Justin Hawkins reacts to the live debut performance of 'The General'

[rumandraisin]

Anyone see the Darkness film last night? Very interesting about the comeback and touring these days for a medium sized band, a cult band. Interesting to see how little money is in it in terms of playing smaller venues and trying to break even. In the footage around 2015 when they were playing 1000 capacity venues he said the meet and greets were bringing in the money to make a profit. 

Big Darkness fan. Just fun and catchy but with the talent to back it up. 

I think it was only on one night only at Cineworlds round the UK. 

Edited November 10, 2023 by rumandraisin

[Amir]

3 minutes ago, rumandraisin said:

Anyone see the Darkness film last night? Very interesting about the comeback and touring these days for a medium sized band, a cult band. Interesting to see how little money is in it in terms of playing smaller venues and trying to break even. In the footage around 2015 when they were playing 1000 capacity venues he said the meet and greets were bringing in the money to make a profit. 

Big Darkness fan. Just fun and catchy but with the talent to back it up. 

I think it was only on one night only at Cineworlds round the UK. 

Hadn't heard about this, looks like it'll be on Blu-Ray next month, I guess on streaming/digital platforms around then as well: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CMQYYYC6

[rumandraisin]

Just now, Amir said:

Hadn't heard about this, looks like it'll be on Blu-Ray next month, I guess on streaming/digital platforms around then as well: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CMQYYYC6

It was really cool, very interesting. Not a documentary like I was expecting, surprisingly little about the classic era. Which I kind of prefer, more like a fly on the wall thing over the space of 3 or 4 years. 

[StrangerInThisTown]

Japanese Prisoner Of Love that's a legitimate amazing fucking song, that 1+ minute long outro of Megadeth style riffing still blows me away everytime the way it just keeps ramping up at the end, just amazing and heavy as fuck like you wouldn't expect, I literally listen to it everytime I'm at the gym.

And more ontopic: don't see why people are shitting on Justin reacting, reaction videos have been around since the start of Youtube itself, he just happens to be an actual real singer in a rather well known band. Those other reactors are just random people mostly, so seeing someone known like that react is pretty refreshing if anything. Myles already was on his channel, I'm calling it now he will have Slash on when he's promoting his new album next year

Edited November 10, 2023 by StrangerInThisTown

[TheGeneral]

I'm not a fan of The Darkness or Justin Hawkins, but my god people you have to be the whiniest bitches out there. 

"Why should we care about his opinion?" If you don't, just shut the fuck up. Reaction videos aren't even half as bad. Yes, they are low-effort. But so are GNR single releases.

I don't even know why I'm being so fueled about this, but it just really pissed me off what a bunch of ridiculous people are roaming this forum.

[evilfacelessturtle]

22 hours ago, Blackstar said:

Axl said in China Exchange that he made a conscious effort to sing cleaner both in the studio for recording CD and live during that time (I suppose he was referring to those early 2000's performances).

Audience: Hi there. Big fan. Did you ever feel that your voice was- your voice is obviously a natural fit for rock and that kind of genre, but did you ever feel that you want to branch out a bit more maybe collaborate, maybe join a jazz band, who knows?

Axl: I like Frank Sinatra. I like a lot of Elvis, I like a lot of 70s Elvis though as well. I like a lot of different styles of things. I don't know about a jazz band. It really just kind of depends on the song. For a while, like with Chinese, I was trying to get my voice a lot clearer. I feel like that maybe fans didn't necessarily respond to that so much as well, sometimes, at shows and things but I think it was very good for me to be even better at what I am doing right now.

https://www.a-4-d.com/t2686-2016-06-07-china-exchange-an-evening-with-axl-rose

So maybe those "inconsistencies" and switches from rasp to cleaner voice at the shows of that time were actually the result of the opposite: the "raspy" lines were the ones that were random because of muscle memory and the way he used to sing, but then he was bringing himself back to singing clean, as that was his choice.

 

But on CD, he used as much rasp as he could, and he was clearly trying to do that live, as well. SInging clean is not difficult, it's the natural state of your vocal cords. Rasp is added on top of that with an additional technique. That is, barring someone born with a vocal deformity that makes their baseline raspy. But it's quite clear that Axl's rasp was not just natural and was created artificially in an unhealthy way.

And he was still using what little rasp he could muster in 2001-2002. If he wanted to sing clean, he would have sang clean. And again, there is no explanation why he would have less rasp on Live Era when he's trying to pass of 1998 vocals as 1987-1993 vocals.

