Ready to crash and burn I never learn

I miss the sound of Guns N Roses. 

Especially hearing it on the radio. Gone were the days when, upon tuning in to NU107, the unmistakable sound of Slash’s leadguitars gliding like high-tension wires over the solid grooves provided by Duff, Izzy, and Steven would flood your room and consciousness like a welcome intruder. I think the factors that contributed to GNR’s success were the very same reasons that actually destroyed the band. 

In my opinion, there are two schools of thought within the confines of rock music: the traditional blues-rooted guitar-hero/virtuoso camp whose biggest disciples and pioneers include Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page, Black Sabbath, and Clapton; and the concept album/lyrical imagery/experimental camp that boasts the stellar line-up of The Beatles, Pink Floyd, The Kinks, and Bob Dylan (I didn’t include the punk movement, which was all about attitude and not about technical or musical proficiency.). Hendrix et. al. weren’t famous because they wrote lyrics that would rival that of say, TS Eliot's poetry,the same way John Lennon was not famous for his killer guitar histrionics. 

Those who belong to the guitar hero camp were superb and consumate performers who used the guitar as means of letting their most primal andburied passions out. While Hendrix et. al. used the guitar as the main attraction in any performance or song, Lennon et. al. used it as a tool to shade and color a song in sync with the other instruments, rather than let it jump out of the speaker. However, it does not mean that the guitar heroes/visionaries were lesser, in an artistic point of view, to the rock-poets. It simply means that they have their own unique way of expressing themselves: their fingers do the actual talking instead of the words themselves. 

Appetite For Destruction, original Robert Williams cover art

Although this may sound a bit sacriligeous to some, Guns N’ Roses managed to somehow balance the elements of both camps, even including the nastiness of punk. Who other cock-rock-hair band besides GNR would you still listen to nowadays without the fear of being ridiculed? Poison? Warrant? Motley Crue? Axl Rose’s predisposition to being experimental and progressive was somehow balanced by Slash’s more traditional blues and rock n’ roll values. The Use Your Illusion series were, in a way, flavored by Axl’s newfound interest in Trent Reznor’s music. I mean some of the more memorable tracks in those albums were laced with synthesizers and keyboard effects(“November Rain”, “Estranged”, “Don’t Cry”, “Live and Let Die”, etc.,) that, in turn, were matched by Slash’s stellar guitar works like in“November..” and “Estranged.” Add to that unique concoction controversial and provocative song lyrics that were a far-cry to the ridiculousness of the hair-metal era that spawned them, and you have the right ingredient for success. That is why even today, listening to GNR’s albums, they still sound fresh and exciting compared to the one-dimensional scope of rap-metal/punk-pop that seem to have taken over the word “commercialism” without any effort at all. 

As for the band’s demise, fans were already veering toward the likes of Nirvana and the rest of the alternative posse by the time they released that train wreck called The Spaghetti Incident? anyway. The interesting part is that those different points of view that buoyed the band to achieve mainstream success were the very reasons that dragged them down in the end. I always believed Axl Rose was a gifted songwriter, especially when working with his former bandmates, but he tends to overindulge when left alone by himself. And in my opinion, had there been compromises in both camps, the next GNR album would be even bigger than Appetite For Destruction, Lies, or the Illusion albums. Or any other albums.