Guns N' Roses' Use Your Illusion I and II

Eric Weisbard

• Editorial: Continuum
• Año: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781441124807
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Categoría: Música «rock»

It was the season of the blockbuster. Between August 12 and November 26 1991, a whole slew of acts released albums that were supposed to sell millions of copies in the run-up to Christmas. Metallica, Michael Jackson, Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Garth Brooks, MC Hammer, and U2 - all were competing for the attention of the record-buying public at the same time. But perhaps the most attention-seeking act of all was Guns N Roses. Their albums Use Your Illusion 1 and 2, released on the same day, were both 75-minute sprawlers with practically the same cover design - an act of colossal arrogance. On one level, it worked. The albums claimed the top two chart positions, and ultimately sold 7 million copies each in the US alone. On another level, it was a disaster. This was an album that Axl Rose has been unable to follow up in fifteen years. It signaled the end of Guns N Roses, of heavy metal on the Sunset Strip, and the entire 1980s model of blockbuster pop/rock promotion. Use Your Illusion marked the end of rock as mass culture. In this book, Eric Weisbard shows how the album has matured into a work whose baroque excesses now have something to teach us about pop and the platforms it raises and lowers, about a man who suddenly found himself praised to the firmament for every character trait that had hitherto marked him as an irredeemable loser.

Chapter One
Sunset Boulevard: The Metal Years

Welcome to the season of the blockbuster. On August 13, 1991, Metallica released Metallica, their Bob Rock—produced sell-in, with “Enter Sandman” detonating the MTV Video Music Awards. On November 26, Michael Jackson bought number one for Dangerous with the soon circumcised final section of the “Black or White” video. In-between, a scad of once and future giants of pop music released albums in time for Christmas. Pearl Jam’s Ten (August 27) and Nirvana’s Nevermind (September 24) portended grunge. Garth Brooks’s Ropin’ the Wind (September 10) proved, thanks to the newly installed SoundScan, which measured actual sales rather than the rock-weighted guesses of store clerks, that country music was its own behemoth. MC Hammer’s pop-rap Too Legit to Quit (October 21), successor to the ten million—selling Please Hammer Don’t Hurt ’Em, sold a quick three million and then not a copy more after people actually heard it. Mariah Carey’s Emotions (September 17) was indifferent for her (three million at first, five in all), huge for anyone else. And U2 cemented their status as the most enduringly beloved band of rock’s second generation with an album whose title seemed like a media stunt: Achtung Baby.

But the weirdest blockbuster of them all that fall was Guns N’ Roses’ Use Your Illusion I and II, released on September 17, a pair of 75-minute CDs with virtually the same cover sold separately in an act of almost colossal arrogance. GN’R had a right, though. Their first album, 1987’s Appetite for Destruction, had been certified eight times platinum in 1991, on its way to an eventual fifteen. Rock was still the biggest musical genre, hard rock was still the biggest kind of rock, and GN’R were the biggest hard rock band of their day. The first single from Use, “You Could Be Mine,” appeared first on the Terminator 2 soundtrack, and the video featured the movie’s unstoppable machine men. Consumers were supposed to be equally unable to avoid Use Your Illusion, which like all post-Thriller blockbusters of that time was planned to play out over several years, relived in multiple single releases and videos, tours, spinoff products, and press provocations. And on one level, it worked: the albums instantly claimed the top two chart positions, ultimately sold seven million copies apiece in the US alone, and spawned videos as leviathan as “November Rain.”

Still, Use Your Illusion was also a disaster, the epitome of the rock bloat that alternative was about to come and try to slay, the album that fifteen years later Axl Rose is still struggling to follow up, the end of Guns N’ Roses, heavy metal on the Sunset Strip, and the entire 1980s model of blockbuster pop/rock promotion. Look back on the artists of that holiday season now: Kurt Cobain killed himself; Michael Jackson was shamed out of the spotlight; Garth Brooks retired from releasing new albums; Metallica went into therapy; Pearl Jam recast themselves as a jam band; Hammer is a semi-recurrent VH1 episode; Mariah Carey’s ambitions gave her a nervous breakdown on Total Request Live. Only U2 have kept the missionary rock dream alive, first by seeming to scorn it (and embrace anti-rock sounds and stances) with Achtung, then self-consciously reclaiming it with All That You Can’t Leave Behind and Bono’s global campaign to end third-world debt. The luck of the Irish!

