The OFFICIAL Unofficial Achewood Message Board
Trivial Pursuits => Arts & Entertainment => Topic started by: Golfhaus on October 22, 2008, 11:28:52 pm
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Apparently, Guns N' Roses is releasing Chinese Democracy on November 23rd, thwarting the smarmy people who thought that Chinese democracy would come before Chinese Democracy.
It is also apparently biting Dr Pepper in the ass, since they promised to give everyone a free can of their delicious soda if it got released this year. They seem to be making good on it (http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/dr-pepper-deliver-its-promise/story.aspx?guid={30944E42-06B0-48C8-A6F2-118E65426A7B}&dist=hppr), though.
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Damn, I was about to start cracking out the Fenjiu and do saki bombs. Then I see that its about some washed up zombies releasing an album my older cousin would have bought in 1989.
Still holding the mojitos for when castro bites it.
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I've officially, by the way, spun the anticipation dial on this one.
I am past anticipating it so much that there is no way it will measure up and am right into anticipating it so much that ANYTHING will be awesome, just for being.
I am at about five Mega-Lucases on the Anticipation Scale for Chinese Democracy.
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I heard a single from it this morning on the radio.
It would have been a great song.
...if it had been released, say, a year after Use your Illusion.
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I dunno, man.
I spent my work day mostly listening to "Kid Charlemagne" on repeat, blaring from my work van and... like...
That's a song of its time in 1976 and I still rocked the fuck out of it.
What's wrong with a song that turns out to be a great song from 1993?
"Pork Soda" came out in 1993. So did "Black Tie White Noise". "Modern Life is Rubbish" for God's sake!
If it turned out at all like "Transmissions from the Satellite Heart" then its awesome.
"Siamese Dream" "Bargainville"... "Alapalooza"...
You have sold me all the more on this record, Choop, sold me with your cold Vulcan logic.
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Axl Rose for President. Am I right LFM, hey! HIGH FIVE!
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Here is the title track that everyone is saying is pretty ok. Pretty overrated I think.
http://www.wwtdd.com/post.phtml?pk=13881
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It's hard for me to get excited because I only every liked Appetite for Destruction. But I'm still curious.
Has anyone heard the new AC/DC? The one song I've heard from it sounds a lot like AC/DC.
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I couldn't see Axl Rose being in high office as any less ridiculous than Palin in the same.
Look, no one channels the rage of being a sharp-but-emotionally-imbalanced teenager sitting in a wheatfield dreaming of Sodom and Gamora better than GNR.
It's not the most complicated or mature emotional push in the world or the most complex drive to express musically but... like... it's a part of my personal profile.
The part of Axl still trapped in rural Indiana writes music for the part of me still trapped in the teenage Adirondacks.
That's the best I can explain it.
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See, miles has got a can for throwing out there the way I feel about it. Which is some AC/DC that sounds like AC/DC is more interesting to me than any thing from those other dudes.
Yeah, I pretty much feel the same. Of course GNR really is just Axl and some dudes. AC/DC is all original, except for the singer of course, but he's been with the group for nearly 30 years now.
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...Which is some AC/DC that sounds like AC/DC is more interesting to me than any thing from those other dudes.
Word. The song, I think it's called Rock n Roll Train, is actually better than decent, probably their best single in a couple decades, all with big plodding drums and thick bass steaks. Reminds me why they are the second best hard rock band ever, and that an Albini engineered album would be interesting.
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second best hard rock band ever
Who's the first? It's Jethro Tull, isn't it...
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Who's the first? It's Jethro Tull, isn't it...
Well, they did win that Grammy...
I'm guessing he meant Winger though.
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needs more Slayer
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What doesn't?
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What doesn't?
Schnittke.
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Is this the October surprise we've been expecting?
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Well, they did win that Grammy...
I'm guessing he meant Winger though.
I think Tull one it for the metal category, no? But if you must know, it's Scorpions.
It's not, it's the Jesus Lizard.
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"Pork Soda" came out in 1993. So did "Black Tie White Noise". "Modern Life is Rubbish" for God's sake!
I've always been of the opinion that I was the only person in the known universe to enjoy Black Tie White Noise, "the David Bowie album even David Bowie fanatics hate," as a fanatic I dated for a while once said.
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The Who is the hardest rocking band. I heard it on Jeopardy or some shit.
There's a song from Chinese Democracy in Rock Band 2, and it is quite awful.
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The entire album is available for listening on a song-by-song basis at the band's MySpace (http://www.myspace.com/gunsnroses) page.
It sounds like Axl Rose took Pro Tools out behind the Guitar Institute and got it pregnant.
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I was just writing a blog post about this, I forget we had a thread and thought I had to just talk to myself about it... The gist of which was, I have never heard a Guns n' Roses album, but I just read this review of this one in the Onion:
http://www.avclub.com/content/feature/chuck_klosterman_reviews (http://www.avclub.com/content/feature/chuck_klosterman_reviews)
This review was so interesting that it made me want to go out and buy - no, not the album; I want to buy one of this guy's books. I can't decide if this means he is doing a good job as a reviewer or not.
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I bought one of his books, (sex, drugs, and cocoa puffs) and I was really annoyed by it.
My main memory of it is that I got to the end and thought "wow, that guy is really clever. Wait... was there any point to any of that, aside from proving how clever he is?"
Similar story with the 30 pages I read of Killing Yourself to Live
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The guitar player wears a damn bucket on his head. This point can not be over emphasized.
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I bought one of his books, (sex, drugs, and cocoa puffs) and I was really annoyed by it.
My main memory of it is that I got to the end and thought "wow, that guy is really clever. Wait... was there any point to any of that, aside from proving how clever he is?"
Similar story with the 30 pages I read of Killing Yourself to Live
The section on Saved by the Bell was great. Right up there with SbtB Quote of the Day.
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With everybody talkin' Watchmen and Guns N Roses around here, I had to go check the calendar and... no... my birthday wasn't moved to November.
