“The guy sings so great”: The rock singer Axl Rose claimed “buried him”
There’s never been a standard definition for what a great rock and roll singer is supposed to sound like. Some may have the showstopping voices like Steve Perry, and others might sound like they have a frog in their throat like Bob Dylan, but looking at the hierarchy of musicians, it’s more about the kind of personality that you bring across rather than the raw talent that you have as a singer. And while Axl Rose did have the chops to pull off some insane vocal runs, he knew that some people were well out of his reach.
But given who Rose grew up listening to, it was almost expected of him to be one of the finest singers in the world. Some people might not have been able to latch onto his screechy voice at the beginning of Guns N’ Roses’ career, but since he grew up listening to everyone from Elton John to Queen, he always prioritised singing blistering high notes rather than screaming for the sake of screaming.
That was always the beautiful contradiction about Guns N’ Roses. They had a much deeper musical well to draw from than the rest of the LA rock scene, but they also weren’t afraid to show their punk influences either, almost as if Rose was trying to shoot for a vocal range that was halfway between Freddie Mercury’s operatic voice and the thick snarl of John Lydon.
When the band was coming up, though, music was already in a state of change. Hair metal was dying, and while many people may have told the story about how grunge killed the genre, Guns N’ Roses were the ones to fire the warning shots, given the fact that their badass tunes were bound to make everything from Winger to Warrant sound incredibly lacklustre by comparison. As soon as Nirvana hit the scene, though, it was all over for anything on Sunset Strip.
Rose was able to survive with his integrity intact, but before Nevermind became the biggest record of the 1990s, he was already keeping his ear to the ground. Nirvana may have been the ones who broke through first, but when looking at the heavyhitters of the Seattle scene today, Soundgarden had been slogging it out for years in the underground, and at that point, Rose wasn’t only paying attention. He was downright scared when he heard what Chris Cornell could do with his voice.
Compared to every artist in Seattle, Cornell’s Robert Plant-esque wail was the closest thing to a rock god that the Seattle scene could muster, and Rose felt like he needed to step up his game if he wanted to compete with that, saying, “I keep trying to find things to open myself up to. I enjoy Soundgarden. The singer just buries me. The guy sings so great.” But looking at what Soundgarden was making at the time, it’s not like the feeling was mutual.
After all, grunge was all about being as authentic as possible, and to them, Rose represented all of the pageantry of rock and roll at its most insipid. Guns N’ Roses could have easily come out with a song that was all about misogyny and destruction on ‘It’s So Easy’, but looking at a song like ‘Big Dumb Sex’, Cornell was going out of his way to point out how stupid it was for rockstars to talk about smut all the time.
Although Cornell eventually embraced his rock god tendencies later on in life and even went on to work with Slash on his solo record, he and Rose came from two completely different worlds. Both of them had a healthy respect for the classic rock stars of the 1970s, but there was no way that Cornell would be caught singing something like ‘One in a Million’ during his prime.
