF and buy something from the New Age section" — signed Axl Rose, you can bet on it), delivered as a "fuck you". A clean three minutes. Spacious too, in atmosphere (think of the speed-of-light amplification of city-traffic magma). Exactly what's needed, if hard rock is what you want.

"Dust N' Bones" sees the keyboards burst in, with a tone that's fundamentally Aerosmith; the chorus, manfully romantic (see, besides Aerosmith, Bon Jovi), is neither unpleasant nor boring (for the genre). Almost country, almost drunk, in tone. The reverb-drenched ending is a Rolling Stones copy.

"Live and Let Die" maintains a certain quality and decorum: it apes the excessive pomposity (a sweetness so overdone it curdles into dumb, self-indulgent, unbearable sappiness) of Meat Loaf, but earns its own identity thanks to Slash's slow, descending blues-metal guitar entrance right in the middle of the orchestral mazurka.

"Don't Cry": saccharine, fake as a tin coin, cowardly, cheap, rhetorical. Especially today... So many true things... And yet, and yet, that intro by Slash, Axl's stumble into a momentarily hesitant breath at a certain point: not just memorable, but genuinely touching all the same. It's the covers made of it that have ruined it; the song itself, overly calculated, ruined itself with its own hands (that one "baby" too many... which Americans so love). Still, there it is. And one shouldn't wish it weren't there, because it will be there regardless. Like sex: everyone does it even though everyone does it; every hard rocker writes ballads even though every hard rocker writes ballads. Must be genetic.

"Perfect Crime" is where the album's true pomposity begins. Then again, it's the only means by which Axl, Slash and Stradlin can probe their own egos and their lifestyle, devastated by excess (all of it physical, by the way). And there's the album in a nutshell: an excess, entirely physical, entirely about quantity rather than quality. Flawlessly executed, granted. Too bad it's the flawless execution of something with no inherent value of its own (the greatest value these individuals' lives possess is the one already expressed on Appetite for Destruction, and here needlessly, and almost always worse, restated; needlessly, except insofar as it serves their own survival).

"You Ain't the First" is an acoustic counterpoint. Guns n' Roses share (albeit on a far lesser scale) the same spirit — as well as many of the same attitudes and ways of relating to life and music — as the Rolling Stones: they devour everything. Even when there's no "Something" with a capital S behind it. In short, they put on a show, they stage a concert (and an album, as we see) even without quality songs. They're creatures of the stage. Unimpeachable, incorruptible professionals. They prove it. It's not enough to make a full meal of it, but at least it's enough for bread.

Same goes for “Bad obsession,” shifted toward electric Aerosmith-Rolling Stones rhythms. Content-wise it's zero (there's no life of Axl or Slash and the resulting message, as there was in Appetite for destruction, unless that has degraded so much as to seem inconsistent). Execution is perfect. Hedonism without aesthetics. For the beasts it might be enough. For everyone else, it's boredom.

“Back off bitch” caresses the essence of hard rock sound, retracing all its stylistic devices and tricks, mapping out its complete "stave." A taxonomic exercise. Without interpretation. To "understand" and make this white-hot pachyderm one's own (to give it value and justification: what great/meaningful tracks have) would take a "heart" and a "desire" so full of devotion as to border on sainthood. Everything can be "justified" (appreciated). The question is how much effort it takes to get there.

“Double talkin' jive” is the very same story (especially in the final part of the track). Still, the song's rhythm deserves credit for a more distinctive attitude and a more experimental flow, which makes it, to some extent, easier to appreciate, if not outright enjoyable. Worth pondering.

“November rain” is, I'd say, the b-side of “Don't cry”: it's more tedious and harder to sit through only because it's longer (too long: 9 minutes; like “Riders on the storm” by the Doors: too long). Piano, flute, guitar, girl under the arm, lighter held up to the left, a nod of approval and satisfaction (at the whole picture). If you go along with all this, you'll go along with (or already do) “November rain.” Sure, Axl's voice (here acting as songwriter) sinks into and embellishes the part like no one else could. Sure, the dreaded word "baby" doesn't show up. That's something, at least. But on Appetite for destruction, that something would have made people smile or shout "gay."