No, my birthday is still in August. It is just that the conversation is awesome.
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Oh. How about that. My cousin (second cousin, technically) produced and mixed this.
Edit: Argh! Damnit, First cousin - once removed. Genealogy blows.
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Well, your cousin's rich now, so drinks are on him.
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Well, your cousin's rich now, so drinks are on him.
Tiny cans of Dr. Pepper for everyone?
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That joke worked on so many levels, Vik. Too many.
It is as if the universe was working three strands of reality for twenty years just to get to that joke.
And just to compound it... CAN'D!
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I'm just a-gonna repost my off-the-cuff Chinese Democracy review here, for the hell of it.
No, I did not copyedit it as... it was a blog posting, you know?
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I've come to the realization that I like Axl Rose's work for much the same reason that I like Terry Gilliam's work... okay, yes, sometimes they are really aiming for things that they can't really pull off or that... no one can really pull off in one piece of media-art but... goddamn it, they're trying.
They've got the biggest most awesome most ridiculously over-the-top and practically-undoable ideas and they probably fail but, seriously, I'd rather see someone trying to pull this grand perfect vision out of their head and... fuck*ng up to extents where you just can't do it than see someone put out a perfectly polished, tightly constructed piece of schlock.
You know, have the boy get the girl in the end and blah-blah-blah.
You know, rhyme "moon" "June" and "swoon" and get in all the right hooks.
"Brazil"... of course... was gutted by studio editors looking for happy endings and a bit confusing in different parts just because there was kind of no way to get all those ideas out there on the screen... or the images were just kind of too weird or he was just trying to get too many ideas packed into the datastream but... dammit, he was failing in those little moments because he was trying so hard to do everything perfect.
"The Brothers Grimm" crashed and burnt into a lovely interesting muddle of a car crash because there were so many forces in play and, maybe also, because its harder to make big ideas on a big budget these days... but for Christ's sake, I'd watch that picture a thousand times again before you'd get me to see "Titanic" again. Me, just sitting there growing angrier and angrier, thinking how many "Big Chill"s could be made on that budget with only Kate's titties and Leo's eventual horrific death to cheer me up for split seconds, you know.
And the "giraffeer King"... the dude just hit it out of the park because of where he was and what the script was and... a situation where the concept of using a real and gritty NYC as the backdrop to the madness, it grounded him ever so slightly, forced him to treat the Big Crazy Ideas as the imaginings of someone insane with grief, framed him into a place where he had to be even more creative because of the constraints.
And maybe Axl's "giraffeer King" was "Appetite for Destruction" because... the constraints were on his madness that he was not a big star yet, he couldn't put out a hard rock album that went Freddy Mercury-crazy with strings and synth, they were going to be marketed as a dirty greasy Sunset Strip debauched hard rock band with just a little bit of hair metal and punk mixed in to work the crossover appeal and... if he wanted to get paid, dude couldn't embrace his inner Howard Hughes quite yet. He had to sit down with his band and just do the best bar-band rock they could and throw in a few ballads to get women to buy the record too.
Had to do even better because of the constraints.
Well... Chinese Democracy? Constraints are kind of the completely-fuck*ng-opposite of Chinese Democracy. And you know what? That constrained him more than anything possibly could... because suddenly laid out before him was all the time and all the money in the world to do whatever the fuck he wanted and... that meant all the time and money in the world to take his perfect vision of what he thought a rock and roll record was out of his head and onto digital files... until he said he was done.
And so, of course, it took seventeen years.
Really, if someone said to you in your chosen field, "here is all the time and money in the world, make something perfect"... and now keep in mind, you're also borderline insane like Axl Rose... of course you take seventeen fuck*ng years.
No one's cutting off the money, your back catalog's still selling and your live and greatest hits albums continue to go platinum... anytime you wanna drop an experimental single, someone'll put it on a big budget soundtrack... and whenever you decide to crawl out of your Malibu mansion, you can say that your guitarist will wear a chicken bucket on his head and there's only a coinflip chance you'll show up and you'll still sell out every show you book in about three hours?
Fuck yeah, you keep trying to keep doing something perfect and sublime.
As long as they won't stop giving you money, they can never really actually say "no".
And now, here we are. The first compact disc I ever bought was Use Your Illusion 2, in the long box and everything, and I was fuck*ng twelve at the time... and now I'm twenty-fuck*ng-nine. "Here we are now", to steal a line from someone who rose and fell in the time between that album and this one, "entertain us".
Cobain died and Biggie died and Tupac died and somehow U2 DIDN'T die and rap-metal rose and fell and pop-punk rose and fell to the point where Green Day's doing prom theme ballads and the girl from No Doubt is the new Madonna somefuck*nghow... and Axl was in his bomb shelter the whole time, hanging out with the dudes from Nine Inch Nails and Primus and that guy with the chickenbucket on his head... and Shaq and Moby and Dave Navarro and somebody named "Bumblefoot"... just waiting. Waiting.
My favourite joke, lately, has been saying "we'll elect a black guy president before Chinese Democracy comes out".
And here we are now. Entertain us.
And... the good news is? It's a lot more "Brazil" than it is "Brothers Grimm".
It's pretty damn good. Yes, you will have to shut off your inner-cynic because... yes yes, the dude's melodramatic as hell here and there and has a bit of a persecution complex though in his defense these seem to have existed in him long before he was rich and famous to sit around in a mansion with Kleenex boxes on his feet and dwarves in bellhop costumes offering his guests little wooden bowls of cocaine to bend over and snout directly out of...
But he's also got a lot of tricks up his sleeve and the best hired guns (excuse the pun) that seventeen years of unlimited money can buy and, here's a hint, that means he's got some goddamned amazing hired guns on the damn thing. Bumblefuck and Chickenfeet might have suspect self-appelation skills but they can play that fuck*ng git-box, you dig?
