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Happy 10th Anniversary to Chinese Democracy!


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42 minutes ago, WhazUp said:

I don't know about anyone else but it really doesn't feel like a whole decade has passed!  I remember being in high school and so stoked that the album was actually coming out that I bought 2 copies on CD - one to keep sealed and the other to play.  

Fond memories of that period, I remember when the album leaked a week before the release date but was heavily watermarked with clicks, skipping, and weird MSN messenger noises and all that :lol:  It was a fun time to be a GNR fan between the album coming out and Axl coming here the month after that as Dexter for the first time.  

Whether we think the album is a "true" GNR album, or if we liked it, or think it has flaws, one thing I think we can all agree on is that it was a crazy ride to get there and those fun memories of the leaks in 05/06 and lurking on the forums reading about them is what enticed me to join the forums and be active on here ever since

I like hearing stories when we were buying guns recordings during teen yeats,  and the story goes "i skipped school".....its good to know we knew what our priorities were. It was like that for me when the illusions albums dropped.

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2 hours ago, Sydney Fan said:

I like hearing stories when we were buying guns recordings during teen yeats,  and the story goes "i skipped school".....its good to know we knew what our priorities were. It was like that for me when the illusions albums dropped.

Unfortunately I haven’t had the chance to buy a new GNR album when it came out, but I did stay up until 4 in the morning listening to the Forum stream last year and had to wake up at 5:30 for school. That was the closest I ever got to falling asleep in high school. Although I did see GNR at foxboro on the second night and it turned out my principal was there too.

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I think ChiDem (the song), Better, SOD, TWAT, CITR, Sorry, Madagascar, TIL and Prostitute are all great to fantastic songs.  I know a lot of people are pretty high on Shackler's Revenge (and I think it's solid, sometimes I feel it more than other times) but that song, If The World, Riad, Scraped and maybe IRS are all decent to good songs IMO and if the vault has stuff like rumored amazing songs like Thyme, etc, I wonder why some of these serviceable but nothing amazing songs ended up on the album over some real gold from the ChiDem era instead.

 

I'm really into the Illusion albums though and they all have 3 or so songs that probably are just decent and nothing special.  Maybe with albums, that's just sort of how it goes.  Usually there will be a few songs that are fine but nothing too impressive

 

I really think some of Axl's best lyrics and delivery are on this album.  I know some find CITR corny and I'm not too into the live versions, but I think it's a pretty amazing song and feels like it would feel pretty at home on UYI 2 or a mid/late 90s GN'R album had the band not broken up.  The vocal work and guitars on TWAT are insane.  I'm grateful ChiDem exists

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10 minutes ago, Caught_in_a_Coma said:

 if the vault has stuff like rumored amazing songs like Thyme, etc, I wonder why some of these serviceable but nothing amazing songs ended up on the album over some real gold from the ChiDem era instead.

I don't think Axl was ever planning on it being one album and done, it makes more sense to hold on to amazing songs when the plan was to follow the album up with another one in the next couple of years.

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I think there is a half good record there albeit most of these songs were better as demos/live songs, ''The Blues'' (best song on the album in my opinion), ''IRS'', ''Madagascar'', ''There Was A Time'' - ''Better'' also I suppose and maybe ''Sorry'' at a push (the lyrics are so bad though!). The rest of the album however is complete crap. I look on it as an album with a big jump in quality, between the aforementioned which are all around the good-great category, and the rest which are complete excrement: there is no middle ground. 

 

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15 minutes ago, DeadSlash said:

I don't think Axl was ever planning on it being one album and done, it makes more sense to hold on to amazing songs when the plan was to follow the album up with another one in the next couple of years.

You're right and he said as much in interviews.  He had talked about a follow up to Chinese Democracy and referred to it as like the second half of the project. I don't know why I didn't consider that.  Yeah, you'd want heavy hitter songs for that album.  I wonder if we'll ever hear those songs

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The last time I genuinely got massively excited to buy a CD and peruse it's artwork.  What happened next was a travesty.  A bunch of morons cocked up all promotion, no tour, no fucking anything.  Axl sat on his arse, the Gashba era, the sheer lack of enthusiasm across the board...  Followed by Axl eating his humble pie, chasing the moolah and playing it safe every night with minimum effort with a half baked "reunion" line up.  Having said all that, I loved the new guns era, I loved the leaks, the intrigue, the shows had fantastic energy and suspense, and the album was very good if not massively over produced and polished.  I long for THAT Guns N' Roses again.

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It’s funny, that unless you lived it, the waiting for a new Guns album, from the early 1990’s in the lead up to its eventual release in 2008, you’ll never understand as a fan, what an excruciatingly long wait it was.

I was waiting, from November 1993, after TSI, for a new Guns album of original material to surface. And in that time, the last of the few original members dissolved, and the rumours that circulated in the years following that were crazy. This was pre-internet era, scouring for magazines for scarce info, then into 2001 with Rio, a completely new band etc 

It really was a surreal time to be a GN’R fan. 

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I still love it like I did 10 years ago.

I've always thought of Chinese as a natural progression from UYI.

Better, There Was A Time, Prostitute, Sorry & Shackler's being my favorite tracks.

My only nitpick is Street Of Dreams. I've always preferred the 2002 live version to the final product.

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19 minutes ago, ChineseDemocracy2004 said:

Slash is my favourite guitarist and I may be in the minority but I don't like his solos during Chinese songs at the moment.

I agree on the latter.

I believe GNR needs someone like Buckethead or Bumblefoot (from a style and abilities standpoint) to tackle those types of solos. Slash is great for his, and Robin's solos or the slower BH/Bumblefoot solos like in Sorry and Catcher.

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