Chinese Democracy

As I’m sure everyone has heard by now, “Guns n’ Roses” finally released Chinese Democracy last week. After bouncing around in the dark and mysterious recesses of Axl Rose’s mind for something like fifteen years, the album is finally on shelves at a Best Buy near you. I won’t get into a discussion of the merits of the album. Reviews have been pretty good, and personally I quite like the album (including but not limited to the sensitive power ballad "This I Love.") I know it’s cliché to rag on the current music scene, and a little too easy, but for me a decent album from 1/5 of the original Guns n’ Roses is better than 95% of the music currently out there, at least as good as the two albums that beat it to #1 on the US charts. If Chinese Democracy had managed to come out in the late 90s, it might have been heralded as the end of an era. In late 2008, unfortunately, it’s just a sad reminder of how great the band was in their heyday, and how long ago that heyday really was.

When I was a kid, Guns n’ Roses was the coolest band on the planet, period. If you asked a kid in the late 80s to think of the quintessential rock band, odds are they would have pictured G n’ R (after asking you what “quintessential” meant.) I was just a child at the time, and I could hardly run out and buy Appetite for Destruction or even the Use Your Illusion double (priced) album. But I was never far from teenagers who could. A group of teenagers used to hang out under the basketball hoop on a driveway four or five houses up from mine. They would stand there night after night in the summer smoking cigarettes and talking in voices that carried all the way down the street. I was always too nervous to get close, but I would lay out in my back yard listening to the insects chirp in the trees and the voices, unintelligible, but distinctly older and dripping with what I thought was sophistication. Teenagers have a strange aura when you’re a kid. You’re well aware that they’re not quite adults, but they seem so impossibly old and different. They’re adults that still get to have fun—that drive around in cars and go to the movies and the mall whenever they want.

And they got to sit around at night and play their music. All the 80s hair bands were represented, of course, but I’ll never forget the night I first heard the opening notes of “Welcome to the Jungle” ripping out across suburbia, Axl’s unforgettable wail drowning out even the crickets. What I heard coming from the boom box that night was fierce and violent and free, and it belonged to those kids down the street. It’s an unwritten law of the universe that, while we all might love music, you can never quite have a relationship with a song like you can when you’re sixteen. That night I sat on my porch and dreamed of the day when I could be like those teenagers down the street, and this music would belong to me.

I never really grew into one of those teenagers. By the time I was in high school grunge and alternative were already on their way out and N*Sync and Britney Spears were on their way in. So maybe people from my age group can never quite call Guns n’ Roses their own. But that doesn’t mean they didn’t represent everything that made that last generation of adrenaline fueled guitar rock so exciting: The girls, the crazy life style, the long hair, the “I don’t care” attitude. I think a lot of our idea of what’s “cool” comes from the teenagers we know as children, and so for the children I grew up with there was nothing cooler than Guns n Roses.

When people pop in a new CD (or nowadays, download a song) by a favorite band from the past, they’re not looking to find a new favorite song. Nothing, and I mean nothing, connects us to our emotions and memories the way music does. Consciously or not, when people buy a new CD with the Guns n’ Roses name on it, they’re looking to feel the way they felt on those summer nights two decades ago, when the music was brand new and they were a whole lot longer. But the days of boom-boxes blasting out music over dark suburban streets are long gone. Today, Axl Rose is the only original member of G n’ R left, and he’s pushing fifty. For a lot of people, it will be difficult to get past the fact that Appetite for Destruction will never come back. I’m sure there are still people who run out to buy every Paul McCartney album hoping to hear “She Loves You” again for the first time. But if you can get past all that and judge it for what it is, Chinese Democracy is a solid rock album and definitely worth a listen.

Oh, and Axl? If you can’t resurrect the past, can you at least get me my Dr. Pepper? Thanks.