For a time, gigantic albums still materialized as accidental novelties: the Titanic and Bodyguard soundtracks, Hootie, Alanis. Country music, conservative by nature, held on longest: Shania Twain, the Dixie Chicks. Hip-hop lived large, but rappers couldn’t hit the same numbers: that genre never became the overwhelmingly dominant force in the industry that rock had been. Celine Dion gets her own book in this series, so let’s leave consideration of her rare ability to interpose a global pop model on the domestic American market to Carl Wilson. The general rule still holds. An era had passed. The idolatry required to sustain albums on a 1970s or 1980s scale could no longer be met by a popular culture whose niche markets were collectively far more valuable than its consensus heroes. Television has American Idol, neatly detaching the mass audience from the album making process altogether. It isn’t clear how much longer CDs will be sold in stores.

Use Your Illusion, then, arguably marked the end of rock in the weird shape it had taken when the sixties ended: mass culture masquerading as oppositional culture, with the bully’s swagger to prove it. All these years later, Axl Rose is still caught in artistic limbo. Yes, he has been grappling with a specific album, Chinese Democracy, but it goes beyond that. He doesn’t have a format anymore. To steal a comparison that may be commonplace, but never so geographically accurate, he has become rock’s Norma Desmond, the silent film star trapped on Sunset Boulevard in Billy Wilder’s 1950 Hollywood apotheosis. “I am big,” you can imagine him saying. “It’s the music that got small.”

* * *

When Use Your Illusion was first released, however, the archetype still held. If anything, it seemed then, the pollution was just getting worse. Rose and Guns represented the liberatory dream of the counterculture subverted into fascistic right wing entertainment. Terminator rock.

Joe Queenan, a humorist gifted at encapsulating baby boomer sentiments, cinched this view of the band in an article he wrote for Time upon UYI’s unveiling. Here are some extended excerpts:

For the original cover of their monstrously successful 1987 debut album Appetite for Destruction, Guns N’ Roses selected a painting of a sinister robotic figure towering over a ravished female with her undergarments around her knees. The album, whose leitmotivs were violent sex, drug abuse, alcoholism and insanity, featured lyrics like “Tied up, tied down, up against the wall / Be my rubbermade baby / An’ we can do it all.” The record sold 14 million copies.

Buoyed by this success, the Gunners in 1988 exhumed some archival material and released a stopgap, extended-play album with such lyrics as “I used to love her / But I had to kill her”; “Police and niggers, that’s right, get out of my way”; and “Immigrants and faggots … come to our country and think they’ll do as they please / Like start a mini-Iran, or spread some f—disease.” The record sold 6 million copies.

Buoyed by this success, the Gunners have now made rock-’n’-roll history by simultaneously releasing two completely different albums with virtually identical covers: Use Your Illusion I and Use Your Illusion II. This time out, the Gunners, while clinging to their trademark bitch-slapping posturing, have also introduced such engaging new subjects as bondage, the lure of homicide and the pleasures of drug-induced comas. They offer a song called “Pretty Tied Up,” accompanied by a drawing in the lyric sheet of a naked, bound and blindfolded woman. They also graphically invite the editor and publisher of Spin magazine, Bob Guccione Jr., to perform oral sex on the Guns N’ Roses’ irrepressible lead singer, W. Axl Rose.

The two albums (price: $15.98 apiece on CD) went on sale at midnight last Monday, and many large stores stayed open to accommodate sometimes raucous crowds of buyers who had milled about for hours. Nationwide, the albums sold an estimated 500,000 copies within two hours of going on sale, and 1.5 million copies within three days. With 7.3 million records already shipped to dealers around the world, the record company, Geffen Records, has encouraged wild talk that the album could be as big as Michael Jackson’s Thriller, the top-selling record of all time (more than 40 million copies sold worldwide).

To those like Queenan who had grown up associating rock and roll with progressive ideals, GN’R was the latest example of a phenomenon that had begun with Grand Funk Railroad and Led Zeppelin at the turn of the 1970s. The hopes of a Woodstock Festival, or even its tragic counterpart Altamont, had seemingly degenerated into a mammothly profitable set of routinized concerts held in baseball stadiums, where young white multimillionaires acted out politically retrograde aggression in carefully packaged spectacles. It was bad enough for sixties types when arena rock emerged during the first Nixon administration: you could read it as a backlash and still imagine your own culture winning. By 1991, more than a decade into the Reagan—Bush era, arena rock had calcified like the Republican majority.

