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Chinese Democracy may become the most underrated album in history.


Ace Nova

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CD had no where to go but down when it was released. The hype the decade + in the making. Nothing could have lived up to that and all the pressures that go into it.

Yes Axl is partly to blame but you bet your ass that the label and the orginal GNR members made it hell to get this album out. The record company didn't want to release it they wanted a reunion all of Axl's managers, most brought in by the label done the same thing push for a reunion and when Azoff failed to deliver a reunion the label threw in the towel and released CD, plain and simple. I think when Axl turned over CD to the record label he just walked in a said here it is I'm not redoing anything and they both gave each other a FUCK YOU when it was released. The label didn't promote it, Axl didn't promote it and waited a year to tour after it's release.

All in all I think CD is a good album, yes there are 3 songs I don't like but what record doesn't have a few throw away songs on it.

One thing I think would have made it better was that the song should have been stripped down because they had to much coming at you that there is no way you can take it all in and unless you are a big fan you aren't going to get because you will listen to it a time or 2 and give up on it. There where several songs that had to grow on me at first but now they are part of my favorites on the album because I get now.

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If I could produce Democracy, this is what I would do:

- Replace Scraped, Shackler's, If the World and CD with something better from the vault. (Put the removed songs out as b-sides or soundtrack songs).

- Remix the album so it has a more streamlined guitar sound. Some tracks have five guitarists!! It is absurd!! If it was left completely up to me, I would focus solely on Buckethead-Finck and forget trying to include Bumblefoot.

- get rid of all of the Pitman inspired beeps and farts

- Get a better Madagascar vocal from Axl as, on the studio version he sounds like Vera Duckworth after 50 fags.

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If I could produce Democracy, this is what I would do:

- Replace Scraped, Shackler's, If the World and CD with something better from the vault. (Put the removed songs out as b-sides or soundtrack songs).

- Remix the album so it has a more streamlined guitar sound. Some tracks have five guitarists!! It is absurd!! If it was left completely up to me, I would focus solely on Buckethead-Finck and forget trying to include Bumblefoot.

- get rid of all of the Pitman inspired beeps and farts

- Get a better Madagascar vocal from Axl as, on the studio version he sounds like Vera Duckworth after 50 fags.

THIS. The production is too heavy for its own good.

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I fucken love it. Songs like Madagascar, TWAT, Prostitute, Better, SOD, Catcher were mindblowing to me. Axl's music speaks from the heart. Even something like Silkworms, regardless of what you think of the actual track, you can tell the lyrics have genuine anger and hate.

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The lyrics were too self-defeating. Estranged had that. But that was one song. An album of songs with similar lyrical content subtracts from the album's sincerity.

I disagree. I feel like the tone of UYI 2 is similar. UYI I is much more fiery, take out Nov Rain its kind of AFD 2.

but UYI II.

CIvil War - Chi dem political

14 Years - Better

Yesterdays - Street Of Dreams

Heavens Door - ITW

Get in the Ring - IRS

Shotgun Blues - Scraped

Breakdown - There Was a Time

Pretty Tied Up - I really do think this is what CD misses

Locomotive - Shacklers Revenge

So Fine - again not much JT on CD

YCBM - Riad n the Bedouins

Estranged -Catcher in the Rye

Dont Cry - Sorry

So two songs, the more rock n roll songs arent really on CD. But romanticism and rage, with tinge of political is comparable to UYI II.

Which makes me wonder if UYI II was more Axl s record whereas I was more the Slash album of rockers.

I agree that binary kept fans happy you had Dont Cry and Dust n Bones or Perfect Crime to balance it. I think CD just doesnt have a Dust Bones, but Riad is a Garden of Eden.

Throw an Izzy or Fortus song on the next one and its going to cover it.

Also CD tracklist goes from big and loud to slower and more epic. That gives a boring feeling. Whereas UYI was schizo. The songs are there on CD to do it. Riad, Sorry, Shackers, TIL type of thing.

CD really only has 7 songs at the pace of AFD which keeps the pace up all the way.

CD

Shacklers

Better

Scraped

IRS

TWAT

Is comparable to the first side of AFD. But theres also more UYI songs interspersed in the tracklisting.

Sorry, TIL, Madagascar, Catcher are all pretty slow. Sorry killes the pace of side two dead. But it works as sides of vinyl. Each side has a rocker I think with ballads n epics.