You have the feeling, you know, that if this album wasn't by "Guns N Roses" wasn't by "Axl Rose, recluse, borderline-genius, borderline-menace-to-the-public-good" and it just landed somewhere, you'd say... holy God, where did THIS come from? It feels like it comes from the parallel future that Bill and Ted founded... in all the ways good and all the ways bad at once.
It is melodramatic at times, intensely (and intensely entertainingly) paranoid at times... and, yeah, in places, over-stuffed and over-produced. Industrial speed metal AND Moroccan beats AND drum machines AND twinkling pianos AND full orchestral swooshes AND choruses all in the same two minutes of one song.
But, also, at points, it is the pinnacle of a certain kind of song. Where classic hard rock meets opera or, at least, the gorgeous maddening excess of the best progressive rock. Robert Fripp and Slayer sitting down, shaking hands, and agreeing to try and cover the "You Never Give Me Your Money/Golden Slumbers" suite on Abbey Road. Donald Fagen and Trent Reznor banging out a live cover of "Gimme Shelter" with Phil Collins on drums but definitely not singing.
I don't know. I'm trying to come up with a ridiculous enough example of what Axl was trying to do and... I can't. Dude was shooting that high. Dude was shooting for the moon with a laser gun and he was gonna carve Cobra Commander's fuck*ng face into the thing, if he had his way.
Dude was trying to make the best goddamn album in the history of rock and roll music. He... didn't but in little snippets, in certain songs, in certain sections of songs, he's puts himself the arguement. There is some amazing stuff. There is some weird stuff that is fine but doesn't completely make sense. There are places where those waxen wings melt in the sun but you gotta give the dude credit for trying to fly that high.
The title track "Chinese Democracy" along with the next two tracks "Shackler's Revenge" and "Better" are just straight forward thrashing rockers, overflowing with screeching angry majestic paranoia and just raw energy that... just make you feel like a teenager again. That just evoke all that passion and distrust and confusion triumphantly.
It isn't the highest art in the world, of course, to make that kind of song... that just make you want to close your eyes, nod your head and scream along (it isn't singing along, its screaming along, of course, this is GNR after all)... but if it is an art, the dude is still the master of that art.
Suburban dickheads in red frat-boy hats and ironic bandanas and fuck*ng clown masks (for some God-unknown reason) have come and gone, trying to pull this off and... no, sorry, Axl Rose is still the master of this kind of song. You make hate or like or love that sort of song but... he is still the living master of that kind of song.
Because he does it BIGGER than those assholes. He's got a drummer named Brain, guitarists named Bumpershoot and Chickentender and five hundred computers with ProTools on them and he is unafraid to use them. Go ahead, dare him to use Protools on five hundred computers at once. Make his day.
And then the dude swoops in with "Street of Dreams" and... here come the tinkling pianos and the synth strings and the real strings and... well, he's the dude who did "November Rain", remember. Seventeen years later, he is the dude who did "November Rain" and he is not afraid to whip out the November Rain dick, either.
Which leads me to one of the most important points about this album... it's an interesting experiment, not only in leaving someone who is probably a genius about a certain kind of thing and also probably not so much a consciousness as a collection of interlocking neuroses interacting in such complex manner as to imitate a consciousness all the money in the world to make a record but...
It's also an interesting way to see what actually made the old GNR tick.
Stripped away is Slash's desire to be a bluesier heavier shredding-er(?) sleazier Aerosmith.
Gone are Izzy Straddlin's pleasantly mellow Rolling-Stones-at-maximum-ramble melodies.
Excised are Duff's roots in a Seattle punk scene that in the middle Eighties was just starting to put away their New York Dolls LPs and start turning into what would have perfectly-coiffed fake-messy hair slapped on its hair and called "grunge".
And what we're left is... good ol' Axl, the Axl who was forever trying to figure out how to sythesize the best parts of Led Zepplin and Queen into one thing... except now, twenty years later, he's also trying to figure out how to get Nine Inch Nails into that mix as well.
I mean, in a weird sort of way, he's not just like Terry Gilliam, he's also the equal-and-opposite force to David Bowie... Bowie forever taking what's in the zeitgeist that day and seeing what he finds interesting inside it, Rose forever taking whatever's in the zeitgeist that day, grabbing onto it and trying to bend it in his direct.
David Bowie riding the river wherever it goes. Axl Rose swimming against it so hard that he almost wills it to reverse.
Both ridiculously awesome in their own ways. Anyway.
The last four tracks "IRS" "Madagascar" "This I Love" and "Prostitute" follow the same sort of pattern...
"IRS" is loud angry epic paranoid, resplendent in the rage of treatening to not only call the cops on his enemies (real and imagined and somewhere in-btween) but to call EVERY COP IN THE WORLD on them. I mean, sure, you can call the cops on your upstair neighbor for moving furniture at three in the morning but... yeah... it would be rad to call EVERY COP IN THE WORLD. That'd shut 'em up.
"Madagascar" is the song where you really have to turn off your irony-chip, Data, but if you can, you'll have a hell of a time with sober horns and swirling horns and grinding guitars and... clips from "Cool Hand Luke" and "Braveheart" and Martin Luther King... never quite reaching full coherency but evoking all kinds of neat shit and, hey, maybe that's the best we can really ask of commerical art. A barely-restrained messiah complex ("forgive them that tear down my soul and bless them that they might grow old"... awesome? AWESOME!) may not make for the best life partner or drinking buddy but it makes for some great music, at times.
"This I Love"... Axl going for the "if Freddy Mercury was actually singing to a lady" and it mostly works.
"Prostitute" is in some ways the best and most... positive? up-beat?... song on the album and its kind of hard to describe. "Outside"-era Bowie and "Infinite Sadness"-era Smashing Pumpkins jamming out a single with Brian Eno as the producer? The kind of song where as the crunching solo ends and fades into pianos and strings and digital sprinkles you think...