“The garden” finally returns to a more explicitly existential core. Malign, though soft, though too long, it conjures an almost dreamlike, visionary ballad-like atmosphere. Worth rediscovering and appreciating. It almost achieves something all-encompassing. Not rhetorical in the least. Explicit and sincere.

“Garden of eden,” however, plunges back into a nonsensical display of violence and thuggery (a murderous rap-like cadence) that's an end in itself, not even believing in itself, however much a supreme savoir-faire props it up (as usual - though it's like asking Piero della Francesca to try not knowing how to draw: he couldn't manage it, even if uninspired). "Don't damn me" is less a question mark than something unworthy even of that. It spews filth. For whom? For other spewers of filth? If this is how Guns n' Roses chose to survive, it would have been better to die (that is, to break up; which, in fact, happened not long after).

“Bad apples” is rhythm and blues of a fine pedigree, no doubt about that. But if you read the sheet music, do you find anything of worth or invention in it? “Dead horse” might actually surprise: an acoustic opening that seems to foreshadow Nirvana's "Unplugged in New York." Then the crude blues-hard rock ensemble kicks in and ruins everything. Clearly there wasn't much to say.

“Coma” offers 10 minutes of a classic closing standing ovation. Believe the 10 minutes, believe the "classic" part too, and the "closing" part as well. As for the standing ovation, allow me to opt out. It's the best track among the worst ones we've covered here: but that's still not enough; yes to the screams, to the alienating guitar phrasing, to the squared-off drumming; no to the overall excessive sense of entertainment for its own sake. It's as if someone were desperately and uselessly trying to fill an empty grave. Interpret the metaphor however you like.

Use your illusion II

“Civil war”: how long had it been (if you're coming off the indigestion of the previous album) since we last heard Guns n' Roses playing hard rock the way it should be done (loud and soft, devastating, thuggish, erupting in a scattered, roaring catapult of sound)? Here they are again, blazing, innovative, with a tail-end kick so decisive it gives hope for a rebirth. And all this (thanks to a composition of real worth) despite (and I say this as a negative) the track's over 7 minutes, despite the keyboards' ranting on (filling things out, Jerry Lee Lewis-style, with roaring crescendos and some undeniable dips). When there's real substance - here it's a whisper (with a brilliant opening of a voice mistreated on tape), an arpeggio, and then Axl's resilient, dying desperation. Perhaps the best Guns n' Roses track since “My Michelle”; certainly the best since '87. Live, finally, it's stratospheric: like all great songs, which hold up to anything.

“14 years” is a power-pop number carried by keyboards, not unlistenable but nothing more (though that's not nothing, given the times). If we had to grade it, let's call it a "success." “Yesterdays” is the horrendous one. A ballad. (With titles like that, you don't get far anyway; even if the mood is collegial and the yearning for "memory" reigns supreme).

“Knockin' on heaven's door” is the version of the song that will go down in history (half the world's non-specialists, at least, have no idea the track is by Bob Dylan).

“Get in the ring,” with the manic artifice of the live take, reaches the peak of violence, of heaviness (as much in sound as in tedium) and of sheer intransigence (the manifesto of the thuggish hard rock or metal-street sound invented by Guns n' Roses - after the Rolling Stones had given blues the same treatment) as much as of crudeness and lack of value (what does it stir up, besides the urge to switch off the stereo?). The lyrics, at least, are redeeming.

“Shotgun blues” keeps stubbornly echoing the quintessential bluesmen, the Rolling Stones. “Breakdown” whistles along, kicks the keyboards into gear, hints at a half-tenor voice from Axl. And then... and then it grows tedious however much it chases after underground epicness.

“Pretty died up” even throws itself headlong into an oriental-sounding opening (go figure); then, with that little piano line, it almost feels like entertainment for dazed old barflies, just a touch more worked up/lively or drunk than usual. “Locomotive,” 9 minutes. Of what, name something you don't like and you'll probably be right. Axl tries to work miracles with his voice, but it's not enough (though it does him credit).

"So Fine" was, alongside "Don't Cry" (essentially identical: but then again, that "damned" twist, different from its unassailable, catchy, straight-A teacher of a predecessor, with its genuinely gripping, impassioned chorus), the other excuse for making out at teenage parties in the year of our Lord 1991. Slash, on guitar, seems to be holding the lamp for Axl, who, with his voice, "plays" a (carefree as much as crude) honky-tonk piano.