Frankly, I think Axl wants people to believe it was a choice because he was embarrassed by it. I think that's also why OMG was drowned in distortion. And is it still a choice, to this day? He still sings a lot of stuff clean.

21 hours ago, Blackstar said:

AXL: I work with a guy named Ron Anderson, and I’ve worked with Ron since we got signed. I worked with a woman, Gloria Bennett, for a little while, and then I worked with Ron Anderson, and he’s very, very good. I haven’t been to him for a while, and I don’t work on, like, how to sing the songs or the melodies or the words or anything like that. I mainly just work on the muscle control in my throat and stuff. Since it’s not something I’m practiced at doing continually, your mind forgets how to do it, and then you go out there after... on your fourth or fifth show, after driving over the mountains... You can’t hear well, and the monitors aren’t that great, and you just yell loud and forget how you’re supposed to sing because you’re not used to it. That’s it. See ya, Japan! That’s the new, big, hip clone phrase now, but we do mean it!

https://www.a-4-d.com/t4361-1988-11-dd-blast-axl-rose-explains-how-he-has-guns-n-roses-by-the-throat

He had been taught how to apply techniques to preserve his voice early on, but most of the time he "forgot" to use them while performing in the 80s and early 90s, probably because of muscle memory combined with getting crazed and fired up while on stage.

He's talking about not oversinging live and damaging his voice. Ron was teaching him how to stay under control. He says "I don’t work on, like, how to sing the songs". What he was not learning was how to sing with a different, healthier technique.

There's a difference between taking doctor ordered breaks between destructive performances so that your voice works at all, and learning a technique that will hold up over an entire career.

That's like saying an athlete who breaks his legs every other game is maintaining his body because he takes time off for the bones to heal. 

Edited November 11, 2023 by evilfacelessturtle

[Powderfinger]

4 hours ago, TheGeneral said:

I'm not a fan of The Darkness or Justin Hawkins, but my god people you have to be the whiniest bitches out there. 

"Why should we care about his opinion?" If you don't, just shut the fuck up. Reaction videos aren't even half as bad. Yes, they are low-effort. But so are GNR single releases.

I don't even know why I'm being so fueled about this, but it just really pissed me off what a bunch of ridiculous people are roaming this forum.

You go girl. 

[Gordon Comstock]

23 hours ago, evilfacelessturtle said:

Those moments align with what I said; his voice got cleaner as he sang higher. UTLH has some added lines that are laughably high to be pretending they were from 1992, and that's why they're so clean.

WTTJ is clearly different form how he sounded in 1992 (which is why the lines that remained from the actual performance are so obvious). Right off the bat, it's a thinner and more fine rasp. And then on the line "we've got everything you want", his voice goes clean on "thing". Mid-way through a single word the rasp fails on him.

Again, why would he choose to go clean on some random lines if he was trying to pretend it was all live from 1987-1992? You didn't answer that question.

Do you really think it's more likely that he chose to make his voice completely unrecognizable from the sound that made him famous and chose to get mocked as Mickey Mouse?

Yes, obviously the LALD scream falls in the right spot for him, or else he wouldn't be able to do it so consistently unlike literally every other song in the set. And obviously it's much easier to control your voice with a single note than across multiple notes in a melody. 

If it were a matter of choice, why would his performances be so inconsistent? You seem to be avoiding all my direct questions.

Well as early as 1999 with Live era you see the line I pointed out in Jungle.

Let's see... 2001 at the HOB show. All I had to do was listen to the very first line of the first song to find that. He starts off trying to rasp with "you know where you" but then loses it completely with the word "are":

2002, same deal at 3:20, he starts raspy but loses it at the word "scream"

I could go on and on, but it's just silly to even bother. Anyone who listens to the band at all knows this. 

The damage from the UYI tour was so severe that the real recovery period was more like 1994-2005. He could manage short bursts of rasp still, but could not sustain them. In the studio, he can piece together those short bursts into a full song. It's a very common practice called comping. That's why all the stuff recorded around 1998-1999 like OMG and Live Era have that fine, thin rasp, whereas the later stuff with more classic sounding rasp was likely done around 2004-2005.

It's quite simple, if a singer cannot sustain their style of singing consistently, they are not maintaining their voice properly.

Use your head. A studio is a controlled environment with as many takes as you need that can be pieced together. Live performance is where your true voice gets exposed. And of course the regular use of touring will wear it down faster. The very fact that you admit he could only do it "in moments" proves my point. Why would he deliberately choose random places that change every night to suddenly go clean or raspy? This is delusional.