Steve Waksman, a popular music studies academic with immensely long hair and serious guitar chops, has probably spent more time analyzing this arena rock paradigm than anyone else, both for his book on the electric guitar, Instruments of Desire, and his forthcoming This Ain’t the Summer of Love: Rock Music and the Metal/Punk Continuum. For Waksman, whose analysis is echoed in Queenan’s rhetoric (returning compulsively, as it does, to the massive following for GN’R’s excesses), the arena rock bands were the first to have their vast audience appeal waved in the face of hip and progressive types as a kind of populist fuck you. I think it was broader than that: for instance, Merle Haggard’s success with “Okie from Muskogee” registered back then as a Silent Majority coming-out party, while Isaac Hayes’s gold chains and platinum albums were read in part as a Black Power repudiation of the New Left coalition. The collegiate, white, suburban-reared, baby boom audience, which laid constant claim to being the largest generation in American history, was constantly confronted with evidence of its relative smallness once people the same age, but with different backgrounds, were allowed to pick their own heroes.

Still, the tension between arena rock and an earlier notion of rock and roll was particularly familial—a betrayal of collectivity. The French Revolution produced Napoleon. The rock revolution produced the likes of Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler, who (as Waksman notices) recounts, in the band memoir Walk This Way, a trip to sound check at Madison Square Garden during an early Zep tour. “When I got there, the road crew and the union people were all eating and the band hadn’t arrived. The stage was empty and so were the 19,000 seats. The silence was deafening. I walked out to the stage and lay down, with my head hanging backward off the edge. I was overwhelmed by instant delusions of rock and roll grandeur, imagining that I was roaming the land, raping and pillaging, disguised as an ambassador of rock. And I said to myself, Someday a band of mine is gonna fill this fuckin’ place”.

Maybe, however, the longing to stand out from the hordes was as democratic as the urge to be subsumed into a common cause. One could easily argue that the very dream of being raised up into the spotlight retained, even unto Axl, its Elvis-the-truck-driver and Hollywood-starlet-discovered-at-the-lunch-counter edge. Waksman concludes of the arena rockers: “their very ordinariness made them powerful representatives of the people for whom they performed. … The 1960s were over, and a new young audience had found a reason to raise its collective voice.”

So which was it? Terminator rock or further proof of pop’s status as the most egalitarian of art forms, affording aspirants from every level of society and every psychological disposition the power to sing through the amplifier of the gods? That question will be running throughout this book. It’s why I think I personally fixated on, and have chosen to write about, Use Your Illusion rather than its almost universally revered predecessor, Appetite for Destruction. Accounting for a particular great work is one thing. Healthy. I want to linger on something danker, a spot of cultural quicksand.

Assume that none of us, then and especially now, are so naïve as to believe uncritically rock’s loud claim to have thwarted the music industry’s desire to treat its products as commodified, processed, assembly-line ear candy. Concede that Guns N’ Roses, even in their heyday, satisfied most of their fanship by giving new life to a tired formula, not by breaking any molds. The critique of “rockism” has increased exponentially as rock itself has withered in impact, retracting the genre’s claims for significance to little more than a karaoke simulacrum of its former self. I read with no surprise that a member of the hipster band Clap Your Hands Say Yeah had to put his Guns N’ Roses tribute outfit on hiatus after his legitimate career took off. GN’R might have been a threat, once, to Kurt Cobain at least. At this point, they are basically a joke, a memory to shudder at or ironically cherish.

But if you write off Guns N’ Roses, please be honest and also write off the presumptions of alternative rock, too. (Can you even remember them?) “Write off the intellectual arrogance of rock criticism, if you can still find it apart from blogs, and denounce as pleasureless and proseless the field of popular music studies, with its horrible, never used acronym. Write off every instance of pulp formula wanting to be more than that—a more nuanced distinction than the notion of rock transcending pop. Because that’s the crux of the matter: whether commercial culture should stick to the script. Commodified pop is as acceptable to a certain kind of newish highbrow as folk culture used to be in those 1950s mass culture debates. From that perspective, the quality that makes certain pop products ugly and middlebrow is their delusions of grandeur. This isn’t a book about Appetite for Destruction, an album that succeeded by every definition in rampaging and pillaging the way Steven Tyler had dreamed he could. That’s fine. It’s a book about the void that was summoned up when Axl Rose decided that he was entitled to sit at his new piano and make beautiful music.

