Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008
Let the Final Pillar of My Youthful Nostalgia Fall…
George Lucas started all of this.
First with his Star Wars prequels, which took the bloom off the rose.
Those of us that came of age in the 1980’s were bummed out, sure, but hey, it was just for kids in the first place we said. And though we realized Lucas was taking advantage of our love for his previous work, we gave him a pass.
Then came the announcement of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Yeah. That one. It would be okay, we reasoned. Lucas may have gone crazy, but Spielberg would save the day.
Then the movie came out. And the rose was no longer merely un-bloomed. It had been vomited on, crucified, and set on fire.
But hey, trying to relive past feelings was a wasteful exercise anyway, right? So write off movies entirely.
The only thing left? The final, untainted element of my adolescence, that had not yet soiled itself?
Guns N’ Roses.
Yeah, I was one of those kids. One of the ones whose universe was rocked by Appetite for Destruction. Whose concept of idyllic love and melodramatic tragedy were formed by “Sweet Child O’ Mine” and “November Rain”. Who found voice for my own suburban angst and frustration in the music of W. Axl Rose, Slash, Duff “Rose” McKagen, Izzy Stradlin’, and Steven Adler.
And through it all, through Gilby Fucking Clarke (Rockstar Supernova, dude? Really?), The Spaghetti Incident?!, and even the NuGN’R shows, I was still on board.
One part of it was that I could always find reasons to justify my continued adulation (Nine Inch Nail’s Robin Finck was in GNR 3.0 — and I’d been a fan of his almost as long as Slash! That works!). Another part of it was because The Legend was always more important than the mundane reality.
But ultimately, it was because the recording catalog of Guns N’ Roses had remained static in my mind; pure. It still represented all of those things it had for me when I was a kid, because the perpetual delay of Chinese Democracy has essentially rendered the band unable to fuck up my memories. They couldn’t let me down in the most meaningful way — with the music — because they hadn’t released anything since the classic lineup called it quits.
See, it is easy to view nostalgia crash-grab tours as separate from the music that inspired them, when the music itself has been frozen in time. Crazy Dreadlocked Guy gotta eat, you know. No shame in doing the cover band thing.
But today, that changed. Today, Chinese Democracy became official. It’s coming out November 25th.
As a motherfucking Best Buy Exclusive.
I won’t bother going into how ridiculous a Guns N’ Roses record coming out at Best Buy is, anymore than I would bother talking about ridiculous a Sears Sex Pistols Box Set would be. It’s obvious, and you as a reader are either going to get it, or not, and care, or not.
But me… I care. Because if music is memories, an instant access to emotional touchstones in our lives, then something died today.
No, the old albums won’t change. My seminal life moments that were set to Guns N’ Roses songs aren’t chemically modified in my brain.
But something has shifted. The sliver of my adolescent self, that still believed in Sex, Drugs, and Rock N’ Roll, has to be honest now. That small slice of me that still wanted to believe Axl Rose has some secret Ethic of Artistic Purity, that he’d gone Brian Wilson on us these past 15 years, and was a more meaningful artist because of it, has to own up. And the last fraction of myself, that has tried to find solace in my own past, versus taking on and owning my own future, has to give up the fight.
When everything that you used to be is burned away, some call it purification. I’m calling it Chinese Democracy.
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This seems very similar to how I felt when Billy Corgan “reunited” the Pumpkins and released “Zeitgeist” in the cash-grabbiest way possible. It’s just really disappointing.
Appetite is the stuff of legend. This new single is just not that good. I think you nailed it.
It’s such a strange set of circumstances; this album has been out there in the ether for so long, everyone had assumed it would never be released. That vaporware aspect of it allowed everybody following the story to envision it however they wanted; those of us wanting to give Axl the benefit of the doubt could assume it would be The Best Record Of All Time — but tragically, we’d just never see it.
In that sense, even if the record was amazing it wouldn’t have been able to live up to everyone’s expectations. And Dan is right — the single isn’t mind-blowing. At all. It’s a cool epic-sounding intro and riff that goes nowhere. And having heard so much of the record already through leaks, a lot of it is straight up bad. It’s the product of a guy that couldn’t let his work go into the world, was lost in terms of inspiration and direction, and consequently made an album over 15 years that bears the blatant sonic imprint of each and every passing musical trend since 1993 (well, maybe not all of them… I haven’t heard a song influenced by Matisyahu yet).
You haven’t even heard the album yet dude…If you were “on board” for version 3.0, and are a fan of Finck–why jump shit now?
The new single is good, but the best is really yet to come. Just like “Right Next Door to Hell” isn’t the best song from UYI, neither is the title song from “Chinese Democracy” the album’s best song. Other songs like “Cather in the Ry”e and “Prostitute” are fantastic and prove that it was definitely worth the wait.
Hey Jeff — thanks for commenting.
Yes, I was on board for GN’R 3.0; in fact, I flew across the country to see them play at the Hammerstein Ballroom. It was a great experience, no doubt.
