AXL ROSE IS THE BOY WHO CRIED WOLF (OR: CHINESE DEMOCRACY IS COMING OUT IN 6 WEEKS AND NO ONE SEEMS TO GIVE A SH*T)
Is it just me, or is the blogosphere / webernets almost completely mum on the fact that Chinese Democracy, the long awaited Guns N’ Roses Axl Rose album 17 years in the making, is finally set to be released on November 25th? Ladies and gentlemen, do you realize how soon that is??? Seventeen years we’ve been waiting for this. We’ve been misled into believing the album would finally see the light of day so many times before, but never have the facts been as solid as this: Never before has there been a concrete release date; Best Buy announced they’d reached an album exclusive deal to release it; Best Buy has even launched a pre-order page. It would seem that this album is finally going to actually hit the shelves.
And yet, it would seem that no one is talking about it.
It’s not that we don’t give a shit. We clearly do. Everyone on this site goes ape shit each time new leaks / demos have surfaced over the past year and a half or so. It’s just that, after so many years of being led to believe the album was about to drop only to be let down and strung along again and again, we’ve become numb. It’s as if we’ve grown accustomed to the GNR hype machine so much so that we just shrug our shoulder: “Oh, it’s finally going to come out, how about that?” We’ve all heard close-to-finished versions of most of the songs anyway, but Axl’s camp has let this mess drag on for so long that it appears the iron isn’t hot anymore.
Don’t get me wrong, this album will sell like chopped liver to a bunch of Jews coming out of their fast on Yom Kippur; but it just seems like there should be a lot more hype than we’re seeing at this point in the game. Maybe the PR machine is just now kicking into motion, but 6 weeks out from release of the new Metallica album you couldn’t go ANYWHERE metal-related without hearing about it. Like ’em or not, Metallica’s management team and PR folks worked that album damn well, whipping up the Internet into a frenzy of mushy pulp consisting solely of Metallica. It worked. And that band had released an album way more recently than 17 fucking years ago.
Will Chinese Democracy see the same success as Death Magnetic? We’ll see. It’ll sure be fun to watch the run-up and the hype machine kick into motion.
-VN
