TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/093091/0930440.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 9.2 KB | 205 lines

                                                                                MUSIC, Page 82

Misfit Metalheads


To enjoy the red-hot rock 'n' roll of Guns N' Roses, you have to
get past their violent, sexist and racist lyrics

By JOE QUEENAN


    For the original cover of their monstrously successful 1987
debut album Appetite for Destruction, Guns N' Roses selected a
painting of a sinister robotic figure towering over a ravished
female with her undergarments around her knees. The album, whose
leitmotivs were violent sex, drug abuse, alcoholism and insanity,
featured lyrics like "Tied up, tied down, up against the wall/ Be
my rubbermade baby/ An' we can do it all." The record sold 14
million copies.

    Buoyed by this success, the Gunners in 1988 exhumed some
archival material and released a stopgap, extended-play album
with such lyrics as "I used to love her/ But I had to kill her";
"Police and niggers, that's right, get out of my way"; and
"Immigrants and faggots . . . come to our country and think
they'll do as they please/ Like start a mini-Iran, or spread
some f---disease." The record sold 6 million copies.

    Buoyed by this success, the Gunners have now made
rock-'n'-roll history by simultaneously releasing two completely
different albums with virtually identical covers: Use Your
Illusion I and Use Your Illusion II. This time out, the Gunners,
while clinging to their trademark bitch-slapping posturing, have
also introduced such engaging new subjects as bondage, the lure
of homicide and the pleasures of drug-induced comas. They offer a
song called Pretty Tied Up, accompanied by a drawing in the
lyric sheet of a naked, bound and blindfolded woman. They also
graphically invite the editor and publisher of Spin magazine,
Bob Guccione Jr., to perform oral sex on the Guns N' Roses'
irrepressible lead singer, W. Axl Rose.

    The two albums (price: $15.98 apiece on CD) went on sale
at midnight last Monday, and many large stores stayed open to
accommodate sometimes raucous crowds of buyers who had milled
about for hours. Nationwide, the albums sold an estimated
500,000 copies within two hours of going on sale, and 1.5
million copies within three days. With 7.3 million records
already shipped to dealers around the world, the record company,
Geffen Records, has encouraged wild talk that the album could
be as big as Michael Jackson's Thriller, the top-selling record
of all time (more than 40 million copies sold worldwide).

    It would be unfair to attribute all, or even most, of Guns
N' Roses' success to their unrelentingly sexist and
uncompromisingly violent lyrics or to their forays into
xenophobia, racism and sadomasochism. Rock 'n' roll has always
been filled with sexist, violent bands, but very few of them
sell 14 million copies the first time out of the chute. What
sets the Gunners apart is that they are a genuinely electrifying
band that neither looks nor sounds like the interchangeable
Whitesnakes, Poisons and Bon Jovis that make up the drab MTV
universe. What the Gunners play is very, very good. What the
Gunners say is very, very bad. Of 30 songs on the new albums,
10 contain the F word. That's why several chains -- including
K Mart and Wal-Mart -- won't stock them.

    The Gunners stick to the serious business of rock 'n'
roll, synthesizing the Stones and the Sex Pistols to produce
Aerosmith for the '90s. They never drift very far from the
jackhammer style that began to dominate the idiom two decades
ago. This is the main reason their audience is not entirely
limited to 16-year-old boys with baseball caps worn backward.
Guns N' Roses tenaciously clings to hard rock's tradition of
being loud, mean and obvious. No one alive looks more like rock
stars than Rose, 29, and guitarist Slash, 26, with their
tattoos, their headgear, their emotional problems (Slash has
frequently used heroin, and Rose is a manic-depressive) and
their we-sold-our-soul-to-rock-'n'-roll attitudes.

    The Gunners' success is giving the kiss of life to a
moribund record industry, and has kept rock 'n' roll from doing
what it keeps threatening to do: expire. Veering between
creaking dinosaurs like the Grateful Dead (the hottest concert
act of the past summer), pious scolds like Sinead O'Connor, and
mopey '60s retreads like R.E.M., rock 'n' roll is in need of the
juice that only true believers like Guns N' Roses can supply.