What did I say? "a trend of recovering his rasp after breaks in touring and the rasp fading away as tours go on"

How much touring happened between 2002 and 2011? Three friggin years of that 9 year span. And again, even by 2007 he was not sounding as good as 2006, same goes for 2010-2011. You said it yourself, "near 2010 level".

What's your evidence for this claim? The voice of a 20-something is incredibly resilient. After the UYI tour, he was in his 30s and not so indestructible anymore. Plus, by 1990, that was only 5 years of abuse. Because the clock doesn't just reset, that is added on to every year after that. By 2000, it was 15 years of abuse. Of course something you might be able to get away with for 5 years would start catching up after 15. Look at athletes. They can get away with poor technique while they're young, but eventually it catches up to them.

You're telling me that Axl knew he was destroying his voice from 1987-1993 and that he would sound like Mickey Mouse for the rest of his career and just didn't give a shit? Come on.

 

I was gonna write some long reply to this, but fuck it. If you think the clean voice wasn't a conscious stylistic change, and that he couldn't pull off rasp, I really don't know what to tell you.

As far as 'why would he change his style from what made him famous' or 'why would he only sing certain lines with rasp', it seems clear to me that he was going for something new and trying to re-invent himself with the clean voice. New band, new sound, new look, new approach... it might not have worked, but that seemed to be the intention.

Like I said, I'm not gonna attempt to figure out what his reasoning was for doing it, I don't know if he thought he was fooling anyone into thinking those vocals on UTLH were from 1992, or if he was 'pretending it was 87-93' or whatever, they're probably just what he thought sounded good. He's made plenty of questionable decisions in the studio over his career.

Also thanks @Blackstar for posting those quotes, it would've taken me a while to dig them out.

[evilfacelessturtle]

On 11/10/2023 at 8:33 PM, Gordon Comstock said:

As far as 'why would he change his style from what made him famous' or 'why would he only sing certain lines with rasp', it seems clear to me that he was going for something new and trying to re-invent himself with the clean voice. New band, new sound, new look, new approach... it might not have worked, but that seemed to be the intention.

And yet, CD has the raspiest vocals he could manage at the time.

[Gordon Comstock]

12 minutes ago, evilfacelessturtle said:

And yet, CD has the raspiest vocals he could manage at the time.

 

Does it? The remix version of This I Love has some of the most powerful rasp we heard from Axl in the 2000s but it was never released. Maybe we've heard most of what's 'in the vault' but we don't really know.

You seem fixated on the idea that he was trying as hard as possible to sound like 1992 Axl and use as much rasp as he could manage. I don't think that was the case.

[Blackstar]

15 hours ago, evilfacelessturtle said:

And yet, CD has the raspiest vocals he could manage at the time.

There are songs on CD that he sang entirely or mostly clean, like Catcher In The Rye and Prostitute (and some fans dislike these songs just for this reason) and other songs that he sang with rasp. He could have used rasp on CITR if he had wanted to (because, like you said, the studio is a controlled environment), but he didn't. It was a choice. He chose to sing clean on some songs and parts and with rasp on others.

Regarding Live Era, maybe he didn't care to sound like he did on the UYI tour. It's even possible that he didn't like his voice on the live recordings from 1991 and 1992 (if I'm not mistaken, he recorded overdubs only on live tracks from those two years - the live vocals from '87 and '88 were left untouched). We should always keep in mind that Axl's perception of what's good or not may be very different from the fans' perception. For example, he thought he sucked on the Lies version of You're Crazy, even though it's among his best studio vocals.

 

Edited November 12, 2023 by Blackstar

[rumandraisin]

10 hours ago, Gordon Comstock said:

 

Does it? The remix version of This I Love has some of the most powerful rasp we heard from Axl in the 2000s but it was never released. Maybe we've heard most of what's 'in the vault' but we don't really know.

You seem fixated on the idea that he was trying as hard as possible to sound like 1992 Axl and use as much rasp as he could manage. I don't think that was the case.

That TIL remix was too raspy I always thought, just painful to listen to and it loses the emotion of the song. The album version was spot on. 

[Blackstar]

40 minutes ago, rumandraisin said:

That TIL remix was too raspy I always thought, just painful to listen to and it loses the emotion of the song. The album version was spot on. 

Yes, although I don't like the song much either way, I'm in the minority that prefers the the vocals in the album version than in the remix.