Well, I'm a sap, here. You think "yes, we can". Because the outro is that fuck*ng hopeful and rad.
But, again, these moments come and go, especially in the middle-half of the album. Strange choices, songs that could kind of be good but don't make any sense on the album with the other songs. You can joygasm at the beauty of the outro to "Prostitute" and then...
In "Sorry" an interesting but inexplicably Pink Floyd-esque number with a nice tune but confusing and overly literal lyrics and singing the words "but I don't want to do it" in a manner that could only be described as Count Chocula singing the first few lines of Tom Petty's "Breakdown". I'm... I'm entirely serious. Track ten about thirty-six seconds in. Imagine Count Chocula singing "I don' care if you love me, I don' care if you don'" and... that's how he sings "but I don't want to do it". The... entire rest of the song is sung in regular softer-mostly-not-falsetto Axl voice and... fuck*ng one-phrase as Count Pettula.
Or "If The World"... a kind of interesting love song with some really nice backing piano and a tight guitar solo that... opens with flamenco guitars and turns into a stripped-down technofunk song for some reason? You nod your head and enjoy it but... why does it go into "from a distant radio" sound for like two lines out of nowhere?
"There Was A Time" and "Catcher In The Rye" come in as solid mid-tempo "Use Your Illusion plus more industrial guitars and string sections" rock numbers, fun as hell, kind of nostalgia pieces, maybe more classic-rocky than the rest...
"Scraped" is musically a crunchy little energetic song, musicially, but the song's lyrics which end up sung as an argument/duet between low-growl Axl and falsetto-Axl and... it kind of loses me. I keep trying to enjoy the song and the Bill And Ted guitar squeals and... I keep getting caught up in the idea that this is a duet between a man's two distinct personae and, like, it's just strange. It's like finding a porno of Tony Clifton fuck*ng Latka Gravas and, like, you're just confused because they're both Andy Kaufman, right? Anyway. This might just be me.
And then "Riad N' the Bedoins" comes along and I have no idea what in the hell Bedoins is all about.
Bedoins is kind of the one song where all the layers and all the processing and everything all kind of fade into lost cacophony for me. I like the rhyming of "frustration" and "salvation" as much as any melancholy self-loathing overeducated liberal dude but... yeah. Dude's basically singing the verses too fast, not quite a rap and it just rushes past me. Feels more like the background track for a shoot-'em-up video game than a song. Just kind of all over the place, the one song where Axl really loses me, other than some nice nuggets of crazy guitar solo in there.
And that is sort of what "Chinese Democracy" ends up being.
Ten tracks of Axl Rose really sort of... not making the perfect rock record but certainly distilling all of what was both great and completely uncomfortably insane about Guns N Roses, weird little production overthinks and all, and four tracks of interesting misfires. Or, yeah, two-point-nine tracks of interesting misfires along with a verse of Count Pettula in
"Sorry" and all of "Riad N' The Bedoins".
A really great CD to have in your car when you've got a long stretch of the Ventura Highway between you and home, to bang your head a little around Burbank and listen to the beautiful twinkles at the end as you're pulling in for home, feeling just a little more hopeful than when you started...
That's what rock and roll's supposed to be, isn't it? I don't know, maybe, maybe not. That's what I think it is, though.
Where it failed, it failed for shooting too high, for something that either you can't do with rock and roll or something that you can't do if you're a half-crazy obsessive anyway and... that's something. That makes the flaws interesting. I mean, I own the 4-disc Criterion set of "Brazil", you know.
One of my favourite physical possessions, that Criterion set.
If you're the type of heathen who needs a letter grade, I give it as high a B-plus as you can possibly give without becoming an A-minus. Why not an A?
In the words of that dude from "RENT" and "Dazed and Confused" in the Encyclopedia Britannica commerical:
"Too long. I found so much great information I put it all in. Overkill."
But then again, if he hadn't have tried so hard that he overshot, maybe he wouldn't have gotten that close.
Maybe I'll have to give it another listen.
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jough we're gonna need to place an order to requisition another few crates of ellipses.
yeah.
yeah. mmhmm.
well i don't know why, he just loves them i guess.
look, whatever, jough, just don't run out or you'll basically ban him from posting. i'm just keeping an eye on our stock here.
well that's your choice then ain't it.
...
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what he said
Canned in honor of the Stop The Airquotes Campaign.
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I have no concrete idea of from whence my propensity toward ellipses derives, however I've heard tell the theory that it is from too many years of writing dialogue for lost and forgotten screenplay-type things. Basically, they say, I fell upon it as a crutch for trying to get across the conversational senses of when I'd be pausing to trail off, after years of trying to perfect a Richard Linklaterian "he writes like people talk" sort of patois for my work.
One hopes that it will mistaken for an aspect of intentional personal style, at some point.
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TLDR
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I don't like GNR or Dr Pepper, but don't forget to get your free Dr Pepper coupons today.
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I read for about 5 minutes before I scrolled to see I was only about a quarter of the way in. I'm sorry that's all I could take.
Maybe you should write a book about Axl Rose.
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I have no idea whether it is a good idea to write a book about Axl Rose but if you do, you will really need to get over the ellipses. It is one thing in an email or messageboard post, but I have never seen an ellipsis in a book that didn't make me think "sloppy writer."
("Ellipsis." I wasn't positive that that was a word, but the board spellchecker seems to recognize it. So it's more a word than 'messageboard ' or 'spellchecker,' apparently.)
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but I gave you a tcodp for the effort.
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A friend who works at an alt-weekly asked me for a capsule review as she had none, maybe this is more up your alley, guys and girls:
Remember that old Encyclopedia Britannica commercial? Kid gets a B-plus but…why not an A? “Too long. I had so much good information, I put it all in. Overkill.” Swap “Axl Rose” and “ProTools” in there and you’ve got “Chinese Democracy”. By turns epic and thrashing, overproduced and alien, Twilight-maudlin and Patience-sublime, you have a record just as lovely and weird as you were when you first heard “Sweet Child”. A strong B-plus. Overkill n’ all.