    The Gunners certainly know how to stay in the news. With
Rose's brief marriage to Erin Everly, daughter of singer Don
Everly, Slash's drunken, profanity-spewed acceptance speech at
the 1990 American Music Awards (carried on live TV), Rose's
annulment of his marriage, guitarist Izzy Stradlin's arrest for
urinating in an airplane galley, and Rose's arrest last November
after allegedly hitting a female neighbor on the head with a
wine bottle (the charges were later dropped), you have the
makings of a mythology that Keith Moon would envy.

    On July 2 at a concert not far from St. Louis, Rose got
into a fight with a camera-toting biker (cameras are banned at
Guns concerts) and ended up storming off the stage, to the
dismay of 20,000 fans. In the ensuing riot, 16 people were
arrested, 60 were injured, and $200,000 in property damage was
sustained.

    The band's exploits bring to mind Rob Reiner's priceless
1984 film This Is Spinal Tap, a pseudo-rock documentary
chronicling the disastrous final American tour of the world's
stupidest rock band. Surveying the Gunners' career, one gets the
impression that the band may have seen the film, entirely missed
the satirical thrust, and elected to pattern themselves after
Reiner's brain-dead metalheads.

    It's hard, for example, not to question the intelligence
of a band that uses the word niggers even though its lead
guitarist, Slash, is half black. It's hard not to be puzzled by
a band that agrees to appear at a benefit for the Gay Men's
Health Crisis in New York City, only to get bounced off the
program because its latest record contains the word faggots.
It's hard not to be mystified by a band that goes on a 25-city
tour after a two-year absence and puts out two new albums after
the tour is over. And it's hard not to chuckle at a band whose
lead guitarist spends a sizable chunk of his Rolling Stone
interview discussing the death of his pet snake Clyde. ("Had he
been sick for a long time?" inquired Rolling Stone, in arguably
the most unforgettable rock-'n'-roll interview question of all
time. Yes, the snake had.)

    The Use Your Illusion albums seem certain to keep selling
well. Although the first album is better than the second, and
although neither contains a song as memorable as Sweet Child o'
Mine or Paradise City from the Appetite for Destruction album,
both are exciting, well-produced records, with plenty of catchy
rockers and only a handful of outright duds. The guitars are
hot, the drumming is hot, the vocals are red-hot. Anyone who can
get past the offensive lyrics will be buying one of the best
rock albums of the year. Or two of them.

    Assisting the layman in getting past the lyrics will be
the cottage industry of those rock critics who earn a living by
explaining away the Gunners' verbal excesses as "satire,"
"parody" or a crude but sincere attempt to achieve a sort of
audiophonic cinema verite. These are the same people who fashion
byzantine intellectual justifications for the vicious
anti-Semitism of the rap group Public Enemy or the uninterrupted
verbal degradation of women that is the stock-in-trade of 2 Live
Crew.

    It is a very troubling thought that never in the history
of the business has the record industry has been so dependent
for its financial well being on the success of such social
misfits. Whereas in the past the industry has looked for a shot
in the arm from the cuddly Beatles, the enigmatic Michael
Jackson or the populist Bruce Springsteen, it now turns its
yearning eyes to a bunch of young men who, by even their own
admission, are "sociopsychotic."

    And whiners. Yes, one increasingly grating thing about the
band is their inexhaustible capacity for self-pity. Having been
coddled from birth by their record company and by MTV, and
having been given a free ride by the rock press, the Gunners
nevertheless cannot get off the whinemobile, as they moan about
the demanding life of a rock star. According to Forbes, the
Gunners will earn $25 million in 1990-91. These guys don't know
how to take yes for an answer.

    So they retreat into Guns-vs.-the-world self-pity. "Don't
damn me when I speak a piece of my mind," sniffles Rose in the
band's most annoying new number. "Cause silence isn't golden
when I'm holding it inside." Poor Axl. A talented vocalist and
a whirling dervish of a stage performer, Rose is nonetheless one
very disturbed human being, who sings, "I'm a cold heartbreaker/
Fit ta burn and I'll rip your heart in two." This is probably
true. But even truer, and more appropriate, are the words once
sung by his obvious intellectual forebear, the Scarecrow in The
Wizard of Oz:



    I would not be just a nuffin',

    My head all full of stuffin',

    My heart all full of pain.

    And perhaps I'd deserve you

    And be even worthy of you,

    If I only had a brain.