The Guns N’ Roses song that Axl Rose regrets making
At first glance, it would be easy to mistake Guns N’ Roses for a street gang. Before they had some of the biggest hits of the hair metal movement, every member of the band looked like they had crawled out of the gutter, using only guitars and microphones instead of switchblade knives. While they had their dangerous side, Guns N’ Roses were still a family…until the early 1990s.
After the massive success of their album Appetite for Destruction, frontman Axl Rose believed the band needed to aim far bigger for their next release. Instead of just making another rock record in their own successful mould, Rose was convinced they needed more material, setting out to make a double album of all new songs on what became Use Your Illusion.
Despite being composed as a group effort, this era of Guns N’ Roses is the time in which it starts becoming Rose’s band that happens to feature the original members. During the sessions, drummer Steven Adler was fired, and rhythm guitarist Izzy Stradlin quit once the band took to the road after the album’s release. While the finished product might have been a labour of love, one of the songs on Use Your Illusion II hasn’t sat well with Rose over the years.
When writing material for the new album, the original idea was to make a song called ‘Why Do You Look At Me When You Hate Me’, which was intended as a jab back at the critics. Since their inception, GNR had always battled the press, occasionally getting into fights with journalists who insisted they were terrible and wouldn’t amount too much outside of the hair metal movement. Renamed ‘Get In the Ring’, Rose intended to take all his pent-up frustrations out on everyone who ever dragged the Guns N’ Roses name through the mud.
Although the song starts like any traditional kiss-off song, the tune gets frighteningly literal during the breakdown, where Rose names different journalists that have slagged off GNR in the past and tells them to suck his…appendage. While the lyrics could have been chalked up to Rose’s traditional masculinity, he eventually came to regret the final recording.
When speaking with That Metal Show years after the fact, Rose mentioned that calling these journalists about by name wasn’t his idea, recalling, “There was this blank space in the song, and they said ‘Why don’t you just go in and go off on them’ and I eventually did, and everybody was happy with it. I didn’t realise the political wars between different publicists at the record labels and their relationships with magazines like Rolling Stone and SPIN. So I was set up, and no one stepped forward to say anything”.
Without the context of the names, though, the song still fits in with the Guns N’ Roses ethos from the time. At this point, they had become one of the biggest bands in the world, and a song about them going off on their critics is practically a victory lap as they pour over all of the money they’ve made as rock stars.
While there might have been some manufactured animosity from the band, it backfired a little bit as well. Since those journalists were still working, it probably didn’t hurt them to add ‘dissed by Axl Rose’ to their resumes.