And only one ellipsis!
EDIT:
Got notes. The Britannica ref was a tad obscure. Maybe that's what I need, an editor who ain't a-scared to push me a little without bruising my ego.
She liked:
Already one for the books in terms of budget, gestation and ridiculously-named guitarists, “Chinese Democracy” turns out quite like that picture of a man setting the world record for number of tennis balls held in one mouth: as freakish as it is impressive. By turns epic and thrashing, overproduced and alien, operatically paranoid, Twilight-maudlin and Patience-sublime, it turns out just as lovely and weird as you were the first time you first heard “Sweet Child”.
...a lot better.
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You may have noticed that you editor removed your ellipsis.
Ok, I went back and slogged through your "review." It wasn't so much a review as... Ha ha, I can't pull off an ellipsis joke.
It wasn't so much of a review as an apology. In your heart of hearts you know it's not that good, but you love it anyway. If it were actually good you would have been able to say so with about 2000 less words.
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That or, y'know, I was just so exuberant about the parts I did like about it that I just couldn't stop typing.
I mean, it's not like I'm (metaphorically) long winded or anything.
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Dude, "November Rain dick."
You get a can for that, don't care what nobody says.
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Well... [the review] made me wanna check the damn album. It's somewhere on the internet, I hope...
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Going way back... I love the shit out of Chuck Klosterman, in spite of the fact that he does at times go out of his way to prove how damn clever he is. He's the kind of writer I like to think I could be if I worked much, much harder at being clever. And took drugs on occasion. But I highly recommend all his books, except "Downtown Owl" which I haven't read yet.
Stupid question time, after reading the Klosterman review... does anyone from the original G'n'R lineup, other than Axl, actually play on this album? Sounds like no.
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Nope. Axl is the only original Gunner on it and, indeed, Dizzy the piano player is the only other guy from any other GNR iteration and he didn't show up until the Use Your Illusion albums. In fact, Izzy Straddlin's the only original guy he's even on good enough terms with to even thank in the liner notes. But that's kind of part of the fun mythology of the thing too, you know.
Axl, holed up in Xanadu, working harder on the enemies list than the album.
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Axl, holed up in Xanadu, working harder on the enemies list than the album.
Kane'd?
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I stopped reading to check out the validity of one of your statements, and holy shit you're right, if only by the slimmest of margins.
Use Your Illusion I and II: released September 17, 1991
Nevermind: released September 24, 1991
"The Spaghetti Incident?" and people cooler than the rest of us notwithstanding, the last time G'n'R put out a real album, no one knew who the fuck Kurt Cobain was. That is mind-boggling. In my head, Cobain has an omnipresence - that 1990-1992 timeframe was where I first started to capital-A Appreciate music, so on my own little personal journey, he was always there. That that week could spell both a beginning and an end to two iconic bands amazes me.
That would have also been the second or third week of my freshman year of high school. That might explain some things.
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"The Spaghetti Incident?" and people cooler than the rest of us notwithstanding, the last time G'n'R put out a real album, no one knew who the fuck Kurt Cobain was.
His mom knew who he was, and that's all that REALLY matters in life.
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Whereas I was twelve and, man, the Illusion albums were my WORLD for like a year.
And then I skipped over most of grunge and went straight to my dad's old prog albums.
Kurt Cobain, to me, was a dude who wrote some interesting lyrics and showed good taste in cover material on the Unplugged album but the three-man-band post-punk thing just did not speak to me. A dude wanted pianos and solos and strings and Hammond B3s and choruses and Moogs and delay-boxes, you know? When I found my dad's stash of Pink Floyd and King Crimson and Steely Dan, it was ALL fuckin' over.
And, I mean, if Use Your Illusion was anything, it was a guy weened on Led Zepplin tentatively trying to turn into a harder version of Yes.
Which is why when I did lean toward the music of the day, it was toward the excesses of the Smashing Pumpkins and later Ben Folds and so on.
I think that Cobain was growing into something interesting but, yeah, Nirvana was not a THING for me.
You could argue that in the rural Adirondacks we were five years behind the times but there we are.
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Don't get me wrong; I don't wish to downplay the role the Illusions played in my teenage years. I played the crap out of them. At the time, I probably thought GnR was more relevant than Nirvana. It wasn't until much later that I realized what Nirvana represented, and literally didn't recognize the torch-passing that went on until reading (the first third of) your missive and went researching.
I discovered Pink Floyd in the summer between junior and senior year, and they quickly became my favorite band, despite my first exposure being The Division Bell (Take it Back has just been released as a single) and my second exposure being Ummagumma. They still are, though I reserve playing their music for times when I need them, like depressive moments or times of extreme duress.
I will always remember my "What the FUCK" moment watching Axl and Elton make a duet out of the end of Bohemian Rhapsody during the Freddie Mercury concert on MTV. Oh, MTV, the things you could be doing... SHOULD be doing... for the youth today. How many MTV viewers today even know who Freddie Mercury is?
How many know who Axl Rose is?
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Oh, MTV, the things you could be doing... SHOULD be doing... for the youth today. How many MTV viewers today even know who Freddie Mercury is?
How many know who Axl Rose is?
How many know the M in MTV stood originally for "music"? As opposed to "meh".
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Yeah. Legally, "Least-Expensive-Reality-Programming-Available Television" shouldn't be able to call itself MTV anymore.
Some kind of false advertising thing. Whenever the lawyers from Gitmo are freed up, they oughta get on that.
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I thought the letters in MTV didn't stand for anything anymore. Like AMC, TLC, GSN, or NARAL.
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Guns and Roses are giving away cans of Dr Pepper
[STORY] (http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/news/147864-guns-n-roses-lay-the-smack-down-on-dr-pepper)
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Chinese Democracy review in the form of an SAT question:
Appetite For Destruction is to a really great plate of tacos
as Chinese Democracy is to this (http://www.hulu.com/watch/1447/saturday-night-live-taco-town).
