No one ever accused Axl Rose of thinking too small. So why wouldn’t he decide to post an exhaustive summation of his thoughts about the past, current, and future incarnations of Guns N’ Roses on a GNR fan website after years of near-silence on the topic? Axl actually spent much of this past weekend exchanging sometimes hostile messages with the regulars at mygnrforum.com, but the lengthy exegesis he revealed on Sunday exists on a whole new plane. It’s the Chinese Democracy to those earlier posts’ Appetite for Destruction, if you will.
Now, I consider myself a fan of Axl’s recent work as well as his classic years. I really enjoy at least half the songs on Chinese Democracy ("Catcher in the Rye," people!), and I don’t give a damn who knows. But reading to the end of this manifesto, which tips the scales at 4,545 words, was a challenge. Excerpting it almost seems pointless; if you’re interested in Axl’s mindstate, you should probably just click over to his post in all its glory. That said, the major takeaways I got were: 1) Axl still feels pretty bitter toward Slash, 2) Whoever is responsible for keeping track of Axl’s legal paperwork deserves a raise, and 3) Aside from all that, he seems like a fairly reasonable guy who values his fans as well as his (current) bandmates. But that’s just my feeble attempt at summarizing this word swamp. Did anybody who was brave enough to finish reading Axl’s musings see it differently?
More on Guns N’ Roses:
EW.com traced The Road to Chinese Democracy
EW gave Chinese Democracy a B– review
PopWatch pondered Chinese Democracy‘s bizarre cover art
PopWatch reacted to the album’s title track
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Sherlock Holmes way hotter here than in my highbrow literary fantasies
Apparently not.
no
Needs better editing.
Dude needs a new do!
My eyes hurt.
Now that we’ve established the obvious, I would say that he has a slight problem with coherent prose. But he did seem as reasonable as he is capable of being. The fact is, no one came out of that whole situation NOT looking like a butthead. The best thing they all could do is move forward and try to run their yaps as little as possible.
Chad Krueger posts better messages, NICKELBACK RULES!!!!
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I will take your word for it-I guess I do not have the attention span to read it all
As a child of the 80′s, I always had regret that the Gunners couldn’t keep it together, and ironically enough, it was the sober member, Axl, who was the main reason why. I think that if the band could have kept going through the 90′s, they would have been remembered right up there with Led Zep and U2 as the best bands of their era…
I can’t even imagine caring about what’s up with GNR any more than I could about what’s up with Faster Pussycat or Motley Crue. It’s a done deal. It’s nostalgia. It’s not news.
But didn’t he already rant in the song “Get in the Ring?”
THANKS AXL FOR TALKING TO US DIRECTLY! THANK YOU!!!!
axl rose is an imbecile. he took too long to make a crappy cd and look at what he’s doing now. nothing. just go away and deal with your 15 year failure.
I think the prose issue was the website’s fault. You could tell while reading it that he was answering specific questions that had been asked in the forum, but we can’t see the questions. Without being able to see the questions, it just looks like one long essay that repeats itself a lot. That being said, I read the whole thing and after a looooong time as a GNR fan, it was refreshing to get that level of communication from him.
I would question your view of Axl’s lecture as “reasonable.” Swaths of it suggest he’s a few bricks short of a brownstone, and I would hope that EW would ask some of the pressing questions.
For example, why is the mind behind “One In A Million” now trying to start a feud with J.D. Salinger over a 50-year-old book? In this tirade to which you linked, Axl calls his most famous book “utter garbage” that should be removed from schools.