Screw Barak Obama. This is what I’ve been waiting for. It’s 17 years since Use Your Illusion I and II were released but the new Guns N' Roses (smirk) record, Chinese Democracy is here. In this time The Pixies, Rage Against the Machine, Smashing Pumpkins and something called a George Bush administration have had time to split up and reform. And most importantly, Axl Rose has had time to piss off, alienate and/or fire not only the original members of Guns N’ Roses, but also several bands’ worth of replacements. It is simply amazing that this record was ever completed.
I should take a moment to lament for my native Britain, where the record doesn’t come out until tomorrow (unless you are one of those rich folk with access to the internet). Here in Madrid, and most of the rest of the world it has been for sale for over a day now. And having heard all the tracks I feel self-important enough to write a blow by blow account how my ears received this sainted musical milestone. It’s not like there is anything going on in the world that is more important for me to get on my high horse about.
We can speculate about the delay without knowing for sure what caused it. In the period between Use Your Illusion and now, a plethora of musical styles have gone in and out of fashion, including grunge, industrial metal, rap-metal, nu-metal and that really whiny US punk that dominated the charts a few years ago. I still hear Good Charlotte in my nightmares. Has Axl Rose been trying to keep abreast of the latest musical fashion, fearful that the hard rock of the late 1980s and early 1990s is no longer something people will respect? And how do these styles fit with his bombastic Queen fantasies and desire to write epics and arty rockers? We also need to take into account the man's legendary perfectionism that many working with him attest to; some of these songs have been on the internet for years and sounded fine to us mortals. Was Axl spending all this time reworking them because they didn’t reach the level of a musical high renaissance? We also know that a mass of material was written for this record, probably three records’ worth at least. With all those songs Korean Democracy and Cuban Democracy might have been made in this space of time too.
First, the good news. Before the track listing was made official, rumours were flying around about which songs would make the final cut. Tracks leaked onto the internet ranged from the good to the seriously ugly. Remember Axl Rose’s parting gift on Use Your Illusion II, the one-minute stinker 'My World?' Even hard core fans choked at that pretentious fizzle of brown arse wind. In fact, the hard core fans probably hated it the most because it indicated another degree of separation from what they had come to expect from their band. But judging by some of the internet leaks, Axl wasn’t entirely persuaded that this was a road to avoid, and dangled Silkworms in front of us as a terrifying warning of the shape of things to come, possibly as an attempt to reduce hype about his missing record, possibly to try and make 'My World' look like a masterpiece in comparison. Having killed off Guns N Roses and effectively made it a backing group, Axl Rose’s often questionable creativity would be sufficiently unchecked for him to serve up a pretentious shit-storm, especially since Izzy Stradlin, the other brain of GNR, wasn't around to pen some of his classic 'simpler' songs. In the same way George W Bush is running down the clock as US President, we just had to trust Axl and hope he didn’t do anything too stupid.
It therefore gives me great relief to see the tracklist and know that Silkworms is not on Chinese Democracy.
Anyway, an epic stodgy record needs an epic stodgy review, like nothing else before. Hell, I’m going to review every song in a celebration of all things over-the-top and too big for their own good. From tracks 1 to 14, here is Chinese Democracy:
1. Chinese Democracy – In the beginning there was Axl Rose. And he created the heavens and the earth, and a record that sounds huge, though overproduced. This record did have like five producers after all, and a Big Mac wrapped in plastic would seem organic in comparison. Indistinct chattering sounds are shot through by a crunching intro that sounds like Godzilla chewing cement and then a real song kicks in. It sounds every inch as bad-ass as it should…and it sounds like Guns N’ Roses too, dispelling all my fears that we were going to get some mongrel hip-hop ballet record or something equally misguided. I guess $13 million was worth it. This is what we’ve been missing.
2. Shackler’s Revenge – A very “me, me, me” song, this. But again, it rocks. The verses have that same sinister quality I liked so much in 'You Could Be Mine'. And the chorus makes Axl sound like he is on a one-man mission, probably to prove that carrying on was a good idea after all and that turning your back on him is a bad move. Especially if it ends up with Velvet Revolver. Points deducted for the needless solo, which is just confused and couldn’t have fitted into the framework of the song worse if someone in the studio had just randomly decided to switch on a blender. It sounds like Audioslave lasted long enough to have an influence on some people. But that aside, we’re cruising here and all my expectations and doubts look misjudged. Who needs Slash?
3. Better – Eww, that opening is nasty, like a school playground chant forced through a broken Rapmaster 2000. And it keeps cropping up through the song. The chorus is right on the money, though, sounding as towering and crunchy as a steamroller slowly reversing over a bag of Dorritos. The soloing again is clumsily bolted on and unnecessary. I’m not down on solos but they need to complement the song, if not take it to a new level. Here the already grating tune effectively screeches to a halt so that Axl Rose can announce “and now for a solo”. It’s that gratuitous and, good as this song is in parts, I cannot believe this was a single.
Bloated fun fact! The Sun is big. We know this. But the hypergiant star VY Canis Majoris has a radius of between 1800 and 2100 solar radii (ie, the radius of our Sun). So it's bigger.
