The shocking moment in 1992 when Axl Rose used a translator to incite an Argentinian riot
When Guns N’ Roses initially started making music, they did so by bringing an end to the hair metal scene in Los Angeles.
There were a lot of people who loved the hair metal scene, but for Guns N’ Roses, the whole thing was style over substance. People were taking too long to perfect their image and were putting out boring music in the process. It was time to put an end to it, and they figured the most effective way to do that was to put together an album of hard-hitting, energetic and aggressive songs.
That’s exactly what fans got with the debut album Appetite for Destruction. From start to finish, the whole record was made up of hard riffs, aggressive (and somewhat questionable) lyrics, and the screeching vocals of Axl Rose. This was a record that people could open mosh pits and riot to, and that’s exactly what they did when they went to Guns N’ Roses shows.
“I fucking hated the whole scene, man […] In Los Angeles, it was just bullshit. And we were coming up in the midst of all that,” declared Slash, “Everybody was fucking converting to the industry standard to get a record deal and get girls, this whole thing. Where our band was coming from was the antithesis of all that, and it’s something I’m really proud of.”
When the band moved onto their next major albums, Use Your Illusion I and II, they still had a lot of those hard-hitting and aggressive songs, but were also much more willing to play around with style. Tracks like ‘November Rain’, ‘Don’t Cry’, ‘Estranged’, and many more were all examples of a much softer side of the band. It led to them growing in popularity, and they began touring all over the world.
While it may have been the albums with a softer sound which led to Guns N’ Roses really taking off worldwide, the crowd’s attitudes didn’t really alter. Even on the Use Your Illusion tour, crowds were opening up mosh pits and exhibiting violent behaviour. It didn’t help that a lot of the time, the band’s lead singer, Axl Rose, encouraged as much.
As the tour was winding to an end, Guns N’ Roses had a handful of shows left in South America, and they were getting a lot of negative press. The coverage of the shows had worried Argentina’s president so much that he told young people they shouldn’t attend the gig for their own safety. He admitted it would have made more sense to just stop the shows altogether, but the president knew that would probably lead to bad press. “Prohibiting them [from performing] would’ve been the logical thing for us to do,” he said, “but that would’ve certainly given rise to the world to criticise us and call us authoritarian”.
The shows went ahead, but not without incident. Fans were rabid and wound up throwing things at the band on the stage. Axl Rose decided to call these troublemakers out and told other people in the crowd to turn on anyone they saw throwing something. However, given that a lot of people in the crowd didn’t speak English, he had to bring a translator on stage to announce as much. Whether the instructions were delivered with quite as much punch as Rose is for debate, but his commands to incite violence certainly stirred the pot in Argentina.
“We have some really fucking stupid people here tonight,” he said, “who think that throwing things at the stage will relate into a better show […] beat the fucking shit out of them”.
