My review of Chinese Democracy

My review of Chinese Democracy, uncut. The reason I put albums in quotes as opposed to italicizing them is because that's The Cornellian policy.
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It would be unwise to review Guns N’ Roses’ new, unprecedentedly delayed album “Chinese Democracy” without first putting it into historical perspective. GnR’s last album, “Use Your Illusion,” came out in 1991. Bush 41 was waging war in Kuwait, and I was just entering kindergarten. Over the following decade and a half, Guns N’ Roses has been whittled down to frontman Axl Rose and a series of increasingly anonymous studio musicians. Izzy Stradlin, the rhythm guitarist who wrote all the best songs on “Appetite For Destruction,” left the band not long after, citing the fact that Axl would never show up to gigs on time. Lead guitarist Slash, bassist Duff McKagan and drummer Matt Sorum held on for a bit longer, but after observing Rose managing the simultaneous feat of becoming more lazy and demagogic at the same time, they bailed and formed their own horrible band, Velvet Revolver.

Meanwhile, Axl Rose had been smart enough to retain creative ownership of the name “Guns n’ Roses” and started recruiting instrumental foils who would be smart enough not to question his genius or subvert his spotlight. In 1995, while I was in fourth grade, he started initial recording sessions for what would become “Chinese Democracy.” His new stable of musicians would include, among hundreds of others, keyboardist Dizzy Reed, multi-instrumentalist Chris Pittman, drummer Josh Freese, guitarists Paul Tobias, Robin Finck, Buckethead and Bumblefoot, and, most inexplicably, former Replacements bassist Tommy Stinson, whose transformation from archetypal anti-establishment rocker to paid employee of the biggest authoritarian in the business still makes me depressed. The average life span of a musician in Guns N’ Roses was something like three months and understandably so: Rose possessed something of a work ethic, but he was famously temperamental and an ardent perfectionist, given to recording hundreds of takes of each of his songs and discarding them at roughly the same rate.

Thirteen years later, I am a senior in college and “Chinese Democracy” has cost Geffen Records at least $13 million. In the past few years, one or two songs would occasionally leak on the Internet, to be followed by Rose and his team of lawyers demanding extreme litigious action to be taken against whoever leaked tracks with ridiculous names like “The Blues,” “Catcher In The Rye” and “I.R.S.” And yet, here it now is, in its final form: 14 tracks of new official GnR (making Rose’s songwriting average of about one per year significantly below what we generally expect of serious musicians). It was inevitable that the album would come out sounding as overdone as one would imagine a thirteen-year-old album would, but not even I was prepared for how truly insular Axl Rose had become in this past decade: This album will probably best be appreciated as an unintentionally hilarious series of extremely poor musical choices. Fortunately, we have no one to blame but Rose himself.

The album is a terrible, barely listenable mess with D-grade songwriting, utilizing state-of-the-art production values that already sound dated even a day after the album has been officially released. For a band that, despite their less than stellar work ethic, managed to produce remarkably consistent albums up to now, it is disheartening to see Axl Rose strike out fourteen times in a row, although some songs are more worthy attempts at capturing the old GnR magic than others. The reason for this is simple: Rose has simply no one in his fold with the temerity to try editing his more ridiculous impulses. Rose’s new army of five guitarists can all shred perfectly fine, but they are all drowned in a mix meant to subvert any means of displaying personality or character. Compare this to the Guns N’ Roses of old. Sure, Slash was a cheese merchant and not the most original guitarist in the world, but at least he played with flair and an intuitive blues vocabulary that was entirely his own. I can’t tell if the guitar solo in “Shackler’s Revenge,” for instance, is Buckethead, Bumblefoot or some other fret-wanker with a stupid name, but it doesn’t matter because it sounds like a solo played by ProTools and fed through a soul-sucking Lazarus machine. If nothing else, this new album is symptomatic of a popular genre I like to alternately call either “meathead rock” or “autotune rock.” “Chinese Democracy” resembles less the albums of the band’s past than it does the new breed of terrible establishment rockers like Mudvayne or Staind. I attribute this to Rose’s infatuation with the industrial stylings of Nine Inch Nails: though he may have found it novel to combine industrial beats with heavy, processed guitars, he ends up making an album only one step removed from that most dated of sub-genres, nu-metal.

“Chinese Democracy” is full of terrible attempts at genre cross-pollination. The opening title track and first single opens with a full minute of vaguely eastern-sounding droning (kind of like how Led Zeppelin’s “In Through The Out Door” starts, actually) followed by a ferociously dumb riff of the “Louie, Louie” sort. This is understandable, but then it is repeated for virtually the whole song. I’m not the biggest GnR fan, but I know Rose is capable of better songwriting than this. There was a time in their history when they were capable of throwing off pretty good riffs with abandon that would all make sense within the context of the song. You might not notice in a track like “Sweet Child O’ Mine” because of its ubiquity, but Slash was brave enough to discard the opening “carnival” riff, as good as it was, halfway through the song in favor of a more expansive and interesting song comprised of a chorus and verse that functioned interdependently, in addition to several memorable solos and an eerie breakdown toward the denouement. Rose is completely incapable of doing this anymore, so he instead tries to distinguish different parts of his songs with expensive ideas like gigantic choirs, ill-advised electronic noises, flamenco guitars, Pink Floyd-esque programmed soundscapes and hoary balladry. Often, all of these elements will appear within the same song. To say that the album sounds schizophrenic does a disservice to schizophrenics capable of producing great art. The only word I care to use for it, really, is “awful.”

Even the songs with a few bright moments, such as “Better” (not a cover of the Regina Spektor song, unfortunately), with its arresting vocals and catchy harmonics, are offset by moments of sheer ludicrousness, with Rose overstepping his meager talents at almost every turn and showing his true face as a meathead, chest-thumping rocker with nothing relevant to say. The lyrics themselves are filled with Rose’s usual boastful come-ons, alternating about every third song with an almost unnerving sentimentality. What’s weird is that several of the songs here could be about the process of the making of “Chinese Democracy,” such as when Axl says in “Catcher In The Rye” (trying to paint himself as the Salinger of rock, I guess), “All at once a song I heard/No longer wouldn’t play for anybody/Or anyone.” True, and funny, but for all the struggling rock musicians trying to make it by through their dedication and talent, watching someone like Rose burn limitless amounts of money on such a useless album and then boast about it is enough to make anyone want to give up the dream.

“Chinese Democracy” is already getting a few good reviews from media outlets—the always dependably rock establishment-reverent “Rolling Stone” gave it four stars, for example—but the chances of this album holding up the way “Appetite For Destruction” did are roughly congruent to the chances of Slash and Axl settling their differences in a WWE-style steel cage match. This is one of the worst albums I have ever forced myself to listen to multiple times. It is a disservice to the legacy of Axl Rose and company, and obviously proof that Rose either needs a genuine musical foil or needs to get out of the business altogether. I would suggest that this album should be forgot about altogether, but that seems unlikely. The only distinguishing characteristic of “Chinese Democracy” is its inherent “Heaven’s Gate”-ness, in that it will be forever characterized by just how bloated and unprecedented of a failure it turned out to be.