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Wait...
that was really funny.
I didn't know they were making funny skits again.
"Pizza! Now that's what I call a taco!"
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I have a Guns and Roses story.
Back when Appetite for Destruction was at the top of the charts or thereabouts I was out with some friends who played the cassette on their car radio on endless repeat. Their favorite song was Mr. Brownstone because they were junkies.
I was out with these cats and there was like six of us in the car. We were going out to see Krista's mother for some reason, I can't remember. Anyway, The cassette switched sides and that was it, she had played all she was going to play. When the music started up again it was dragging and sounded all fucked up and garbled like it was getting eaten by the player. They ejected, it wasn't getting eaten it was just wore out. They put it back in and it continued to sound funny. They kept ejecting and putting it back in and it never improved anything and it was starting to get annoying because of course we were listening to it at max volume.
So finally after about 10 minutes of this I said, hey, I know how to fix it, let me see the tape. They ejected the tape and handed it to me and I threw it out the open window of the moving car. They were all like What The Fuck did you do that for. I tried to calmly explain that the tape was shot, there wasn't anything they could do about it except get another copy.
I thought they would see reason and let it go, but no, they turned the car around and went back to look for it. Unfortunately they found it.
But then a miracle occurred, when they put the tape in the deck it played. Throwing it out the window fixed it apparently. All the rest of the way out to Krista's Mom's house it played and my friends kinda looked at me like I had some special power.
Of course on the way back the tape started crapping out again. They wouldn't let me throw it out the window a second time the fuck*ng non believers.
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Paul, You..Are..Rad
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And that's all Axl's asking for, really.
The belief that ridiculous action can lead to miraculous results.
That and so much cocaine that only he or David Bowie could survive ingesting it.
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Linked (http://www.markprindle.com/gnra.htm#chinese) because I love this man.
I love his reviews because I can never predict whether he will love or hate something, but he always explains pretty well.
I also respect that he is much more methodical than me, and is willing to listen to everything ever recorded by a band that only put out one good album. Just so he can give every single album a 1-star review.
Also, I enjoy noticing that he calls bands I love boring, but loves things that I think are super-boring.
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I loved GnR back in the day. Still dig 'em now too. They are calling themselves Velvet Revolver these days.
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I love his reviews because I can never predict whether he will love or hate something, but he always explains pretty well.
\
I dunno, I kinda get the idea that this guy never allowed himself to be fourteen or fifteen.
Poor guy was nine one day, went to bed and woke up thirty-five.
I mean, seriously. When *I'M* accusing someone of over-thinking things, that person is in terrible terrible trouble.
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I do not understand where you are getting that impression, at all.
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I do not understand where you are getting that impression, at all.
It's because he doesn't like Chinese Democracy.
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You know, liking something because you actually like it. Not because you think it's cool to do so, or because you're a bitter cynic with a lump of coal for a heart.
That said, I liked the review. But I can also appreciate Chinese Democracy for what it is.
It's because he doesn't like Chinese Democracy.
Ha!
edit: okay so I read some more of his reviews, and he doesn't have an dang ol' lump of coal for a heart. I was just kind of iterating where LFM was coming from.
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yeah, I mean. I do not get that at all from having read like... 90% of his reviews.
He just fuck*ng likes what he likes.
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I'm just saying... if he doesn't get that overwrought overproduced melodramatic walls-of-sound are one of the most valid approaches to rock and roll, his heart is broken and wrapped in ice at very very best. He's rejecting the record basically for all the reasons why it is interesting/entertaining. Either be one guy on the verge of tears with an acoustic guitar in your hands or have five hundred guys playing piano and theramin behind you.
Be Elliot Smith/Neil Young/Lou Reed/John Lennon or be Axl Rose/Paul McCartney/Roger Waters/Freddie Mercury. Either is potentially awesome!
But to kind of hipster-cynically look at the overwrought theatrics of Chinese Democracy as tossed-off and insincere is to completely not get the point, is to be stuck in 1993 sitting around in flannels wondering if its that you think Rockford Files is cool or if its that you think Rockford Files is so awful that its cool, that you've been posturing so goddamned long that you just don't fuckin' know anymore.
I think Axl's being completely sincere about things that just happen to be fantasies inside the head of a deeply paranoid dude completely isolated from reality.
The heart of darkness of a man who is probably not as deep as he thinks he is.
And the whole bit about how OBVIOUSLY you could ONLY appreciate this if you were bought off to review it positively, oh crap.
What "I'm pretending to love the Brady Bunch because it's a funny idea to like the Brady Bunch" bullshit.
I find myself reading something like that and wanting to be in the final scene of "Pecker", toasting the end of irony. Lazy irony is the laziest of all lazy things.
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Or maybe it's you.
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Or maybe Chinese Democracy sucks.
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what they said.
That man has positively reviewed enough things that I think are boring and bombastic and with too many instruments that I believe him when he says he just didn't like it.
Oh, yeah. Wait, I remember... it was almost every damn pink floyd album. (http://www.markprindle.com/pinka.htm)
I'm just saying... if he doesn't get that overwrought overproduced melodramatic walls-of-sound are one of the most valid approaches to rock and roll, his heart is broken and wrapped in ice at very very best.
I hate this idea. I will put up with a lot of variation in music, I like a lot of different things. But this is an idea that should have died very, very fast. Some people have done it well, but most have done it because it's easy to do when you're fuck-you rich.
Also, there you go again, randomly inserting the word hipster to piss me off.
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Dan, the same can be said for the kind of garage rock you prefer or any kind of style for that matter. Some have done it amazingly well, most of it sucks.
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That man has positively reviewed enough things that I think are boring and bombastic and with too many instruments that I believe him when he says he just didn't like it.
