Guns 'n' Roses

Along rock's long road, plenty of bands have made their mark over time thanks to a brilliant career studded with great albums. The case of Guns N' Roses is exactly the opposite: theirs was a lightning-fast, devastating debut, universally recognized as one of the most electrifying first albums in recent music history. A jolt of pure adrenaline never replicated again, despite the decent potential shown by the alluring double act of "Use Your Illusion I" and "Use Your Illusion II".

"Appetite For Destruction" came out in July 1987, but its impact grew exponentially as the months went by, especially once the most gripping and celebrated singles ("Welcome To The Jungle", "Sweet Child O'Mine" and "Paradise City") started landing on heavy rotation on TV and radio. Two years pass, the decade is drawing to a close, yet people are still talking about this record just as much as the gossip swirling around the band's members rages on (at the dawn of the '90s, the hype is still sky-high, but with the recording of new material underway and the subsequent firing of drummer Steven Adler, cracks begin to show within the band).

From the controversial, censored cover art onward (the image was essentially lifted from a painting by Robert Williams), you can already sense the subversive soul of this record: a rebellious spirit that sinks its claws into a street-sleaze-glam rock scene that had never been so alive and prolific on Californian soil; think of the parallel activity of their scruffy cousins L.A. Guns, or other equally important names from that scene, like the delightful Faster Pussycat, the softer Warrant, or the veterans Mötley Crüe, all hailing from Los Angeles.

Yet Axl Rose and co. could draw on an even broader musical background, an invisible thread linking Slash's passion for the blues to a wide range of influences from the '70s (the New York Dolls, garage rock, the punk wave) or the early '80s (far too little is ever said about the importance of Michael Monroe's Hanoi Rocks).

"Appetite For Destruction" is thus the result of five very distinct individuals, even when it came to writing and recording (it was rare for Axl and Slash to actually be in the studio together). In that respect, the contributions of Duff McKagan and Izzy Stradlin were far from negligible: while the charismatic Duff, even before joining Guns, had already written "It's So Easy" (later the album's lead single), Izzy left his mark with the jittery tribalism of "Mr. Brownstone", the sparky "Think About You" (a song dedicated to heroin), and other tracks co-written with both Slash and Axl ("You're Crazy", for instance, whose original version can be heard on the stripped-down acoustic release "G N' R Lies").

Guns and roses, like the two sides of the vinyl, Side G (guns) and Side R (roses). Six tracks centered on the band's excesses and debauchery, but also on the dangers of American metropolises ("You know where you are? You're in the jungle, baby! You're gonna die!"). Another six tracks, instead, focus more on sex and love, on feelings nonetheless drowned in whisky: toxic, unhealthy relationships that reeked of damnation. Hence "My Michelle", a frenetic sleaze'n'roll passage in which Axl tells us about the unease of a friend of his, or the aforementioned "Sweet Child O'Mine" – an electric ballad that entered the history books through the front door – where Axl himself attempts a kind of love letter to his future wife Erin Everly (a marriage that ended within a month!).

This beating heart is destined to shatter against the distractions of success, drugs and chaos: there's an atmosphere of slow, inexorable self-destruction, even though there's still plenty of fun to be had in the long, crazy nights of Los Angeles ("Anything Goes"). Everything's fine, at least for this once.

The merits of "Appetite For Destruction" are manifold. Before the advent of grunge, that movement capable of overshadowing (in media terms and beyond) the brilliant era of hard rock and certain heavy metal subgenres, this record raised the bar even higher on the many paths previously trodden by the hardest, most street-level rock. It did so in an utterly personal way, first bypassing the polished sheen of hair metal and then, in turn, delivering a raw, direct and transgressive message, in defiance of a decade dominated by pop-wave regurgitations and the definitive rise of family-friendly, middle-class television. The American Dream embodied by the Reagan presidency certainly didn't run through the songs of GNR.

Finally, the release of "Appetite For Destruction" allowed some historic names to reinvent/relaunch themselves on the wave of that success: the case of Aerosmith with "Pump" (another band the Guns owe a great deal to), of Alice Cooper (the commercial smash of "Trash") or of Mötley Crüe themselves, who returned in 1989 with the widely acclaimed "Dr. Feelgood" and had by then become fierce rivals of Axl and co. (on one famous occasion, insults escalated straight into a brawl).

It really was a golden age for that kind of sound, though this album must be placed beyond space and time, not only for its original stylistic qualities. Because a flash of such magnitude can only belong to eternity. All these years later, perhaps that's the hidden meaning of "Paradise City", that beautiful, damned place ("Where the grass is green and the girls are pretty") we return to every time the turntable's needle drops into the grooves of "Appetite For Destruction". I want you please take me home.

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21/08/2022