Finck is one of my favorite guitar players, and he did not disappoint.
The point of my post was not that I am jumping ship now — I’ll be there at midnight at Best Buy just like everyone else, to live out that last hurrah. The point was that we all have clung to the notion of Guns N’ Roses, as they used to be, still existed. What they stood for. What they meant. And the absence of CD over the past 15 years has let all of us pretend those things were true.
Now, I’ve heard the 9 tracks that have leaked, and if we are honest with ourselves, we all know the new tracks don’t measure up. That band we all believed in is gone. Period. It’s time to move on.
Now, this isn’t a bad thing — how could CD ever live up to our expectations, really? — and I’m not trying to insult anybody; it’s just time that I, personally, own up to the reality of the situation and start living in the present, instead of holding on to the past.
Hey Mike — we agree that better songs are coming; I think “There Was A Time” is the best song on CD that I’ve heard thus far.
But the analogy of “Right Next Door to Hell” isn’t really accurate. “RNDTH” wasn’t even released as a single for the Illusion albums. The first song people heard from those records was “Civil War”, which was released almost a year and a half earlier on Nobody’s Child, a benefit album for Romanian orphans (interest bit of trivia — the Nobody’s Child version of “Civil War” features Steven Adler on drums, whereas the version on UYI2 has Matt Sorum).
Also, the first official single was “You Could Be Mine”.
Both of these songs kick the shit out of anything we’ve heard thus far from Chinese Democracy. I’ll take me some “You Could Be Mine” over “Shackler’s Revenge” any day of the week.
I don’t think the comparison is valid between Lucas and GNR; moreover, I agree that Catcher in the Rye, Better, Prostitute, and There Was A Time are some of the best songs Rose has written–Catcher in the Rye maybe the best. Instead of making Appetite part II, he has gone in a new direction–made a new movie, whereas Lucas was making a continuation of the original trilogy. Appreciate these songs for what they are–the director directing a new movie, trying something new. It took me awhile, but I have had some fairly dramatic events happen to me lately, and the new GNR, specifically There Was a Time, fit the mood–a new more adult time, but true emotion nonetheless. I saw the new band at the Hammerstein and Inland Invasion in 2006, and they were incredible. Word is Finck will be on the tour in 2009. Also, with music, the art is more open for interpretation, so the story is not as literal. Do not want to bore you, but hope you ponder that, and give the new music a chance. It speaks to me at a far more mature, deeper sense than Appetite or the Illusions.
Chestere — thanks for reading and posting. You bring up some good points, but what I was trying to convey with my post wasn’t a literal statement of “this record isn’t as good as past records, so now the world is sad”. It was more about what happens when the things we hold precious lose the luster of the idealism we drape upon them.
The Star Wars movies were cultural touchstones for people. They represented the best of many’s remembered past. When Lucas screwed around with the originals, and then put out the prequels (and then Indy IV), it took away the magic for people. It made them just ordinary movies — and pretty mediocre ones in fact.
If you travel the MovieGeek Internet I assume you’ve heard the phrase “George Lucas raped my childhood”. That’s what people are talking about; Lucas didn’t take away those people’s memories of the movies, but he forced them to rethink what they thought about the movies. And about Lucas himself.
Lucas brought himself — and his previous work — down to Earth. It was no longer unique and special, seen through the gauzy lens of personal remembrance. He was just a guy, making flicks that maybe hadn’t ever been as great as we thought.
The same thing works for Axl Rose in this scenario, for me. It’s easy to justify him breaking up the original lineup, and to forgive him all his faults, if you assume they are in the interest of the Artistic Greater Good, or that they are the machinations of a Disturbed-Yet-Brilliant-Mind and that they were all in the service of creating what must surely be a Masterpiece in ChiDem.
And as long as the record never came out, fans could think of him like that. And the mystique of the original records remained intact.
But now that has ended. Axl’s just a guy with issues, who made some great records with some other guys, and has made what is shaping up to be just an okay record without them.
He’s just some dude. Not that his music won’t still touch people, or that he can’t put together a catchy kick-ass chorus from time to time.
But the obsession and adulation is a young person’s game, and ultimately, a great distraction for all of us to look to others for the answers that we should be providing ourselves. That’s why for me, this is about growing up.
Let’s stop looking for Axl to be a brilliant genius and enrich our lives. Let’s enrich ourselves.
It’s tough because Appetite is such a snapshot of a very specific time. Even if we include UYI 1&2 – we are talking a very small window of “musical time” then – poof – it is gone. Frozen in time in all it rockin’ greatness. U2 changed and evolved, but slowly, and we were allowed to go on that ride for each step of evolution. Because GNR is frozen in time and now is coming out with this 90’s industrial-tinged slightly retro-rock, non-Slash sounding record, it just feels weird and different and not like that old slapshot. It like running into an old girlfriend – time has usually been cruel to her since your last mental picture. GNR now is not GNR that dominated the world with ego and rock. Its just another dude with another, maybe average record. Its not just the music, its the package.