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December 12, 2008
CHINESE DEMOCRACY: THE LONGEST POST OF MY CAREER
In his AV Club review of CHINESE DEMOCRACY, Chuck Klosterman said,
"Reviewing Chinese Democracy is not like reviewing music. It's more like reviewing a unicorn. Should I primarily be blown away that it exists at all? Am I supposed to compare it to conventional horses? To a rhinoceros? Does its pre-existing mythology impact its actual value, or must it be examined inside a cultural vacuum, as if this creature is no more (or less) special than the remainder of the animal kingdom?"
Well put: this is no longer an album, it's an event. Yet it came out three weeks ago to the not-so-deafening combination of public ho-hum and a critical yawn. It was neither as good nor bad as fans and detractors wanted it to be. Those who wanted a legendary flop got the same CD with a bike and basket on it as those who wanted Axl Rose to perform some kind of pop music transfiguration for all the disciples who have been claiming he's a golden god. Both went away mildly dissatisfied that they couldn't listen to the musical equivalent of HEAVEN'S GATE.
Klosterman's A- on the A.V. Club was the most generous reviews, and this from a committed contrarian who only cares that you know that he doesn't care about his opinion. Pitchfork gave it a 5.9, arguing that the album's iconoclasm is neither interesting nor unique. For the most part, the reviews have been tepid. For an album that cost 13 million dollars* to make, this is not the result you wanted. I'm sure it will make its money back once Norway gets its hands on it and Axl plays a delighted Denmark. A failure it's not.
Some of the talk I've heard in the days before and after has recreated the GNR legacy, and the part that's inaccurate is that the USE YOUR ILLUSION discs are undisputed masterpieces. For all its incendiary, best-selling madness, there are about eight good songs on both these CDs, and one of them is not the fondly remembered, audacious, but truly awful "Get in the Ring." If you are a fan of Axl's cover of "Knocking on Heaven's Door," I don't know what to do with you - taking a gaudy song like "Live and Let Die" and giving it a new life is one thing, taking an essential Dylan piece and doing nothing at all interesting with it for the DAYS OF THUNDER soundtrack is another. If you took the best of the two, you would have one great album.
Here's the deal, USE YOUR ILLUSION I is full of great songs, and the only two memorable tracks on II are "Civil War" and "Yesterdays; by the time you make it through those, you have another ten songs to sit through.
APPETITE FOR DESTRUCTION is indeed the bridge between groups who are generally considered to be terrible, like Def Leppard and Twisted Sister, and the critically adored grunge movement. It gave authenticity to a crowd normally considered disgusting, and in the process destroyed them, because their illegitimacy was what always made them paradoxically meaningful. A lot of those dudes went on to make millions in start-up companies, and none of them really care about hair metal any more, except when they're drunk and there's karioake available. But APPETITE was also a terrific album, and it showed that Axl's sense of the epic, the sentimental, the simple . . . was gloriously uncomplicated. That complication is what made so many people care about Nirvana, but it's the reason everyone who was 10 when APPETITE came out went over to the house of their friend who had a divorced Mom and let him buy whatever he wanted to listen to Axl shout "So F*cking Easy!!!!"
After that preface, what to say . . . CHINESE DEMOCRACY pretty much rules, even when it doesn't. The opening track, "Chinese Democracy," is Axl's latest attempt to piss someone off who probably would never listen to him in the first place. It has probably been revised for every time Axl read the newspaper. It has the same cleverly mundane rhymes we've come to expect from him. It has a pretty awesome guitar solo that sounds better on every listen.
That said, I wish the next song "Shackler's Revenge" were the next song, if only Axl didn't sound like Frankenstein at the beginning (this actually may be Sebastian Bach). It's a typical "I love you even though I failed you completely" song that fits the GNR Canon like a block in a child's puzzle. It should be a radio hit, but it won't.
A familiar strategy, "Better" builds on that. Hey, Axl is saying, I may be a lothario who will cheat on you and use you, but I still am a human being who suffers. So why don't you come over tonight? This may be my favorite song on the album, with its rising vocals, sonic boom, and jarring guitars. If "Sweet Child of Mine" is an unintelligent man with limited, childish poetics writing a somehow brilliant love song, "Better" is that same guy, with no added introspection, telling a girl he's sorry.
"Street of Dreams" is one of two songs one the album that sounds like it belongs on a rock opera. More on that later. Axl remains committed to expounding on the "Street of Dreams" metaphor, and such piano pounding earnestness makes it pretty easy to make fun of.
