Guns N' Roses - Paradise City

Where Are All the Gods?

1. Once upon a time, I knew, definitively and without fail, who the world's heavyweight boxing champion was. This piece of trivia was encoded into the DNA of popular culture. Eventually, pop culture went through a genetic mutation and boxing fell to the wayside in favor of mixed martial arts. The sport fell into such demented chaos amidst the alphabet soup of boxing organizations and fight fixing that even sports reporters covering the sweet science were confused. Boxing’s downfall coincided with the last of the heavyweight rock stars on the planet. Like boxers, rock stars strode the Earth like toxic, narcissistic, shirtless Gods with alarmingly addictive personalities. They were front-page news for their drug-addled antics and subsequent court appearances. I miss it so fucking much. Guns N’ Roses emerged from the comically decadent Sunset Strip to snatch the heavyweight title in 1987, fighting off contenders in the form of the gloriously sleazy and stupid Poison and Mötley Crüe. They held the strap until August of ‘91 when Metallica released their eponymously titled “Black” album, then regained it briefly a few months later in a split decision when they released Use Your Illusion I & II, only to lose it again and for good when Nirvana arrived. It seemed no one wanted to actually BE a rock star anymore. Sure, Oasis and terminally bratty frontman Liam Gallagher tried (and succeeded for the most part), but there was no real danger in Oasis, what with their Beatles and T.Rex fascination. Guns N’ Roses were a fucking problem. Their debut album, Appetite for Destruction, sits on a short list of greatest debuts in rock history, and the title alone tells you everything you need to know. Guns N’ Roses is everything a great rock band should be and everything a decent person should not be.

2. These hedonistic, cocksure, swaggering assholes consciously renamed themselves Axl, Duff, Izzy, and Slash (poor drummer Steven Adler wasn’t so adventurous as to give himself a gang name). They took the Rolling Stones blueprint and dialed everything up to a far more visceral and volatile level than anyone could sustain - this band was built to implode, make no mistake. A group of people cannot sustain this nihilistic menace. The opening track, Welcome to the Jungle, flat out tells us we’re going to die. The opening lyrics of It’s So Easy tells me the band is trying to fuck my sister. On Mr. Brownstone, they tell us they’re big fans of heroin (Because that always ends well). For Rocket Queen, the band’s recording engineers recorded Axl fucking a groupie in the studio and put it in the final mix. These are the kind of human beings (if you can call them that) we’re dealing with. Please do not confuse morality with ability, because while these people are Grade A, first-rate scumbags, they are supremely gifted and that makes them top-tier rock stars - the kind who can compete for and ultimately win the title. Paradise City though… Paradise City is the ultimate distillation of the band’s considerable power and ability, their paranoid psychopathy - laid bare with blistering effect and dystopian vision over nearly seven minutes of manic bravado. By my count, Slash serves up nine distinct guitar licks here, each of which could highlight a song of its own. This is an extravagant, full-scale, galactic battle riff-a-rama loaded up on cocaine. If I ever pilot an X-Wing into a climactic fight with a Death Star I’m doing it while my R2 unit plays Paradise City over my comms system. The image in my head, as I write this, is of Slash at the Freddie Mercury Tribute at Wembley in 1992, clad in black leather pants, cowboy boots, a jean jacket open to proudly display a Rolling Stones tongue t-shirt, gloriously silly top hat adorning his head, cigarette in his mouth, and massive Gibson Les Paul strapped to his torso as he executes these licks like a biker demon sent by Hades the Greek God of the Underworld. Axl is wearing a British Union Jack in honor of Freddie and white bicycle shorts. He tells a member of the crowd to “SHOVE IT!” before going full whirling dervish. By now the band has added a keyboardist who named himself Dizzy to flush out the rhythm section alongside rhythm guitarist Izzy as well as an all-black female backing singer group to boot. Duff is wearing black and white polka dots and both he and Izzy have their shirts wide open with scarves flowing so freely, Aerosmith lead singer and scarf connoisseur Steven Tyler must have been jealous. This is in Wembley Stadium, the fucking house Freddie Mercury annexed as his own at Live Aid in 1985. The long and short of it is this: THIS IS HOW YOU FUCKING ROCK STAR. IF YOU EVER WANTED TO ROCK STAR, THIS IS HOW YOU ROCK STAR.

3. Axl and Izzy drove themselves to L.A. from their hometown of Lafayette, Indiana and after linking up with some other like-minded misogynists, decided L.A. wasn’t a paradise but rather the apocalypse they were warned about in high school English class readings and comic books.

   Captain America's been torn apart, now
   He's a court jester with a broken heart
   He said, "Turn me around and take me back to the start"
   I must be losing my mind, are you blind?
   I've seen it all a million times

   

   Chris Evans wept.

   Rather than return to Indiana where there actually is green grass, Axl, Izzy, and the rest of Guns N’ Roses punched the throttle, deciding this was the life they needed and wanted regardless of consequences - pay your ugly, Hell-worthy dues here, then stride across the globe a rock star for all time. That’s the deal they made. Guns N’ Roses exists within the final chapters of the Decline and Fall of the Rock and Roll Empire (a figment of my imagination that Greil Marcus or Robert Christgau should write). Guns N’ Roses’ existence and their recorded output are problematic at the minimum. One cannot rock star like this anymore and that’s (probably) a good thing. This generation is more empathetic, more aware, and wildly more in tune with a rightfully more decent viewpoint. It’s not that one cannot, it’s that one should not rock star like this. The modern rock star is drenched in irony, embarrassed to commit to excess, afraid to take full flight on stage, and content to stare at their shoes and hit every note as it is on the record. The messiness of existence is not a thing they’re bothered with or willing to accept. As I sit and pour through well-crafted records that inspire empathy and thoughtfulness, records that fit a beautiful groove thing, records that speak to the more progressive evolution of humankind, sometimes, SOMETIMES, I reach for the ugly within us. I reach for Appetite for Destruction as others might reach for Bulfinch's Mythology because I want my heavyweight champion rock gods to embrace their nature and all the hell that comes with it. Anything less would be civilized, and that’s just not rock and roll.