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).
It would be unfair to attribute all, or even most, of Guns N' Roses' success to their unrelentingly sexist and uncompromisingly violent lyrics or to their forays into xenophobia, racism and sadomasochism. Rock 'n' roll has always been filled with sexist, violent bands, but very few of them sell 14 million copies the first time out of the chute. What sets the Gunners apart is that they are a genuinely electrifying band that neither looks nor sounds like the interchangeable Whitesnakes, Poisons and Bon Jovis that make up the drab MTV universe. What the Gunners play is very, very good. What the Gunners say is very, very bad. Of 30 songs on the new albums, 10 contain the F word. That's why several chains -- including K Mart and Wal-Mart -- won't stock them.