"If The World" has been compared (negatively) by at least three critics to a James Bond title credits song. I've yet to see how this is a bad thing. I love it. This is the kind of simple lyrical progression Axl always makes brilliantly (like "Welcome to the Jungle / It gets worse here every day" ; "Take me down to the Paradise City / Where the grass is green and the girls are pretty"**) - In this case, it's simply that if the world would end, none of our dreams would come true.
I can't help but find this idea at once incredibly poignant and personal coming from him.
"There Was a Time" (the acronym is important) is a song I was kind of hoping we wouldn't get: the washed out rock star goes on an Ebenezer Scrooge style journey through his tarnished history. It's the longest song on the album, and probably the worst, because this is not really the kind of thing Axl is good at. Axl is good at writing songs like "November Rain" that probably never happened, but certainly could happen, kind of like "If The World."
"Catcher in the Rye" is the best song ever written about CATCHER IN THE RYE. It's a typically audacious move, naming a song after perhaps the most iconic book of the 20th Century. It obviously alludes not only to actual overt metaphor of Salinger's book, but also the influence it had on the guy who shot John Lennon. This is one of the typical "this is what it's like to do a lot of drugs and be a manic-depressive," a theme also visited in "Mr. Brownstone" and "Shotgun Blues." For some reason, I think when Axl sings the chorus ("The Catcher in the Rye again / Won't let you get away from him"), his voice sounds as pretty as it ever has. For a disgusting, oversexed guy obsessed with his image, this man has one of the most beautiful voices I've ever heard, and I will argue that with anyone. Years of smoking cigarettes has not changed that.
"Scraped" Another song that discusses how difficult it is to be a rock star. These songs are always the least interesting to me. If Axl's mission on this album could be summed up into one song, it would be "Scraped," which is unfortunate.
A pretty intense song, "Riad N' The Bedouins" is a ridiculous yet kind of awesome attempt for Axl to pretend he isn't obsessed with his image. I knew a song like this would be on this album. At least it isn't the surreally embarrassing "Get in the Ring." It is also probably about 9/11, which is kind of stupid.
"Sorry" is the best song on the album (if not my favorite). If there were any justice in the world, its 6 minute length would be the impetus for a really excellent video (like "Don't Cry"). It expands on what seems like a genuine contriteness to . . . well, pretty much anyone. The best thing about this song is that Axl is not sorry, but songs like this have to express feelings that he doesn't have. Klosterman guesses this song is about Slash or Steven Adler, but it could be about his fans who abandoned him ("Nobody owes you / not one GD thing) ("I'm sorry for you / not sorry for me"). It's a touching song, one which finds Axl trying to express things he doesn't want to express, so it comes out coded and ambiguous. Which makes it, to me, fascinating, like trying to solve a riddle made by someone who isn't very good at riddles.
I realize at this point that I have rarely mentioned the rest of the members of this group who are calling themselves Guns N' Roses, none of whom had anything to do with the previous albums . . . Buckethead, Robin Finck, and Tommy Stinson perform admirably. Are we given the kind of pyrotechnic jam that Slash normally brings to the picture? The manic rat-a-tat drumming of Steven Adler or Matt Sorum? The personality and humor of Duff McKagan? Lord no, and that's what makes this nowhere near the accomplishment of APPETITE. But we weren't really expecting that, were we?
"I.R.S." is the second transparently anti-authoritarian song on the album; as such, it suggests the album intends to have a heavy political component - a yoking of Chinese Democracy (In Axl's mind, an oxymoron) and American democracy (which Axl has nothing to say about) - but it doesn't. Actually, I.R.S. reveals that while we are controlled by hegemonic structures that confine and compel us, none of us have any control over our relationships. You can call the I.R.S., but what good would it do you? This is Axl's "Every Breath You Take," and it's nowhere near as moody (though it tries to be), or catchy, yet it still works as one of the lesser songs on the album. Would Axl have ended a song with lines "There's not anymore that I can do" twenty years ago? It suggests either maturity or defeat, and that should intrigue those who loved this band unironically.
The second time Axl samples the iconic "failure to communicate" moment of COOL HAND LUKE is in "Madagascar," which I feel tries to be the climax of the album, and fails. If it fails to retrieve the epic grandeur of "November Rain," the anthemic mastery of "Welcome to the Jungle" and "Paradise City," it's because Axl is clearly putting fifteen years of political opinion and a developing conceptual/ideological vocabulary in five minutes and thirty eight seconds of polemic. Somehow, Axl tries to sympathize with slaves, and compares some "storm" he's experienced to those Martin Luther King (whom he samples) was speaking to on the Lincoln Memorial steps. And there's a relationship component here, which belongs in another song.