Edited by wasted
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If I could produce Democracy, this is what I would do:

- Replace Scraped, Shackler's, If the World and CD with something better from the vault. (Put the removed songs out as b-sides or soundtrack songs).

- Remix the album so it has a more streamlined guitar sound. Some tracks have five guitarists!! It is absurd!! If it was left completely up to me, I would focus solely on Buckethead-Finck and forget trying to include Bumblefoot.

- get rid of all of the Pitman inspired beeps and farts

- Get a better Madagascar vocal from Axl as, on the studio version he sounds like Vera Duckworth after 50 fags.

Aside from replacing the title tracks, which is arguably the most mainstream song on the album, this is 100% one of the smartest things I've read on this forum. Yes.

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I had quite a few beers in me when I posted the original post in this thread the other night. I should have been more specific in my wording. I hadn't listened to CD a lot over the past year and when I listened to it again the other night, I felt that for me personally, it was an extremely underrated album.

Whether it will be for the rest of the world...especially in 20 years....is really irrelevant....but for me, it most likely will be. I may not listen to it as often for a number of years but I can almost assure you, every time I do listen to it....one of the first thoughts in my head will be, "Wow....this album is really underrated".

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If I could produce Democracy, this is what I would do:

- Replace Scraped, Shackler's, If the World and CD with something better from the vault. (Put the removed songs out as b-sides or soundtrack songs).

- Remix the album so it has a more streamlined guitar sound. Some tracks have five guitarists!! It is absurd!! If it was left completely up to me, I would focus solely on Buckethead-Finck and forget trying to include Bumblefoot.

- get rid of all of the Pitman inspired beeps and farts

- Get a better Madagascar vocal from Axl as, on the studio version he sounds like Vera Duckworth after 50 fags.

Aside from replacing the title tracks, which is arguably the most mainstream song on the album, this is 100% one of the smartest things I've read on this forum. Yes.

The album is named Chinese Democracy. You have to keep the song.

Edited by ARBeast
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  • 1 year later...

I think it was a fuckload more accepted in 1991 when it was the number one and two album in the country, rather than 20 years later when only a handful of people on the internet bother to discuss it.

Just cause some dorky kid just "discovered" GNR and registered here to talk about how awesome "Locomotive" is doesn't mean that anyone else continued giving a shit after 1993.

I don't disagree completely.

But the success of UYI sales, was based off AFD success anything would sell, then the videos the cash thrown at promo, then Axls drive to sell 35 million records.

It's like the prerequisite success you may or may not need for a record to have longevity and become classic.

Half the AFD fans I knew disowned GNR after UYI. Metal heads in my opinion into Metallica, anthrax, Megadeth, motley. I found that Zepp and Pistols had more in common with GNR so I stuck with what the guys in the band liked like a true sycophant. And I like the AFD left overs more than Axls ballads. But now I see the quality of a song like NR.

But I feel like long term, the media and general rock fans have something more positive to say than its not as good as AFD.

Some polls come out with Coma as best song on UYI 1.

I feel like YCBM, DC, NR, Eatranged are now considered as classic as Jungle or SCOM.

The UYI line up got into HOF. UYI has achieved parity.

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Thoughts from the other thread

Quality of the songs is subjective and up for debate. To say they are shit is disingenuous; each one was obviously a labor of love, they weren't throwaway songs, and they're not just generic rock that sounds like everything else out there. Calling them dislikable, not catchy, overproduced is perfectly legitimate; calling them garbage or shit is idiotic and incorrect.

Anyway, whether the record is "good" or "bad" is irrelevant to whether it was successful or not, when we're measuring success by how much it sold and by how widely it caught on and was accepted by the fanbase and by the public at large. Shit sells; we know that; there's a big market for schlock out there, for disposable, generic, throwaway songs. You can't explain the poor reception of the album just by saying it was shit in terms of quality; people will embrace all kinds of shitty music, shitty movies, shitty books, shitty politicians...

It's whether it was the record that people wanted to hear that determined how successful it was. Whether it was a masterpiece, a piece of shit, good but not great, mediocre, whatever, all of which have been argued endlessly back and forth on here, its irrelevant. What is relevant is what most of the fanbase and most of the public wanted to hear - the easy answer that comes to mind is a Slash reunion album, but that ain't really it.

