‘Estranged’: the song that inadvertently killed hair metal
Plenty of disasters have come and gone in rock and roll history that we are better off not remembering. The genre is known to be one of the most badass movements to ever come out of the 20th century, but the more that we see someone try to cash in on trends or make massive flameout records, it’s easy to expect disappointment when a band gets too big too fast. While Rod Stewart always has ‘Do Ya Think I’m Sexy’ hanging over him and The Clash have every minute of Cut the Crap to regret, Guns N’ Roses may have been the one band that officially killed hair metal.
Granted, was that really a bad thing? I know I might upset some people who are still proudly sporting their Queensryche shirts and blasting Poison in their free time, but it was clear that the genre had to die by the time Guns N’ Roses showed up, and it wasn’t exactly a bad thing that they debuted when they did.
The band had transformed rock and roll and made everything look badass again, and considering that all anyone had to go on was bands like Warrant in their sleek white onesies, bringing back leather jackets and heavy riffs was all anyone wanted. That might have helped clear the air, but there was also a looming monster hanging over the entire operation once Appetite for Destruction.
Despite being one of the best debuts of the 1980s, any band getting that big that quick was bound to have consequences, and all the ego was left for the MTV screens when the band debuted their singles for Use Your Illusion. While ‘November Rain’ has rightly gone down as its own strange masterpiece for how grandiose it can be, it was easy to see the cracks forming when everything got blown out of proportion. Slash performing in the middle of a desert was one thing, but making a storyline that could have made a decent B-movie almost demanded that you take everything seriously.
‘Don’t Cry’ was even more grandiose, seeing them light up the skyline as they perform on top of a building, but ‘Estranged’ kicked off the final chapter with a pretty clear thud. Because if there’s anything that Guns N’ Roses fans wanted to see, it was Axl Rose jumping into the ocean and swimming with dolphins accompanied by a nine-minute song all about the death of a relationship.
Since Guns N’ Roses’ appeal was about separating them from the overblown sounds of hair metal, this video takes every step in the wrong direction. Not every band member had to go along with what Rose was saying, but by the time the frontman leaps off of a yacht and Slash emerges from the water to shred a guitar solo, you realise that they didn’t simply jump the shark here. They jumped the length of an entire ocean and prayed that they would stick the landing.
And considering what would come only a few months later with grunge, it was safe to say that they didn’t necessarily change rock and roll for the better. The whole reason why bands like Nirvana ended up succeeding was that everything in this video made rock and roll look like a gimmick rather than any sort of emotional experience. So, the best way to get some authenticity back was to have people talking about actual problems rather than the kind of musical soap opera that this video was supposed to be selling us on.
Guns N’ Roses had a chance to be one of the all-time greatest rock and roll bands to walk the Earth, and while they should be held in fairly high regard for their chops on those songs, ‘Estranged’ was rock and roll to the point of self-parody. By this point, rock and roll stripping things back down was no longer a suggestion but a necessity.