Of course it’s more complicated than that. Axl Rose was a supreme asshole, afforded an endlessly long leash by an industry that had long since figured out that the rebellious image of rock made for good business. But rather than simply sniff “hip capitalism” and walk away, I want us to think more, you know, dialectically about a time when, for example, tens of thousands of people paid exactly the same price for their arena tickets, not the inflated sums that a few winners up in front can afford today. I want us to recognize, by lingering over the ways that Rose’s image has changed over the years, that part of what has disappeared along with his good name is cheerleading for the idea that rock’s vitality needs preserving. And, to be honest, I want to indulge myself, in a manner that journalism has rendered beyond the pale. This is probably a good time to announce that, while I will rehash fading memories of a period when I had UYI on my stereo borderline obsessively, I don’t intend to listen to it again until the very last chapter of this book. Maybe I won’t even like it anymore.

* * *

Return to the scene of the crime. GN’R’s achievement, if you wanted to call it that, was to rival Led Zeppelin as dark lords of authoritarian spectacle. The group sold more copies right out of the box with Appetite for Destruction, their debut album, than Bruce Springsteen had when Born in the U.S.A. maxed out the enormous good will he had been generating since the early 1970s. Cultural studies types were as offended by this as mainstream media. Fred Pfeil, in the book White Guys, explicitly contrasts Springsteen and GN’R, talking about the Boss’s “Rosalita” as an “intimate regional” concert moment, in contrast to “the massive anonymous crowds of GN’R’s first full-length performance video, ‘Paradise City.’” Pfeil sees the group as hired hands, signed just nine months after they formed by an A&R guy at Geffen brought in from Elektra with the explicit directive of finding a new Motley Crüe. If Springsteen’s blue-jeans authenticity was an obvious construct, commodified everyman casualness, this was even worse, a model where “the only possibility for authenticity involves flaunting just how unapologetically dirty you are.” Andrew Goodwin, in Dancing in the Distraction Factory, the first book on music videos, talks about that “Paradise City” clip as sheer “cultural manipulation,” the kind that frightened cold war intellectuals had typically ascribed to mass entertainment but which postmodernists were supposed to discount. The video, shot at Giants Stadium in front of tens of thousands of fans, suggested that GN’R were bigger than they actually were; at the time it was filmed, they were merely the opening act for Aerosmith.

Really, though. GN’R were selling so many records on that tour that their popularity indeed did upstage Aerosmith’s. And it was hardly record company manipulation that built them a following in the LA club scene, or caused the instant viewer response that forced MTV to air “Welcome to the Jungle” more than it had intended to. To claim that Guns N’ Roses became megastars by gaming the system, or simply appealing to the worst in people, is to stand in the embarrassing tradition of publishing company ASCAP engineering the radio DJ “payola” scandal in the 1950s because too many songs by its rival, BMI, were charting, or of Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind, which came out the same year as Appetite for Destruction. Bloom, famously, wrote anti-rock diatribes about: “a pubescent child whose body throbs with orgasmic rhythms, whose feelings are made articulate in hymns to the joys of onanism or the killing of parents; whose ambition is to win fame and wealth by imitating the drag-queen who makes the music.” That GN’R could provoke a similar response in hipster leftist academics speaks to the extent of the arena populism perplex.

The tense reception that GN’R received also had to do with another set of kindred rivals: metal and punk. Punk and new wave emerged from club scenes in New York, London, Los Angeles, and dozens of other smaller cities in the late 1970s as a self-styled grassroots challenge to arena rock notions of the mass. The extent to which punks were working class or art students, a Catholic counter-reformation of garage-rock idealists or a Protestant reformation of rock destroyers, anti-stars or wannabe stars, has been debated ever since. It’s easy to lay out the terms of these battles, and worth taking seriously how strongly felt they could be, so long as one remembers that there are no true cultural absolutes and that most musicians had more concrete things to worry about. In broad strokes, punk happened after arena rock like Jimmy Carter happened after Watergate: there was enough revulsion to momentarily contemplate an alternative, but then the underlying conservative dynamic reasserted itself. The Decline of Western Civilization, Penelope Spheeris’s 1981 documentary about punk bands in Southern California, was succeeded by the 1988 The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: T...