Why do you think the Illusion albums always get sidelined?

[DeadSlash]

2 hours ago, RazorGunner said:

I disagree- nearly everyone I know aside from a few people not really into music was well aware that CD was/is a GNR Album and none of them are on forums. 

This.

A lot of people who may have been unaware of CD at it's release know it now.  Think it through for a second, the reunion tour has been one of the most successful tours of all time.  Is it plausible to anyone that all these people spending hundreds of dollars on GnR tickets never googled them?  I know that in general, people are pretty stupid these days, but do you really think you can find a row of people who liked the band enough to collectively drop $600 to come see them, but so stupid that nary a one was smart enough to drop by their Wikipedia page?

I could believe 60%-80% don't know it isn't Slash and Duff on CD, but unaware the album exist? Doubtful.  This is not a $20 gig at the local fair, it's a stadium world tour.

[Axl's Agony Aunt]

On ‎02‎/‎05‎/‎2018 at 6:47 PM, AxlRoseCDII said:

As we approach an inevitable re-release of Appetite, I do wonder why Guns n' Roses never really put these albums in the spotlight. The 25th anniversary of them passed by with barely any acknowledgement. Durihg tne NITL tour they played what, 3 songs each night from each (counting KOHD/LALD)? It's almost like Guns lives purely off the success of Appetite, playing 8-9 songs a night from it while ignoring they had two other massive albums that led to a massive tour. Why do you guys think this is?

Funnily enough I'm listening to II-Blue now. I got them on LPs back in the day, and Appetite's first side had been my favourite LP side, but II-Blue first side took over when it came out. While I loved or liked all of Appetite, I loved all of Civil War, Yesterdays, 14 Years and Knocking. 

[AXL_N_DIZZY]

9 hours ago, RazorGunner said:

I disagree- nearly everyone I know aside from a few people not really into music was well aware that CD was/is a GNR Album and none of them are on forums. 

Yep. My experience as well. Most seem to at least know that Chinese Democracy was some crazy GNR album that took eons to make. Some will even reference the “dude with the KFC bucket on his head”. Beyond that they probably wouldn’t know much though...

Back to Illusions... actually had someone in my car a few weeks back ask me which Illusions disc “Sorry” was on again when it came on my playlist. Part of the reason I love “Sorry” so much. Channels the classic band pretty well IMHO...

Edited May 11, 2018 by AXL_N_DIZZY

[Blackstar]

Has anyone ( @RONIN?) read this book?

I just did (it's about 120 pages). I saw it got negative comments on Amazon, because it's not exactly what one would expect a book dedicated to an album to be like and not what a GnR fan would expect either. It's also indeed self-indulgent at times and there are digressions in it, references to literature, movies etc. and analogies some of which are a stretch, imo. But despite of all that, I found it extremely interesting. The author states in the beginning that he doesn't intend to write a reportorial book anyway.

What makes it interesting the most is the perspective of the author, which is that of the intellectual, liberal and sometimes elitist critics who didn't like the band or at least had an ambivalent and awkward stance towards it. He comes across as critical to his peers, self critical at times and elitist as others. What seems to lie underneath is an effort to deal with the fact that he liked the band, especially the Illusions and a certain side of them, although he "shouldn't" have (he, somewhat dramatically, says he had lost a piece of himself to those albums as their musical/cultural references, except punk, weren't part of his songbook).

The book unfolds in an unorthodox way, like a work in progress. At first, the author writes solely from memory, stating that he hasn't listened to the albums in 15 years (the book was released in 2007), and without getting feedback from written sources about the band. Then he goes through articles, interviews, videos etc.  Finally he listens to albums, gives his conclusions and selects songs for his own single UYI album. The book doesn't focus only on the UYI's though. A big part of it expands to the band in general, the OIAM controversy (it's interesting that his view on it is very close to some of the points made on the recent thread), how the music press and the prestiged outlets operated, the state of the music industry and rock music and how they developed from the 60s to the 90s, then the millenium shift, etc. 

He makes a few really noteworthy points, regardless of whether one agrees or not.

He seems to accept the consensus that AFD is the defining and the "better" album, but he finds the UYI's more interesting (and that's the reason he chose to write about them) as well as more representative of the band's DNA, although objectively their impact has been much less.

He says that for someone like him, who was already into alternative (I can relate to that) and a college radio dj in the 80s, although Nevermind was undoubtedly a great album, it was less challenging than the "messy" Illusions, especially the ambitious/progressive aspect of them, i.e. the "Axl aspect", which he considers the "real UYI's" (he also implies that Axl's persona was more fascinating than Kurt's, even though less likeable and not being in the same "cultural galaxy" as the author).

He also undermines the common belief that "alternative", by itself, swept out GnR and made them irrelevant, calling it a myth established in the press by 1994 (he worked at Spin at the time and he had written a -positive- review to TSI). And he points out that mainstream-alternative was swept out too eventually and failed to make an impact in the long run.

The author's theories on why UYI's are considered a "failure" (not a commercial one, of course), although at first the reaction to them was generally more positive than negative, and why they essentially marked the end of the band are very interesting: Although he mentions the tour antics and the negative comments in the media about that, it was mostly that the "real" (Axl's) UYI's fell into a void between: on one hand, the change in the music industry and the revisionism in the press that started in '94; and, on the other hand, what the GnR audience wanted and expected (a continuation of AFD, not a breakthrough) as well as the band's hard rock "essence". The latter factor had as a result that the progressive direction was not supported by the band itself; he points out that the albums were purposely "balanced" containing a big number of "AFD continuation" songs and that the UYI tour sets leaned mostly towards the continuation, consisting mainly of AFD tunes and Izzy UYI tunes. The favoring of the AFD side of the band continued in Live Era and Greatest Hits. At the UYI shows there was a contrast, visible when the "Axl songs" were performed, although not yet toxic (he uses the 1992 Tokyo show as case study). The author thinks that maybe Axl was trapped in that dichotomy; he was the only progressive one and the one who believed in that direction, but he might need the balance himself too, songs that allowed him to still be "punk"; and he needed Izzy's songs for that, so he kept them in the set even after Izzy was gone and even to the expense of his own direction. A -kind of unexpected- remark about the "tidal wave of UYI revisionism", is that, in the author's opinion, it was led by Slash with his mid-90s interviews, where he disowned the progressive aspect of the albums and the piano epics as excess and foreign to what the band was. But it was the general climate also: by 1995, The Smashing Pumpkins' Mellon Collie was criticised for the same reasons as the UYI's and Courtney Love was slammed in the press as a female version of Axl.

Edited May 28, 2018 by Blackstar

[Caught_in_a_Coma]

^^^ Thanks for that excellent post.  I agree with the author that the Illusions represent the bands DNA more than AFD.  I think my favorite GN'R sound is found in the illusions in songs like Breakdown, Bad Obsession, Locomotive and Coma

 

 

The Illusions had filler and maybe feel/seemed dated quickly by the popularity of grunge and alternative rock in the 90s.  But IMO, the Illusions deserve much more notoriety and respect.  The Use Your Illusion tour was absolutely insane and GN'R on top of the world.  The November Rain trilogy is amazing, the Illusions albums feature a number of GN'R's best songs.

Edited May 28, 2018 by Caught_in_a_Coma