"It's a very complex record, I'm trying to do something different. Some of the arrangements are kind of like Queen. Some people are going to say, 'It doesn't sound like Axl Rose, it doesn't sound like Guns N' Roses.' But you'll like at least a few songs on there."
- Axl Rose, Rolling Stone, 2006
After so much time, money and speculation, Chinese Democracy has finally been released for mass legal consumption. My impressions from several listens is that it has elements of the GNR formula, but it appears that re-creating the glory that was GNR was not really the point of the album. Instead, Chinese Democracy is a big creative leap in many different and interesting directions, an attempted proof of concept of Axl Rose's "musical genius".
And that leap yielded mixed results -- but the picture that emerges from the album is that of a emotionally conflicted artist who still has brilliant ideas, but he could not execute them at times, leading to some really overwrought songs that were terribly in need of others to counterbalance the creative output.
Perhaps ultimately that's how I view this album, it is a solo album by Axl Rose. To the extent that original GNR members may have enhanced these songs with their performances and ideas, we will never know. As such, despite the title, I do not view this album as a GNR album, and think that it was wrong for him to have appropriated the GNR name for this set of material.
A significant difficulty in assessing this album is the inevitable comparison to GNR's heritage, so let's get that out of the way. Not surprisingly, this album in no way touches their ultimate classic, Appetite for Destruction. This album has some echoes in the Use Your Illusion duo -- in that there are various styles being explored. However, at times, it captures the not-so-good aspects of UYI 1&2 as well, piano and power chords gone amok without a good songwriting structure.
I found the first five songs to be interesting and listenable. I didn't find any of them to really jump out at me as especially memorable, but they were pretty solid. However, it went horribly wrong for me in the last 2/3rds of the album. My first impression was that it reminded me of the last third of the movie, Boogie Nights -- yes, all this bad stuff happened, some self-inflicted, some not -- but it was never the same again when the "team" or cast of characters got broken up. There were points where the contributions of Izzy to songwriting, or Duff to arranging, or the bluesy solos of Slash could have made a big difference. And, then again, that's why I think this album is an Axl Rose solo album, yes there are branches from the GNR tree, but this is really an "Eff U", I'll do it myself effort in all of its convoluted glory and mad "genius".
Upon further consideration, I think this is what happened at the middle to end of the album -- imagine a scenario where you are good at many things, and try to do them all at once ... every time, every song. Or, maybe you have this formula in your mind of what would be the most creative assembly of these elements, which you believe were the formula for successful songs, GNR or otherwise (e.g., Queen, Paul McCartney, etc.). Sometimes that works, and sometimes it leads to a big pile of hot mess.
"Sorry" is the poster child of this latter two-thirds. It reminds me of an outtake of a song that Joss Whedon's Dr. Horrible would sing -- all pathos, paranoia, self-importance, but unlike the songs in that effort, many of these songs were hot mess. Tongue and cheek? I think in an earlier time, confrontational songs like Get In The Ring or the uber-controversial, One in a Million went "there" and were regarded as satirical. After all this time and effort, this is the epitome of the ultimate pity party, take yourself too seriously, self martyr's anthem -- dangerously edging on crazy talk, pure and simple. Madagascar then takes Sorry and multiplies it by about 10,000, the pathos of complexes is so thick that I wonder if some day this will come to an unfortunate end.
That said, getting back to the album, the mad genius certainly still has it in him to create utter brilliance, yet you can plainly see why they call him mad. The results on the latter two-thirds of the album are utterly maddening, the songs do not sink in or make sense after repeated listens -- they show a sense of perfectionist chop suey that never really amounts to anything, and the frayed emotions that drive this artist.
An interesting lyric from the song "Street of Dreams" goes: What I thought was beautiful don't live inside of you anymore. After all the years, all the criticism, and all the weirdness perhaps the bar of expectations was set too high for this album, or maybe all of the same just drove Axl, already the neurotic perfectionist, to keep trying to make an album that would be acceptable. By this I mean, not only to his standards, but to meet the expectations of all levels of potential audience -- could it really be as simple as trying to please everyone all the time? There seems to be some element of that here.
Ultimately, I feel that he should have released these songs as a solo album. That may have been the best way to accommodate Axl's need to create new music, express his reactions to all that has happened in the intervening fifteen years, and keep the heritage of GNR relatively clean and controversy free. Now, by using the name of his former band, he is abusing the goodwill that the public has for that band, its music, and history, and to what end?
So he can pretend in some deluded way that GNR was he and a bunch of sidemen? No, using the name ultimately is a cop-out, it gives him cheap entry and shelter via GNR's goodwill. I don't know why he could not release an album under his name and claim it all as his music, art, and contribution to current music -- and stand on it proudly. To release an album under the GNR name to me unnecessarily clouds the band's heritage, and raises all kinds of questions and issues. I suppose I may never understand the motive behind this.
In the end, I think there are a few songs that I enjoy enough to download, but unfortunately this album did not live up quality and the standard that is GNR, which is unfortunate because that is the name on the sleeve.
In retrospect, the better title of this album may have been, The Missed Opportunity of Axl Rose
SL Grade: D+
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