4. Street of Dreams – Mmm. Before I embarked on this post I had a feeling that songs on this record were going to fall into two categories: songs about ex-members of the band and songs about Axl’s ex-squeezes. Not sure which category this falls into, especially since he’s had plenty of time to accumulate sufficient quantities of wistful thoughts about both. If he’s going to try and echo Use Your Illusion he could have copied 'Coma', 'Civil War' or half a dozen other great tracks. Forcing 'November Rain', 'Estranged' and other GNR weepies to breed mutant offspring is cruel. TO THE LISTENER. This has piano, subtlety, our man getting all heartfelt and croaking, probably while scrunching himself up in a ball and clenching his fists. I’m not enjoying this, probably because more than naything else it makes me think of 'Yesterday' on Use Your Illusion II, and I always skip that aimless little number. I wish I could like it, if only because it must have taken some effort to get that string section and because the lyrics aren’t as naïve or cloying as they usually are on GNR sludgefests.
5. If The World – There must be some mistake. It opens sounding like some toss that George Michael might use as filler on one of his records. Or a second rate James Bond theme tune. Axl quickly soon reminds us that it really is him (something I wouldn't hurry to do if I were in his shoes), his sharp voice strangely making this song even more plodding and starchy. He’s really hoping that some of these epic choruses will hit the spot, but if someone forced you to gnaw through a cardboard cake you would have the taste equivalent of listening to this.
6. There Was A Time – Aka TWAT? Choir singing, backwards guitars and more wretched hip-hop garnish are to be found here. In the FIRST 30 SECONDS of this epic dogs’ dinner, no less. It sounds like it will be another soppy number, but then there is a jagged interlude, which sounds like it could be the refrain - before it disappears, possibly because verse-chorus-verse isn’t avant-garde enough for a misunderstood genius trying to rebuild the Hanging Gardens of Babylon in the listeners ears. Then the melody collapses on itself into a black hole where anything goes. There are key changes all over the shop and it bounces back and forth between moods with such bipolar melodrama that Jerry Springer will soon be trying to interview it. Axl tips a vat of obligatory labyrinthine guitar solo on top, something this shapeless blob of a song could do without. I’ve abandoned all hope that this will be a great record, so I’ll play a game, which I shall call, ‘Which New Guns N’ Roses Song Pushed The Other Band Members Over The Edge?’ This is definitely a safe bet.
Bloated fun fact! The People’s Republic of China has the world’s highest population with 1.3 billion. It is not a democracy. Tell your friends.
7. Catcher in the Rye – Now I know how Axl feels when he has to impress his impatient fans. I’m only halfway through and I’ve clearly bitten off more than I can chew. Where is the vitriol or the rage in this sonic gristle? There is a pathetic na-na-na moment that's so lightweight it makes me feel we are not listening to Guns N’ Roses so much as Mums N’ Pansies. Then the song just falls into a ditch and flails about, with Axl yammering on, almost certainly about himself, and making squealing noises while the backing band experiment with almost every note on the high end of their guitars. 17 years’ self-reflection (or could it be pity?) has provided questionable wisdom: “When all is said and done/We're not the only ones/Who look at life this way/That's what the old folks say/But every time I see them/Makes me wish I had a gun/If I thought that I was crazy/Well, I guess I'd have more fun”. That’s right. Axl Rose has been alone so long he wants to get a gun and shoot the residents of an old people’s home. I think it’s called being in denial.
8. Scraped – The sort of title Nine Inch Nails would pick. This is going to be dark and belliger…oh DEAR GOD that introduction is horrendous. It soon gets going, but I don’t think any of these songs, Shackler’s Revenge apart, have started without at least some form of irrelevant dicking around beforehand. If he seeks new ways to make a song sound important he could try coughing politely or tapping a teaspoon against a champagne glass beforehand. It's more logical than recreating the noise of a smoke alarm being forced through a hairdryer. There is some of the dirty rock music I’ve been looking for here and it could have been a contender, but stupid variations of the introduction keep punching holes in the song and ruining the mood. Seriously, you could build a theme park in a graveyard and it would be less out of place. At this stage I should also mention that this is one of the most solipsistic records I’ve ever heard. By now we must have reached at least a century of lyrics containing the words “Me”, “I”, “My” and their variants. Write a song about cars or snakes, or something different, for god’s sake.
9. Sorry – So apparently along with Nine Inch Nails, Limp Bizkit (pfff…) and Kid Rock (Double pfff…), Pink Floyd found their way on to his CD player. Fair enough, they were a band that knew a thing or two about sprawling epics, and therefore this is quite coherent by Axl standards. It fits together nicely, nothing forcibly inserted here to jar me. I like it, and it leaves me so comfortably numb that I can blank out the contribution of the eight year old who wrote the woeful lyrics. “You like to hurt me/You know that you do/You like to think/In some way/That it's me/And not you/But we know that isn't true.”