In its opening grandeur of horns and synth, Axl announces his intentions. What follows is something more on par with Neil Diamond's "America" than anything GNR has ever done; this is not to say that the band has never attempted to loosely side with a liberal agenda that normally sticks its nose up at someone like Axl Rose while writing elegies to Dee Dee Ramone. For a figure of excess, this is a surprisingly mild anthem, and part of that reason is that it makes no damn sense. Being "free of all the chains" is his way of describing civil rights, his own relationship failures, the expectations for his career**, and a the evolution toward a contemporary political climate that he clearly does not understand. I think Axl expects this to one day accompany a montage at the democratic convention, and may be a requiem of a sort for a guy who has spent most of his career being an apathetic, heavily drugged poster boy for misogyny and excess. On those levels, it doesn't work. This is my least favorite song on the album.
"This I Love" is the second song that belongs on a rock opera. Along with "Street of Dreams," it reminds me of the soundtrack of one of the only Brian De Palma films I've ever liked, PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE***, where soulful and poetic songs of longing are countered by the excess of guitar rock and its cults of personality. It's also a companion piece to SWEET CHILD OF MINE; if that song is a joyful ode to having someone, "This I Love" equally conveys the pain of loss, and the hope of return. Listen to both songs back to back and I think you'll hear what I mean. No song on this album better proves Axl's often-doubted skill at writing and producing excellent songs. It's also a showcase for his voice, and that merit I've already expressed.
(Apparently, this song was supposed to be in the weepy 1998 abstract painting of a bad movie: WHAT DREAMS MAY COME)
"Prostitute" is a perfect song to end this album with, and I hope it's the last song that we ever hear from Axl****. I hope he recedes gently into the good night. In the dialectical struggle of Axl's mind, he's either an artist, a celebrity, a prostitute, or some mix of three. In true form, Axl refuses to show even the slightest bit of humility in admitting his own feelings of inferiority. But he's asking you, the ones who bought this album (and the only person I know who bought it is me, the day it came out), what you think of him. And he's wondering how much he's complicit in the ridicule he's received in the years since he was last successfully recording music. Par Example:
"So if my affections Are misunderstood And you decide I'm up to no good Don't ask me to Enjoy them Just for you"
If I read this right, the "fortune and shame" Axl describes is the jail he lives in, but there's a part of him that loves his fans, wants to make music that they'll listen to, understands the terrifying impact he had on a lot of alienated, voiceless people in 1987, and yet - like every romantic relationship in the song - he blew it.
But ultimately, you're to blame - which is true. When you love a rock band, an athlete, a politician, they are not loving you in return. No matter what that chick who sang "I Kissed A Girl" did, these guys are basically making music for themselves or for their careers, and Axl rose is not only no different, he's the archetype of this
But there's a degree of introspection and responsibility here previously unfamiliar to Rose's best work - the sense that the last fifteen years weren't spent making the best album of all time, but in deep self-loathing and exploration, counting his blessings but also his many failures. This is a man who came of age in the limelight, and rock stars never really face any conceivable world that the rest of us are familiar with. As he put it in the song that I had to go over to my friend's Mom's house to listen to, "It's so easy (easy), when everybody's trying to please me, baby." Let's say "Prostitute" is Axl's attempt at entering a new world even if he's a good twenty years too late.
So there are approximately seven awesome songs (Shacklers Revenge, Better, If The World, Catcher in the Rye, Sorry, I.R.S., This I Love, Prostitute), four good ones (Rian N' The Bedouins, Street of Dreams, Chinese Democracy, Scraped) and two ehhs (There Was A Time, Madagascar). Not a bad ratio.
And not a bad album. In fact, I love it.
* - I continue to get all my information from the Wikipedia. The CHINESE DEMOCRACY page is almost as epic as the album. Also, all lyrics can be found here.
** - Compare these to the following typically incomprehensible (but awesome) lyrics from modern Indie rock; Spoon's GA GA GA GA GA:
"You got no time for the messenger,
got no regard for the thing that you don't understand,
you got no fear of the underdog,
that's why you will not survive!"
I think there is room for both in the world.
*** - Klosterman calls "Madagascar," "a meteorological metaphor about all those unnamed people who wanted to stop him from making Chinese Democracy in the insane manner he saw fit?"
**** - This glam-rock-relic of a mess of a movie must be seen to be believed. Despite coming from a man whose entire filmography I pretty much hate, this is a wonderful movie, and the music is underrated.
***** - It won't. According to the Wikipedia (source: Sebastian Bach), Axl is planning a trilogy of albums, and this is only the first.
| By Andytown | 2:34 PM