How Guns N’ Roses killed a generation of rock and roll
There’s no defining moment where a musical genre dies. As much as people like the idea of having a clean break in history, nothing is that linear, and even when something becomes yesterday’s news, there will still be people blasting the classics that they used to love with zero shame. But there was a moment when stadium rock became one of the worst things in the world, and it’s all the fault of Guns N’ Roses.
Granted, it’s not like they were trying to be the last great rock band by any stretch of the imagination. Most of GNR’s greatest tunes were simply an extension of what rock had been building to after the 1970s. Think somewhere between the seedy nature of The Rolling Stones’s 1970s material and the first wave of punk, and that’s pretty close to what they were working with.
Then again, the problem with them was that rock and roll had changed during that time. Since Van Halen debuted in 1978, every single band in Los Angeles seemed to take the wrong lessons from David Lee Roth and Eddie Van Halen. Suddenly, the only thing that mattered was the look, and as much as their idols were David Bowie and Marc Bolan, acts like Poison and Winger weren’t nearly as talented as their heroes were back in the day.
So now that guitar heroes like Slash were taking over the world, the entire music industry was turned on its head. Now, people were gravitating to songs like ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ and ‘Sweet Child O’Mine’ because they felt real. Since those were doing major numbers, who the hell was going to bother checking out what the next song Cinderella had in the pipeline or what Faster Pussycat had in their arsenal?
Grunge may take a lot of the blame for murdering hair metal, but Guns N’ Roses were there from the beginning, reminding everyone that something drastically needed to change. Once grunge got underway, though, Axl Rose singlehandedly murdered a completely different generation of rock and roll as well.
Once Use Your Illusion was up and running, Rose’s decision to disappear up his own ass during the videos for ‘November Rain’ and ‘Estranged’ made the entire concept of being a rockstar look sad. The sequel to The Decline of Western Civilization had already exposed the LA rock scene for being incredibly seedy, but now all of the excesses that the group talked about getting seemed less like a dream scenario and more like something written out of a bizarre nightmare, especially when Rose decided that his calling would be to jump in the ocean and swim with dolphins.
Compare that with Nirvana, and it’s almost a night and day difference in terms of an artist’s motivation. Kurt Cobain wanted to make music that people could relate to and scream along with, whereas the only people who could possibly relate to what Rose lived in limousines and never strayed from a life of luxury.
And looking at what rock radio has turned into, many bands that have tried recapturing that spirit with something that sounds like Guns N’ Roses does start to sound a little passe. Plenty of great rock acts have come out in the interim, but if one compares Queens of the Stone Age to Guns N’ Roses, for example, the reason Josh Homme works so well is that he’s still in it for the music and could care less about what anyone else thought.
That goes back to that punk rock ethos that Guns started with, but by taking themselves way too seriously towards the end, Rose turned the group from a rough-and-tumble street gang to a band that thrives on excess rather than the raw love of making music. While the return of Duff McKagan and Slash is a hopeful sign that things will get back to the way they were, it’s always disheartening to see the leader of a generation turn their back on the audience.