Oh, yeah. Wait, I remember... it was almost every damn pink floyd album. (http://www.markprindle.com/pinka.htm)
I hate this idea. I will put up with a lot of variation in music, I like a lot of different things. But this is an idea that should have died very, very fast. Some people have done it well, but most have done it because it's easy to do when you're fuck-you rich.
You know what. I like overwrought overproduced melodramatic walls-of-sound. I was 14 when The Wall came out. I own several ELP albums fergawdsakes. I understand the reaction to that genre. I also find that there ain't nobody smugger than a so-called "punk".
Anyway. Two things.
1. Criticism of a specific work of art =/= criticism of a genre. Chinese Democracy may be a lousy example of the type. May be the greatest work of its type. Don't know. Haven't listened to it and don't intend to. It's kind of like hard core Republicans with George W. Admitting that he was the crappiest of presidents doesn't mean you are refuting your "conservative" ideals.
2. Like what you like. Who gives a fuck if I don't like it or some guy internet critic doesn't like it. Fuck them. If Axl Rose has produced something that connects with your soul, more power to the both of you. It's always good to find something you love. Who cares what anybody else thinks.
------ 2(a). A corollary. Other people have this same right. If someone doesn't like the same thing as you do, they are not a moron, a philistine or willfully ignorant.
------ 2(b). A further corollary. People will always snipe at each other about what they like. It's human nature. Your favorite band sucks.
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I mean, seriously. When *I'M* accusing someone of over-thinking things, that person is in terrible terrible trouble.
Whoa, for sure. Like, with five hundred guys playing theramin behind him.
I wouldn't recognize Axl Rose on the street if he came up to me and asked for directions to the subway, but I'm really enjoying this thread.
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Or maybe it's you.
Maybe its Maybelline?
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Whoa, for sure. Like, with five hundred guys playing theramin behind him.
I wouldn't recognize Axl Rose on the street if he came up to me and asked for directions to the subway, but I'm really enjoying this thread.
Every time I see a recent picture of him I think he's Danny Bonnaduce
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What I am mostly bothered by is the assertion that this critic is somehow a bad person/an overthinker/unable to have fun because he does not like Chinese Democracy.
And the assertion that Overproduced Wall of Sound is one of the best ways to make rock music, and that you have no heart if you do not think this... this is just ridiculous. This is just completely ridiculous.
I'm not going to say "you shouldn't like it, you are wrong if you think it is good", but I am going to say what I think about it, and you can like what you like. A lot of my very good friends like things which I really dislike, and I still respect them because they are good people, and because they respect me. (except this one time when I first met my roommate, and I said that Nirvana was possibly my favorite band, and he said "wait... you've heard the pixies, though, right?" I love him anyway.)
Dan, the same can be said for the kind of garage rock you prefer or any kind of style for that matter. Some have done it amazingly well, most of it sucks.
I realize this.
I don't know if I'm explaining what I mean very well. This is a problem I have. I will keep trying.
The issue, to me, is that most shitty garage rock stays in the garage, whereas millions of dollars are spent creating and distributing shitty overproduced music.
Making uninteresting garage rock is a thing which requires very little resources. Maybe some crappy garage bands make it, and millions of dollars are spent producing and promoting their records. They probably end up being bad.
For the same reason, I dislike overproduced too-many-overdubs type albums. Art/music/any creative endeavor is very, very rarely good when created without limitations. Boundaries. "Go in there and do whatever you want, here are the things you need to put in any instrument or sound you could ever imagine" is not a good way to get a good record.
The problem I have with this kind of music, and maybe one day I will get over it or whatever, is that it just sounds too damn indulgent to me. 20-minute violin-bowed guitar solos, full orchestras backing them up, 200-member choirs singing along... this is just too much for me. I don't like Opera, either.
I don't know if I am quite saying what I am trying to say. I think I am most bothered because I feel like this kind of music has created a lot of people who think that you need to be a mega-talented millionaire to make a good rock record. Not people posting on internet message boards about alive stuffed animals. People out in the real world.
"I don't like it, and also it is bad for society."
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Wow, inev is absolutely right.
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And don't even get me started about Britney.
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Wow, inev is absolutely right.
Inev is absolutely wrong. As I understand it, he's saying that if an artist has every resource available to them they inevitably are going to make an overproduced indulgent piece of shit record.
First off, any artist that rises to success has every resource available to them. When Neil Young for instance plays a song that consist of just his voice and an acoustic guitar it's not because a 20 piece band and 60 piece orchestra weren't available to him. But when he does put on the orchestra and big band it's because it's what his artistic vision has dictated and not because he's a kid in the candy store that doesn't know when to stop.
Personally, some of my favorite music is what you would call "overproduced," but when the tools of the trade are used effectively it can really move you like nothing else.
Evidence (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZez_k4vAzU) for the defense of overproduced music.
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I mean, people like Neil Young are the exceptions which prove the rule. How many other artists can you name who are hugely financially successful who have put out as many fantastic albums as him?
He is one of few performers who started out small with just his talent, and got up to the point where he CAN afford to do anything he wants, but has the wisdom to know that that does not mean that he SHOULD throw in everything but the kitchen sink. There are countless bands who lose their way in the magic of the studio once they've "made it" with their first album. Sometimes it pops up right away (the flaming lips' second album apparently had this problem because they found someone willing to let them do all kinds of auditory hijinx for cheap... it wasn't until later that they had the musical maturity to use these resources effectively) and sometimes it sneaks up on you (later Led Zeppelin, to me at least, goes way too far afield.)
The Beatles are not overproduced, they are geniuses.
And I would argue that they did not have everything available to them the way modern bands do, in that the beatles largely figured out how to get all those awesome noises on their own, or with the help of friends/coworkers/etc.
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Well you are speaking to my original point now.
Dan, the same can be said for the kind of garage rock you prefer or any kind of style for that matter. Some have done it amazingly well, most of it sucks.