There were two things people wanted the album to be: badass, or insane. They wanted some straightforward badass rock n' roll music, or they wanted something insanely ambitious and huge, something that would be big enough to match that fifteen year wait. An album of You Could Be Mines, or an album of Comas - YCBMs for the general public that had never paid much attention to GnR since the breakup and just wants some good ol' hard rock from what they see as an old rock band, and Comas for the fans who'd actually been agonizing for over a decade.

Chinese Democracy, good, bad, whatever you think, was neither of those things. Most of the songs aren't badass hard rock, and they're not insane, mindblowing epics. Axl wasn't in touch with what the public wanted to hear from GNR; he was doing his own thing, following his own muse, just recording the kind of songs he felt like recording and experimenting with the kind of sound that interested him personally. I'm sure he was expecting a better reception for it, after all he'd put into it - and I'm sure the label saw it coming, that he was basically doing his own thing and that what he was making was not the record that the public was expecting from him, hence the endless tinkering and rerecording.

Axl wasn't trying to alienate everybody with Chinese Democracy, he wasn't expecting people to hate it - he was hoping it would succeed, but that it would suceed on his own terms. He wasn't aiming to do that by making the album everyone was expecting, he was aiming to win everyone over to his own personal ideas.

Could he have done that if it was released back in 2000? Who knows? But what's clear is that by 2008, hardly anybody had the patience to be won over anymore. For 90% of the people who paid any attention at all to the album, the wait was too damn long. They weren't really aching to hear what Axl had up his sleeve anymore - they were just curious enough to give it a one-over; there wasn't really any passion left. When the gave it that one over, when radio stations gave it that one over, they found out it wasn't badass radio rock, or something mindblowingly epic and insane, the former of which might have grabbed people's attention for a while no matter what band it came from, and the matter of which was the only thing that could justify having waited that long. And after finding that it was neither of the things they wanted, people soured on it pretty quickly and forgot about it.

I don't think it could honestly be called a terrible album; it just wasn't the one most people wanted to hear, and that's that, really.

Good ass post

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That quoted post above about it not being the album people wanted to hear is pretty spot on. I will say the vocals were lacking, the Janice Joplin influence of screaming or singing between verses was one too many, and the album lacks a story. The only song that relates to the album is the title track. The album really needed to reach Pink Floyd type levels with the wall. It needed to take you in and give you a story. Something that could be turned into an epic in a way.

I think this is what people wanted. They wanted something incredible in terms of quality and a completed album. CD has alot of sounds, but there is nothing that sticks with me when I sit through a full listen of the album. The instrumentals are incredible throughout, but I just needed something to connect into a story for me. I think Axl could have found a central story for this album and adjusted the lyrics and sound to make that story immersive.

I wish I could give someone a reason to listen to CD but there really is none. The album just seems to not know what it wanted itself to be, and that is a major problem for me on a creative standpoint.

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Thoughts from the other thread

Quality of the songs is subjective and up for debate. To say they are shit is disingenuous; each one was obviously a labor of love, they weren't throwaway songs, and they're not just generic rock that sounds like everything else out there. Calling them dislikable, not catchy, overproduced is perfectly legitimate; calling them garbage or shit is idiotic and incorrect.

I stopped reading after this. If i think the songs are shit they are shit. End of story. No amount of pretentious defence will change that. I'm not going to sit there and think "wow these songs really are a labour of love and given they don't sound like everything else out there means these songs truly must be good on some level." No. Fuck that shit. If a song sucks it sucks. Only on a GnR forum would I have to read some weird, pretentious, overly thought out reasoning as to why the song isn't shit and how wrong i am if I tought the song was shit or garbage. I mean for fuck sakes if a Nickelback fan gave this same type of reasoning you'd laugh in their face. But because it's Axl and the songs were a "labour of love" thinking they suck is idiotic? Fanboysim at it's finest.

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Maybe the label or Ezrin don't understand GNR fans who want something crazy and epic. Throw Silkworms and Oh my god next to Stonesy acoustic song.

Anyway I like to reimagine it like this these days, more of a journey.

This I Love

Riad and the Bedouins

IRS

Madagascar

Chinese Democracy

Street of Dreams

There was a Time

Prostitute

Catcher in the Rye

Better

Shacklers Revenge

If the World

Scraped

Sorry

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