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?
***
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.
Author
Topic: Chinese Democracy is a go (Read 14973 times)