Opinion: Guns N’ Roses is a One-Album Band

Some bands have a single perfect moment, and that’s okay. There’s something really cool about a band encapsulating a sound, look, and attitude in one fell swoop, thus setting a standard we’ll imitate and reference for the rest of history. It’s just a shame when we’re forced to account for that band’s legacy, the lesser albums and eras in which these musicians might have been popular, and even iconic and successful, but were notably not as cool as they were during that utterly kickass blink of an eye.

One such band is Guns N’ Roses. Guns N’ Roses is a lightning strike, a one-album band. That album is Appetite for Destruction, the greatest hair metal record of all time, a record that defined a moment in which rock and roll was changed forever by an emerging sound taken somewhere that no one else would’ve thought to take it. But with several members of the band reuniting under the term “classic line-up,” it’s sad that more people won’t admit that G’N’R’s other material is loved only because it was made by the same band that made Appetite. Honestly, did we need anything else?

And what else is there? G’N’R Lies, a fun but throwaway EP with none of the true genius found on “It’s So Easy” alone? Use Your Illusion I and II, the former heavily phoned in and the latter bloated with late-‘80s self-consciousness and bad Beatles worship? Chinese Democracy, the world’s most expensive nu-metal album (get fucked, go listen to “Better” and tell me I’m wrong)? All you’re left with is The Spaghetti Incident? which doesn’t count because it’s a covers album. None of these records are truly unlistenable—there’s no The Shaggs’ Philosophy of the World here, “Don’t Cry” is a fine song to have come on the radio while you’re driving, and hey, nothing like a Misfits cover—but they just, well, kind of suck. You know it, I know it.

You might assume this is an insult, but I consider it the opposite. If you drop a perfect record and it echoes throughout eternity, you’re the fucking bomb, and the fact that your other efforts don’t match it only illustrates how stand-alone phenomenal it is. Appetite For Destruction’s effect on the pop culture world when it dropped is mirrored in the attitude of its creators at that time—wildfire, controlled chaos, an explosion in the night that makes you realize how big the wasteland really is. That the people who made it would become millionaire drug addicts who believed their own hype was sort of inevitable; you can’t be that fucking good and not expect there to be consequences (just ask Linda Blair).

Let’s look at Axl Rose. Forget the fact that the guy got old and has too much money today—when you think of Axl Rose kicking ass and changing the way we all viewed frontmen, do you see him at the piano, with the jersey and the bandana headband and the Ron Howard beard? Fuck no, you see that dude in a torn T-shirt and jeans snake-dancing around the stage and mule-kicking an unruly concertgoer in the face. That’s Appetite Axl right there, just an urchin living under the street. Slash always had it easier, because his job was to be sleazy chain-smoking solo-taming monolith, which to this day he still is. But once Axl’s lyrics were being heard in a billion homes around the world, the dude had to worry about being a mouthpiece for a broader message, rather than just being the fucking mouth.

The obvious response to my argument is, “Scoreboard!” And there’s something to that. According to Wikipedia, the two Use Your Illusion records sold almost twelve million combined copies by 2010, and contain a massive number of hit singles on each record. I’ll never do that in my life; Hell, I had leftovers for lunch. But to that I’ll say, well, yeah, bad things can be popular. They can be successful, too. As a metalhead, I will never really buy the You Can’t Argue With Success line, because it’s so easily forgotten when it’s inconvenient, and because so many of rock’s greatest musicians were financial failures during their heyday. It’s so easy to back up successful artists with their large numbers one minute and then hate on pop stars and industry fat cats the next. What it should come down to is that musical gut instinct. If someone has Appetite in their car, I’ll always be down to pop that shit on. If they have any other G’N’R record, I’ll look around their collection and maybe see what’s on the radio before playing it.

What’s especially interesting about the Use Your Illusion records is that classic rock heads love them, but are also always the people who groan about how albums used to be these experiences, where you had to listen to the whole thing and feel the progression of the record. Hey, I’ve done it too–“Damn pop music! It’s all about the single these days, the radio hit! It used to be about an album!” But the Use Your Illusion records are the original singles albums. I don’t know anyone who’s racing to their stereo or iPhone so they can blast “You Ain’t The First” or “Estranged.” Between the singles on those albums lies a ton of typical, uninspired music. In my mind, that also negates those sales number people like to throw at me. Plenty of people bought the first Britney Spears record just to hear “…Baby One More Time”, and I’m sure plenty of people bought Use Your Illusion I just to hear “November Rain.”

So as we enter this new era of G’N’R history, don’t believe the classic rock journalists and insane diehard Guns cultists who think Axl Rose saved mankind (Chuck Klosterman being both). Go and listen to Appetite For Destruction—Hell, listen to it three or four times, that record fucking slays—and cherry pick some better-than-meh numbers from the rest of the catalogue. But don’t feel the need to pretend Guns N’ Roses’ career was a storied one filled with the kind of beautiful artistic growth that proves what musicians can do. That rewrite of history does an injustice to the great flash-in-the-pan band of our time. Appetite rules. But that’s all.