"Estranged" drags us back into Meat Loaf's symphonic/bombastic world, from which it's only partly redeemed by a certain structure and by the (entertainment) miracles of Slash and Axl (who shifts "tone" in an impressive way; he's a master at it, credit where it's due) each within their own field of expertise.

"You Could Be Mine" is a credible backdrop for the post-nuclear age, though at most it merely describes without interpreting. Philosophically, it might even be right. One of the few tracks to be saved from the shapeless magma. But its character comes solely from an extraordinarily flawless hard rock state of being - a form Axl is determined to guarantee with his own (self-made, self-invented) drawn-out, howled AI-AI (it's through such devices that rock genres get reinvented). After a second, pointless version of "Don't Cry", "My World" tries to startle with an intro and follow-through that go wildly into rap. In the background, a female orgasm. If nothing else, it's over in a minute and a half.

In 2008 came the new shock. After an endless string of rumors and controversies, Chinese Democracy was released. With an expanded but stable line-up - made up of Axl Rose, Robin Finck, Bumblefoot Thal, Buckethead, Paul Tobias, Richard Fortus, Tom Stinson, Chris Pitman and Brain Mantia (plus arrangements and additional parts by Frank Ferrer, Dizzy Reed and John Freese) - and a sound among the most saturated ever heard, at least where heavy rock is concerned.

The pseudo-oxymoron of Chinese democracy is an apt metaphor for the leader. First of all, the album is an impenetrable tangle of piled-up, jumbled sounds, arranged according to an order that - most likely - exists only in Axl's head. It's also, quite simply, a "Cut The Crap" with far more know-how behind it. Marching power-ballads like "Better", which kick off with jarring electronics, conceal laborious melodramatic undertones, and crossover experiments (flamenco intro, hip-hop beat, easy-listening gloss) like "If The World" come across as oddly abstract. The most lyrical track, "Street Of Dreams", relegates an entire orchestra to mere background murmur; the most soulful, "Madagascar", is an unrecognizable free-for-all; the most pompous, "This I Love", is a serenade in which not a single guitar is heard for the first two minutes.

Things get clearer when Axl indulges himself, or tries to prove that the years of waiting were spent grasping the secret of the new trends in metal and hard rock. "Shackler's Revenge" simply puts "Welcome To The Jungle" through the filter of a self-serious, psychotic post-disco appeal, and "Riad N' The Bedouins" - more picture-postcard in style - turns it aggressive. "There Was A Time" and, following it, "Catcher In The Rye", ape the emphatic melisma of "November Rain", but while the former captures its monumental sweep, "Catcher In The Rye" wastes it all on the usual murmuring clutter of sounds in the background. "Sorry" fares better, a building slow number that erupts into a nu-metal scream.

But the frontman's double-dealing knows no bounds, capable as he is of confusing the most full-blooded post-grunge with the old relics of early Aerosmith ("Scraped", with its gospel intro), and, conversely, of disguising an old-school radio album-rock sound with the recent ambitions of Skunk Anansie ("I.R.S."). Noisy for nothing, yet also emblematic and industrial to a degree, is the title track itself, a carousel of pumped-up riffs, grasping anthems, and sampled skits.

Seventeen years, for Axl Rose, three quarters of which were spent trying to hold the line-up together, watching almost powerlessly as the band's longtime members inexorably departed one by one; the rest of the time spent composing, polishing and stuffing to the point of absurdity (orchestra, choir, and a sci-fi regiment of sound engineers) the legend that - by necessity turned virtue - was gradually taking shape. Every now and then it's pierced by a rarefied flash of self-awareness. He also seized the opportunity amid the squandered budget, split between the countless recording studios used, Geffen's advances to Axl (just 2 million dollars to deliver the new record by the end of '99), the damage from the brawls that followed the live defections of the early 2000s, not to mention the humiliations, the stubbornness, the pride ground to dust. The first leaks date back to 2003, the most recent ones arrive right up to today. Dr. Pepper lost the bet.

As for the story of Guns N' Roses, the punks of hard rock, there would be - and there are - other odds and ends to tell. But it's less pointless to leave them unsaid.

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