Guns N' Roses
G N' R Lies

Hello everyone, during my stay on this beautiful site, I had the pleasure and honor of singing in my own way the deeds of great bands like Iron Maiden, Alice In Chains, Rhapsody, Cradle Of Filth, and Muse, to name just a few, but alas, music is not only made of beautiful things; crap also exists, and how it exists...

A shining example of the concept of excrement applied to music is this mini album by Guns 'N' Roses dated 1988. First of all, where do these Guns 'N' Roses come from? It seems a question of secondary importance, but it's not. Guns 'N' Roses come from the United States of America, representing its dark side perfectly embodied by other circus phenomena like Britney Spears, Eminem, Marilyn Manson, or Limp Bizkit, all people who base their unfair musical fortune on image and marketing, which obviously our Big Guns also do, having risen to the altar of celebrity thanks to their total and complete aurea mediocritas, their fake street rock dumb and devoid of any interesting content, both in terms of lyrics, stereotyped to the point of absurdity, and music, the least interesting and most derivative you can imagine, a sort of mishmash between the Rolling Stones, Aerosmith, and The Cult (certainly not the wonderful ones of Love and Dreamtime, obviously...) with some hints of punk here and there. A real fried mess, which stands to America as Vasco Rossi and Ligabue stand to Italy.

Well, once we've framed the "artists" we're dealing with, I move on to review the CD, eight songs (well, songs, what a big word...) the first four taken from their first demo, "Live Like A Suicide," the remaining ones are unreleased acoustic tracks recorded later after their debut album.

My hands tremble as I put the CD in the stereo. After a moment of hesitation, I gulp, tighten my buttocks, and press play: Axl Rose, the legendary frontman, tells everyone to go fuck themselves before even starting (thank you, and I return the sentiments wholeheartedly), then the band starts a bland spiel titled "Reckless Life," where our Axl begins right away to delight me by singing his reckless life (without Steve McQueen and the stars at the Roxy Bar, though) with his angelic voice, an inimitable mix between a slightly hoarse goose and a mule in the throes of a violent hormonal crisis. The second track is "Nice Boys," a cover of the Australian band Rose Tattoo: a fairly well-crafted pop-punk track, which performed by the Ramones would acquire a whole different beauty and artistic dignity, something that the Guns aren't absolutely capable of giving (as they have amply demonstrated in their cover of Knockin' On Heaven's Door, or how to turn one of the simplest and most beautiful songs in rock history into yet another shitty, soggy hair metal ballad). The third track is truly formidable, the true best of the worst, the song that in my opinion represents more than any other their artistic irrelevance and ridiculousness: the masterpiece is called "Move To The City," and it's a kind of blues-rock that makes your butt move like a Rihanna single in its infinite gaudiness and plasticky nature; as if that wasn't enough, the legendary Axl indulges in a series of reckless vocalizations, something you really have to hear to believe the sensation of violent intestinal blockage mixed with convulsive attacks of hysterical giggling that erupts in me in the face of such ugliness. The first part closes with the Aerosmith cover "Mama Kin"; here too the usual reheated soup of hard-blues-dance, but compared to the anaphylactic shock of the previous track, it's almost passable and slips away with relative ease.

Very well, now it's the acoustic part, meaning Guns 'N' Roses without Slash's big guitar solos, the Vasco-influenced guitarist who in the end turns out to be the only decent element of the band. The martyrdom begins with the soporific ballad "Patience," where the only thing that saves it is Axl's whistling solo; otherwise, the song is totally flat and devoid of any class burst, to the point of being relentlessly outclassed by the homonymous song by Take That and makes the subsequent "Used To Love Her," a very modest country song suitable only for a gaudy representation from the Far West, seem almost a masterpiece. There are still two tracks left, and my intestines begin to give way, but I stoically continue: first I gulp down "You're Crazy," an acoustic and slightly slower version of the song already featured on their defecatory debut album "Appetite For Destruction": here too the usual cocktail of hot air raised to the cube, all surrounded by the usual stupid lyrics and the usual singing as pleasant as a bee sting on the glans. Finally, the coup de grace, the famous "One In A Million": the usual uninspired arpeggios repeated to boredom, plus one of the crappiest lyrics ever written by a human mind, a true anthem to ignorance and banality of the typical average provincial American (Bush will probably thank...). This horrendous whine drags on for six minutes of genuine passion (particularly harrowing when our Axl drops the fake engaged singer-songwriter tone to resume his usual filthy braying), and when it ends, I can finally breathe a sigh of relief: I've certainly ruined my day, but it was worth it to write a review like this.