(3 of 3)
The Use Your Illusion albums seem certain to keep selling well. Although the first album is better than the second, and although neither contains a song as memorable as Sweet Child o' Mine or Paradise City from the Appetite for Destruction album, both are exciting, well-produced records, with plenty of catchy rockers and only a handful of outright duds. The guitars are hot, the drumming is hot, the vocals are red-hot. Anyone who can get past the offensive lyrics will be buying one of the best rock albums of the year. Or two of them.
Assisting the layman in getting past the lyrics will be the cottage industry of those rock critics who earn a living by explaining away the Gunners' verbal excesses as "satire," "parody" or a crude but sincere attempt to achieve a sort of audiophonic cinema verite. These are the same people who fashion byzantine intellectual justifications for the vicious anti-Semitism of the rap group Public Enemy or the uninterrupted verbal degradation of women that is the stock-in-trade of 2 Live Crew.
It is a very troubling thought that never in the history of the business has the record industry has been so dependent for its financial well being on the success of such social misfits. Whereas in the past the industry has looked for a shot in the arm from the cuddly Beatles, the enigmatic Michael Jackson or the populist Bruce Springsteen, it now turns its yearning eyes to a bunch of young men who, by even their own admission, are "sociopsychotic."
And whiners. Yes, one increasingly grating thing about the band is their inexhaustible capacity for self-pity. Having been coddled from birth by their record company and by MTV, and having been given a free ride by the rock press, the Gunners nevertheless cannot get off the whinemobile, as they moan about the demanding life of a rock star. According to Forbes, the Gunners will earn $25 million in 1990-91. These guys don't know how to take yes for an answer.
So they retreat into Guns-vs.-the-world self-pity. "Don't damn me when I speak a piece of my mind," sniffles Rose in the band's most annoying new number. "Cause silence isn't golden when I'm holding it inside." Poor Axl. A talented vocalist and a whirling dervish of a stage performer, Rose is nonetheless one very disturbed human being, who sings, "I'm a cold heartbreaker/ Fit ta burn and I'll rip your heart in two." This is probably true. But even truer, and more appropriate, are the words once sung by his obvious intellectual forebear, the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz:
I would not be just a nuffin',
My head all full of stuffin',
My heart all full of pain.
And perhaps I'd deserve you
And be even worthy of you,
If I only had a brain.