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Chinese Democracy? It's Axl Rose searching for his soul
George Chin Photo
Axl Rose, the lone survivor of Guns N’ Roses, spent $13 millon on the album.
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Published: December 4, 2008
Miracles do happen. Chinese Democracy, the new Guns N' Roses album, is officially released.
If you are reading this, and a longtime GNR fan, well, congratulations -- you lived to see it.
Work on the album started 13 years ago -- four years after the band's last release of new studio material. (For grins and snide comparison, it took The Beatles six years to record its entire catalog.)
Since work on the album began, regularly cycled --recycled is more accurate -- announcements of its release and nonrelease have become so de rigueur as to become cultural farce, if not fantasy.
There were periodic indications from insiders on the state of the art, so to speak -- participants jettisoned from the project (or who fled to protect their sanity). All implied that singer/songwriter Axl Rose -- the album's infamously megalomaniacal creator and the lone reminder of GNR of old -- had become obsessed with capturing the sound inside the maelstrom of his mind.
Ah, a familiar ring: Chinese Democracy was conveniently threatening to become Rose's symbolic equal of Smile. That far-reaching album, ostensibly a Beach Boys project, proved so difficult to transfer from the mind of creator Brian Wilson that it contributed to his belly-flop into insanity. Started in 1966, Smile was abandoned, then later pieced together by compatriots and released -- as a Wilson solo album -- in 2004.
A crucial difference: Wilson was roundly heralded as a genius; Rose, um, less so (unless you ask Rose).
No matter. Along the way, the beast with which Rose was consumed appeared to be consuming him.
But it didn't. Chinese Democracy is on the shelves at Best Buy, the only door-and-floor store sanctioned to sell it. It is assumed that Rose, a perfectionist who has never seemed happy, is now happy enough. He had better be -- the making of the album cost him an estimated $13 million and some longtime friendships.
The most intriguing part of the ridiculous affair -- beyond that anyone actually still cares -- is that we've all been duped. Oh, Chinese Democracy exists. You can hold it in your hand, play it in your CD player or burn it to your computer. It is a tangible item, initially interesting, less so as time limps on.
The rub: Chinese Democracy is not a true Guns N' Roses album. Ego aside, Rose does not GNR make.
Think about the album title. Chinese democracy doesn't exist. It's at best a facade, a manufactured cover-up of a more dictatorial reality. More realistically, it's an ideal, a hope, a dream.
So it goes with Guns N' Roses 2008 -- a band in name only, an illusion. Band credit aside, Chinese Democracy is a byproduct of Axl Rose's personal universe -- a sprawl of musicians, producers and sycophants, all hired Guns to revolve around and contribute to the vortex of irrational behavior and madness that is Rose.
Axl Rose and hired associates do not a band make.
But the real Guns N' Roses, now that was a band.
Chinese Democracy has but one thing to do (Rose) with the Guns N' Roses that fans adored from 1987 to 1991. It has nothing in common with such milepost singles as "Welcome To The Jungle" (one of the great rock songs), "Paradise City" and "Sweet Child O' Mine." It's in no way the work of the inebriated misfits who recorded such classic hard-rock albums as Appetite For Destruction and Use Your Illusion I and II.
That Guns N' Roses was a bad-boy gang, complete with multiple addictions, an exploding pancreas, arrests, riotous shows and loyal fans who bought millions of albums. Its music was the absorbed sum of its various personalities and musical influences. It was an uncontrived, evolving convergence of five unnatural people whose common denominators were substance abuse and an insatiable desire for sex, drugs and/or drink and the hardest, truest and loudest of hard-rock anthems.
Look no further than the two meaty albums by Velvet Revolver -- led by ex-GNR members Slash, Duff McKagan (he of the exploding pancreas) and Matt Sorum -- to find the true musical progression of the original Guns N' Roses. Velvet Revolver's music riff-rocks in a style instantly familiar to GNR fans -- and it was made with a singer, Scott Weiland, who was far better and just as wacked out as Rose.
There's no point in comparing Chinese Democracy with the output of the old band. The new album, for all creative purposes, is a Rose solo album. It's not for the band's old fans, but for a new generation. It's re-invention, Guns N' Roses in name only, a marquee marketing ploy and a hedging of bets.
What Chinese Democracy represents, beyond self-indulgence of epic proportions, is one man's attempt to make a really good rock album that breaks from his musical past -- and it achieves that. There is nothing at all about the album's first two songs to sonically connect it in any way with the old GNR.
Beyond that, the album is good, but never great. It's pristinely produced and sonically dense, crammed with orchestras, sound bites, industrialized beats, synths, tricky computer work by an army of Pro Tools experts -- and truly dazzling guitar playing by Buckethead and Robin Finck, among others.
But lyrically, Rose has zip to say -- amazing, given his big mouth and that the world he left 13 years ago is so different as to demand comment. But it never comes. These are shallow songs of bitterness, in essence directed, not outward, but inward. There is no communal spirit; all songs are calculated and precisely assembled. The songs, heavily edited and overdubbed, find schizophrenic identity by grabbing from and relying on passing musical fashions. There is nothing organic or spontaneous.
Rose even sings much of the album in a lower register rather than his trademark howl-and-screech. Chinese Democracy is interesting, as curiosities come and go, but there is nothing to distinguish it. It truly is a well-used illusion. If listened to with no pretext, without all the hoopla, it's just another decent album -- nothing more. It can't even be performed live in a manner that will resemble the album. With few exceptions, the disc is nothing but buff, forgettable songs.
The difference between Chinese Democracy and the old GNR albums comes down to this: The old albums were performances, ragged and memorable. This disc was manufactured piecemeal -- and sounds it.
Guns N' Roses 2008 has dug its own grave -- and, fittingly, there's only one Rose to mark its passing.
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