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Ready To Crash and Burn, I Never Learn
Wanna feel old in a hurry? It happened to me on Friday, as I sat in the employee break room at the ol’ liberry, eating lunch. I leafed through the pile of magazines on the table to find some reading material, and uncovered the August issue of Rolling Stone. And there, on the cover, I read the news that instantly made my bones feel brittle with age:
Guns N’ Roses’ Appetite for Destruction is 20 years old.
The world has changed a lot in 20 years, but Appetite remains a king-hell monster. The third-best album of the entire 1980’s (trailing only Metallica’s Master of Puppets and Slayer’s Reign in Blood, but you knew that already) it singlehandedly began the long-overdue task of destroying the LA hair band scene (a task completed with crushing finality by Nirvana four years later.)
After one spin through its ugly, brutal tales of sleaze, drug abuse, and depravity, the hundreds of makeup-plastered poodlehairs who infested the top of the album charts before its arrival instantly seemed ridiculous and silly. After listening to Axl howl about overdose, death, and urban violence in that teeth-rattling shriek of his, who could ever take Poison and Bon Jovi seriously again? Answer: nobody.
The anger and desperation that fueled Appetite’s anthems would be impossible to maintain once Gn’R became the biggest band on the planet, and Axl’s rampaging ego and multiple personality defects certainly didn’t help. The monstrously bloated Use Your Illusion twin albums took over four years to complete, and the band dissolved in rancor a couple of years later.
Axl still tours under the Guns N’ Roses moniker (despite having fired all the other original members years ago), and rumors persist, sixteen years on and counting since the band’s last release, of another opus in the works. But if it ever sees the light of day, it will almost assuredly suck, and it will definitely not come close to matching Appetite’s brilliance. That album stands alone as the band’s crowning achievement, one of a handful of defining albums for an entire decade, and the soundtrack to a million high school keg parties.
And hey, if your band only gets remembered for one thing, you can’t do much better than that.
