Rosebud

By Cally Fiedorek /// published in the December 2008 issue

“Live like you could die tomorrow,” recommended some lackey executive, as if Axl Rose wasn’t already doing that. Afraid he might die tomorrow, Geffen Records had commissioned Use Your Illusion with a certain terminus in mind: the great Guns ‘n’ Roses blowout sale of 1991. It was to be a double-disc to epitomize deluxe in all its wastefulness and profit, the swan song for draining the final, venal juices from a million-dollar dying animal. Go out with a bang.

It’s one thing to live like you’re dying, another to record that way: Use Your Illusion I & II was madness without the ministry of paranoia, but fear remained the frontman’s biggest sell, the inlaid seeds of his corruption, and moreover, his resilience. His recklessness was reactionary, but not particularly freedom-loving. Seize the day and then the copyrights. It was meretriciously sexual, sexually active, though only for the purposes of music, that heavy-footed contessa. Pandora, and her forever-yielding Box. She was his to own, and ours, maybe sometimes, to hear.

How did Axl work this bizarrely inequitable equation? And what was a greater kick in the balls to rock & roll’s collectivist illusions than that, in the 1990s, to stand in the front row at a Guns ‘n’ Roses concert was to lie prostrate in his line of fire? Annoying facial expressions, overloud singing — any of a handful of infractions could get you called out personally mid-song and deposed at his behest to security. And yet the people sang along. Did Chinese Democracy ever have a chance of bringing down the wall? Does it occur to Axl Rose at 46, fat, sitting jerseyed and groinless on a $14-million production debt, that the most obtrusive ones he built himself?

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“They know it’s just as good as the old stuff, it’s just they’re hearing it through…a computer.”
 — Sebastian Bach

For about two-thirds of the time you and I have been alive, Chinese Democracy has been switching incubators, residing only, parodically, in some imaginary wind tunnel of the information age, its volume of speculative and otherwise storied hash growing exponentially with each new fillip of the master’s draconian will.

November 23, the date of its exclusive U.S. release via Best Buy, was no big decoration day. The decision to distribute small-scale, whereby fans would not only have to leave their houses (so not cool, Axl!) but enter shopping malls, reflects a sad dilapidation of the industry on whose bed-made-of-money it was first conceived.

If the hope was to justify the hype or the expenses, well, everyone knew that wasn’t going to happen, most of all Axl himself. Importantly, there’s little conscious attempt here to weigh the music against the whole rigmarole of its history, and that’s not to call it anything but hermetically self-referential. Chinese Democracy doesn’t sound like 14 million or like 14 years — what did we expect that to sound like? — as Axl’s most derisible sleights-of-hand had already, to himself at least, explained themselves away.

For one thing, his vision of the G ‘n’ R namesake has from time to time caved in on itself only willingly, totally wittingly, too. Axl didn’t build up such a body count of bandmates in some frustrated march towards a final solution: he knows obedience has a natural expiration date, and the man will execute accordingly. And this album, despite its telltale signatures, could never have been the concerted product of over a decade’s labor — he was knees-to-chest in a bathroom or sleeping for half that time. It’s been the fulsome product of over a decade of not caring how long it takes, not just beating the horse through excessive elaboration, but deconstructing it limb by limb at his halftime leisure, noodling over an infinite jigsaw of flourishes in a process that was destined, even intended, to bear some laughably egregious cracks. Axl doesn’t apologize for them with any more than a recurrent “Fuck you” to all those waiting and hating on his long-delayed brainchild, and he didn’t so much finally complete Chinese Democracy as finally force the lid over a wellspring of needless — and annoyingly possible — musical options.

Despite the overblown positive reception that nostalgia, in its pacifying way, has gleaned from more than a few of its receivers, Chinese Democracy is a fat and lazy record that many people will hear and only some of those people will like or, rather, be passionately confused by for a while. It doesn’t roil the waters or piss on kittens much more than classic G ‘n’ R did, it’s just more recklessly unfocused, rip-roaring from riff to verse to post-verse breakdowns, putting on such hulking, such all-encasing airs of ribald hard-rock production that it would require an accompanying car chase for it to sound aspirational in the way that we (Westerners?) expect of music.