10. Riad N’ The Bedouins – Eh? Is Axl going to do geo-politics? Is this the new name of the band? Is it an attempt to sound clever? Again, there are disparate elements in search of a song here because they don’t totally mesh. A shame. It really could have been amazing, and so far this sounds like the biggest missed opportunity on the record. The wailing intro is dynamic and the verse seethes. I could imagine going nuts at a concert to this. But he keeps doing it. He keeps bolting rickety, ugly sounding parts to great melodies and can’t keep things simple to save his life. It could be worse, I suppose.With $13 million he could have lurched completely into Michael Jackson territory and hired NASA scientists to make him cups of coffee or had special furniture made from the bones of albino monkeys commissioned. Yet I get the feeling that if you asked him to change a light bulb he would disassemble the whole house to do it. Over-complicating music comes so naturally to him that it is the silly faffing about rather than the verses and choruses that seem most routine, such as the ridiculous guitar wankery mid-way - totally jarring and out of place yet as mandatory and contrived as a young child’s Christmas thank-you letter to grandma. Delay the release of the record Axl, I implore you. Fuck Dr Pepper. Run this song by Izzy Stradlin and he will make it world class for you by trimming off the fat. There is still hope. Strangely, while the sound on Chinese Democracy bears no relation to Appetite for Destruction, the lyrics haven’t evolved much at all since those days. This time we get: “Riyadh and the Bedouins/Got a plan and walk right in/But I don't give a fuck 'bout them/'cause I am crazy”. Really man, what the fuck are you talking about? This song, more than any other, sets out my issues with this record.
Bloated fun fact! Streetfighter 2 Sumo wrestler E. Honda was originally going to be called ‘Sumo’. In real life there are no Japanese sumo wrestlers called this because ‘Sumo’ is not a name.
11. IRS – This has been around for ages so I know the meaty chorus is going to beat through the undignified whimpering that he sees fit to slap down as an introduction. There is a real groove here and everything fits together just right. As part of an album this will do nicely, though on a great GNR record I'm not sure I would have noticed it. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt with this track, though it’s certainly not worth getting arrested for. More of this will erase some of those earlier traumas.
12. Madagascar – What the hell? A killer version of this song has been kicking around on the internet for a good while now, an epic that really was the sum of its parts. There will be about 50 plus versions of all these songs sitting on studio shelves gathering dust, so why go with a weaker vocal and more tepid sound? To confound us? This is another one of those songs with lyrics talking about how Axl is against the world and nobody understands him. Yeeees. I can see how that could be our fault. Strangely, returning from the early version of Madagascar are the sound clips of Martin Luther King and Cool Hand Luke. The latter samples were on Civil War, 17 years ago, so it’s safe to say that while the ever-capricious Axl Rose has desperately tried to keep the sound of his band cutting edge, chopping and changing, at least all this time some lines from Cool Hand Luke retain some cult-like meaning to him. And I suspect only him. But now we have four good to great tracks in a row and there is a real second wind to the record.
13. This I Love – Just bollocks. Rancid, wallowing, self-harming, filth-rolling bollocks. There is a level of pomposity here that I can’t bear. THIS has to be the song that pushed the other members over the edge, and it’s a damning indictment of the direction of the band. In Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra the protagonist exiles himself on a mountain for ten years, come back to humanity and teaches them how to better themselves and reach a higher level of being. On Chinese Democracy Axl Rose has locked himself away for 17 years and returned to bleat about what was on his mind back in 1991. Am I too stupid to understand this song? It’s terrible, right?
14. Prostitute – With a title like that it could have been 'Mr Brownstone' or 'My Michelle part II', the sort of sonic Molotov cocktail that GNR specialised in, even if they unfortunately strayed (or took wild detours) into misogyny back then. It’s one last chance to pour oil on flames or wrestle with alligators or ride a Harley Davidson off the edge of a cliff but again it’s the safe option. A frickin’ ballad. Unmemorable and not likely to grow on me either, this is no way to close a GNR record and I don’t care what era we are in.
Bloated fun fact! 148 episodes of US s(h)itcom Just Shoot Me! were filmed. I certainly think that’s too many. There were 12 episodes of Fawlty Towers. The most popular programme ever is The News, which even today is still going strong.
Well, that’s it. There are five or so songs I really like here. In Madagascar there is a fifth that would have been untouchable in its greatness if Axl hadn’t persisted in his obsessive tinkering, while Riad and the Bedouins needs its wings clipped to rock like it should. Other songs have their moments. Others emphatically do not. I’m not totally convinced by this project.
I won’t be the first or last person to make the point that after such a long time this record had to be amazing or it would be crushed under the weight of expectation. To be fair, the hype was generated by journalists much more than by Axl Rose, but even if we set aside the length of time this took, I can’t ignore the fact that just under two thirds of the record is pretty mediocre, and some of it just plain bad. And while I was always ready to pardon the songs for not living up to stratospheric hype, I can’t forgive them for not living up to their own pompous levels of self-importance. This is a self-contained affliction that starts when you play the record and ends when you stop. Axl Rose being an often-pretentious individual is no fault of the music press, nor is his vindictive nature and need to keep haranguing those that doubt him. I hope he can be satisfied that, at least in parts, he has proved many people wrong.
Oh, I'm sorry, you just wanted a mark out of ten? I'll give it a slightly too generous 7 out of 10.
: 26/11/08 1:55 PM<< Home
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