And yes of course The Beatles and Neil Young are geniuses and that's right at the heart of the matter. Make no mistake, the Beatles were completely unfettered and in his biography Paul McCartney speaks about how the A Day in the Life sessions came about. It's been awhile since I've read it, but basically they were trying to come up with the most over the top ideas they could conceive. They were trying to out do another "overproduced" genius Brian Wilson.
So even the Beatles most highly produced stuff sounds great because it was created by geniuses. With Guns and Roses on the other hand... well it's garbage in, garbage out isn't it.
I think the review you linked to hits the nail on the head. The reason GnR sucks now not because it's overproduced, but because all of the geniuses have exited the band*.
*obviously I'm using genius loosely referring to guns and roses in the same context as the beatles.
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See, I think Brian Wilson was ONLY interesting at his craziest.
All the early Beach Boys stuff was just well-sung catchy schlock.
Only when he got to the point that was parodied in "Walk Hard" was his sound actually engaging to me.
A good song well-made is not nearly so interesting to me as a shambling half-genius half-trainwreck disaster of melted waxen wings.
This is just me though. I'd rather hear someone stretch and fail with little flecks of genius in the shit than hear someone shine up and perfect the standard old thing.
I'd rather watch "The Brothers Grimm" a thousand times than "Titanic" once more, to analogize to film.
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What Brian Wilson was doing was hardly "standard" at the time. They don't call his work groundbreaking for nothing.
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I mean.
The issue is, "overproduced" is different from "highly produced."
The difference between Brian Wilson or The Beatles, who were geniuses at using the studio to get what they wanted and were big fans of people like Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage and stuff, and schlocky bands that producers try to fix in the studio by hiring drum doctors.
The thing I am against is the idea that "overwrought overproduced melodramatic walls-of-sound are one of the most valid approaches to rock and roll."
The general belief that adding more shit to a song makes it better. That overdubbing the drums 10 times will sound better than just... recording the drums once, with the band.
It's one thing to be the Beatles and decide that the studio is your instrument, to some degree.
It's another thing for rock music as a whole to go in the direction of attempting to do that, as it did for 20 years or so. I often think that I would be a much angrier person if I were alive during that era, not that it's completely over-- we do live in the era of the vocoder.
The idea that something is good BECAUSE it is completely overdone and horrible and excessive, this is an idea that I strongly disagree with. Just as much as I can't stand the idea of playing guitar like this (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zl81Mq4llZg). Or that era of British art, I forget what it's called, but it is a weird early 1800s artistic movement that actually looked like... the covers of fantasy novels, or illustrations of led zeppelin songs.
And here I was working towards a big finishing metaphor that was really clever, but my roommate came in and said "what the fuck are you doing still arguing with internet people, don't you have 2 exams tomorrow?" and I forgot what I was going to say. more to come i guess.
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I think we are starting to see eye to eye. But even if we aren't so what, it's 3 am on Monday morning and I too have 3 finals due this week.
I was using overproduced in quotes because I was thinking it was an in the eye of the beholder situation. But you are now referring to overproduced as using studio trickery to compensate for inferior performance by the artist. That's certainly not what the Beatles or Brian Wilson were doing and I really don't think it's what Axl Rose is doing either.
As for Yngwie Malmsteen, I admire his ability to play so many notes, but that kind of playing is more like sports than music. They should have an annual competition to see who shreds the fastest. But there again, he's just taken something beautiful to it's musically crippled extreme. The original source of inspiration (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCwCBh0z3Hs) for that type of playing still blows me away.
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Or that era of British art, I forget what it's called, but it is a weird early 1800s artistic movement that actually looked like... the covers of fantasy novels, or illustrations of led zeppelin songs.
Is this an attempt to diss the Pre-Raphaelites? Not cool, man.
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Is this an attempt to diss the Pre-Raphaelites? Not cool, man.
What's more I think it might be more accurate to say that the covers of fantasy novels etc look like the Pre-Raphaelites than vice versa. I mean, they were kind of a weird bunch of dudes but I am pretty sure they did not have secret time machines that they used to get Led Zep albums to copy from.
Did you know that Dante Gabriel Rossetti had a pet wombat? He even wrote poems about it (http://www.iath.virginia.edu/~bpn2f/ROSSETTI/family.html).
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yes, I was talking about the pre-raphaelites. horrible.
man, fuck axle rose! he totally blows!
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Is that another term for Rococo? Because that shit is hideous.
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Is that another term for Rococo? Because that shit is hideous.
Rococo is about a century earlier.
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Rococo... B. Ware?
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You know what. I like overwrought overproduced melodramatic walls-of-sound. I was 14 when The Wall came out. I own several ELP albums fergawdsakes. I understand the reaction to that genre. I also find that there ain't nobody smugger than a so-called "punk".
I find it cool that I found myself wondering if you actually meant ELP, or had fat fingers and really meant ELO. I find it cooler that the statement works regardless of which it was.
Although Jeff Lynne was clearly the weakest Wilbury.
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...I... own "El Dorado" on extra-high-fidelity gold CD thing.
There. I said it.
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I find it cool that I found myself wondering if you actually meant ELP, or had fat fingers and really meant ELO. I find it cooler that the statement works regardless of which it was.
Although Jeff Lynne was clearly the weakest Wilbury.
I meant ELP, but my statement is equally valid for ELO.
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Are we talking about hip hop El-P or, uh, something else?
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Emerson, Lake and Palmer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emerson,_Lake_%26_Palmer). I'm pretty sure. Maybe Powell.
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Yeah, that didn't really fit is why I asked. Emerson, Lake and Palmer makes since.
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Cozy Powell is dead, sadly.
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Axl Speaks (http://web.gunsnroses.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=20081216&content_id=a1&vkey=news&fext=.jsp)
That was even more rambling that LFM's review.
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Well, to be fair, it's a bunch of message board answers posted together into one block of text.
That could make ANYONE's words into a me-like ramble.