This Island AXL

[KIKOZ3]

This Island Axl

Last week Guns N' Roses - handy shorthand for the uneasy treaty between emotionally unstable pop star Axl Rose, his endlessly patient studio producers, and whatever hired guns are pretending to be his legendary band this week - issued the first new material in years, a trio of new demos that washed up on file-sharing networks. Hipster magazines have reacted with predictable sneering: "Seems he's trying to channel 'Estranged' or at least Meat Loaf," says Pitchfork Magazine: "He says, 'There was a time we didn't want to know it all.' Likewise, Dreads." I'm hoping the others will go easier on him -- you have to creep up on him, or he'll see his own shadow and retreat to Sedona, NM until 2016, muttering to his advisors about evil energy waves emanating from the offices of Entertainment Weekly.

The new songs - "IRS," "There Was A Time," and "Better" - aren't new hard rock anthems, but scary and sometimes chilling artifacts from a distant planet we humans can only conceive of in abstract terms: the self-imposed exile of Axl Rose. By most reports he is still hung up on an early-'90s lover, supermodel Stephanie Seymour, one of a couple women upon whom he committed stomach-turning acts of assault, according to court testimony. And now, while brooding on old gripes for over a decade, and keeping himself secreted away in a fortress of solitude, a kind of rock star Area 51, he lives out a paradox. Lawyers and New Age charlatans whisper reassuring words to the man who wrote the greatest heavy metal love song, "Sweet Child O' Mine," but lacks the capacity for human love and affection.

Brr - top that for compelling psychological horror, Billy Corgan.

The official story was always that grunge overthrew the old order of party metal, setting up in its place a new state of painful journeys into the self. He may not have the self-insight, still blaming others for his troubles, but nothing approaches the existential horror of being Axl Rose. Maybe that's why I couldn't get his sad new epic "There Was A Time," a fragile ballad that evokes a lost world of L.A. studio rock, off heavy rotation on my MP3 player last week.

The melody wasn't among his best, sounding like it was on loan from Bob Seger, but carried the sadness of the last man revisiting a party that ended a long time ago - so long that the "fourteen years of silence/fourteen years of pain" that bandmate and hometown friend Izzy sang about on 1991's Use Your Illusion could have been about the future, not the past.

Axl was Eminem v1.0, the original artist in the medium of white male fear and outrage who came from Indiana to Hollywood in the '80s looking for fame to smother the damage in his past, then hit it big with "Appetite For Destruction." It was a cautionary tale: in the American dream he found no reward but wealth and madness. (Axl, according to Rolling Stone, now carries around glass spheres to deflect evil magic, and believes he and Seymour, the model from the "Don't Cry" video, were together in past lives.)

Music journalists will probably ask how the voice behind harrowing Sunset Strip lust songs like "Rocket Queen" came to resemble Michael Jackson's "kick me, kike me" bitching from HIStory Volume I - trying to sell records with songs about attorneys' fees and media gripes from last century. Me, I'll be picking up Chinese Democracy if it's out next month, while thinking about what it means to love the music of the depraved -- hey, Leadbelly was a convicted murder, and, uh...

http://media.orkut.com/articles/0418.html

[rocketking]

O.........K............

[eschman]

Definitely the strangest review I've ever read.

[GunsNHalen]

I thought it was a good review..

better than "this song has a good guitar solo and Axl really rocks out"

[ralebava]

This Island Axl

Last week Guns N' Roses - handy shorthand for the uneasy treaty between emotionally unstable pop star Axl Rose, his endlessly patient studio producers, and whatever hired guns are pretending to be his legendary band this week - issued the first new material in years, a trio of new demos that washed up on file-sharing networks. Hipster magazines have reacted with predictable sneering: "Seems he's trying to channel 'Estranged' or at least Meat Loaf," says Pitchfork Magazine: "He says, 'There was a time we didn't want to know it all.' Likewise, Dreads." I'm hoping the others will go easier on him -- you have to creep up on him, or he'll see his own shadow and retreat to Sedona, NM until 2016, muttering to his advisors about evil energy waves emanating from the offices of Entertainment Weekly.

The new songs - "IRS," "There Was A Time," and "Better" - aren't new hard rock anthems, but scary and sometimes chilling artifacts from a distant planet we humans can only conceive of in abstract terms: the self-imposed exile of Axl Rose. By most reports he is still hung up on an early-'90s lover, supermodel Stephanie Seymour, one of a couple women upon whom he committed stomach-turning acts of assault, according to court testimony. And now, while brooding on old gripes for over a decade, and keeping himself secreted away in a fortress of solitude, a kind of rock star Area 51, he lives out a paradox. Lawyers and New Age charlatans whisper reassuring words to the man who wrote the greatest heavy metal love song, "Sweet Child O' Mine," but lacks the capacity for human love and affection.

Brr - top that for compelling psychological horror, Billy Corgan.

The official story was always that grunge overthrew the old order of party metal, setting up in its place a new state of painful journeys into the self. He may not have the self-insight, still blaming others for his troubles, but nothing approaches the existential horror of being Axl Rose. Maybe that's why I couldn't get his sad new epic "There Was A Time," a fragile ballad that evokes a lost world of L.A. studio rock, off heavy rotation on my MP3 player last week.

The melody wasn't among his best, sounding like it was on loan from Bob Seger, but carried the sadness of the last man revisiting a party that ended a long time ago - so long that the "fourteen years of silence/fourteen years of pain" that bandmate and hometown friend Izzy sang about on 1991's Use Your Illusion could have been about the future, not the past.

Axl was Eminem v1.0, the original artist in the medium of white male fear and outrage who came from Indiana to Hollywood in the '80s looking for fame to smother the damage in his past, then hit it big with "Appetite For Destruction." It was a cautionary tale: in the American dream he found no reward but wealth and madness. (Axl, according to Rolling Stone, now carries around glass spheres to deflect evil magic, and believes he and Seymour, the model from the "Don't Cry" video, were together in past lives.)

Music journalists will probably ask how the voice behind harrowing Sunset Strip lust songs like "Rocket Queen" came to resemble Michael Jackson's "kick me, kike me" bitching from HIStory Volume I - trying to sell records with songs about attorneys' fees and media gripes from last century. Me, I'll be picking up Chinese Democracy if it's out next month, while thinking about what it means to love the music of the depraved -- hey, Leadbelly was a convicted murder, and, uh...

http://media.orkut.com/articles/0418.html

Eminem is a very bad and stupid Axl v2.0 ..

[Dead Flower]

I thought it was great.

[mick hudson]

i liked it...