‘Use Your Illusion’ is biggest downfall of Guns N’ Roses
For a brief moment in time, it looked like Guns N’ Roses was going to be the band to bring rock and roll back to the masses all over again.
The era of glam rock had its time in the spotlight, but even in the middle of the Sunset Strip, this band of musical gutter rats were giving every single teased-hair hopeful a run for their money whenever they came out with tunes like ‘Welcome to the Jungle’. Every other “badass” rock and roll band in town looked like The Archies by comparison, but while Use Your Illusion attempted to deliver on every promise they made, it wasn’t exactly what everyone wanted.
Then again, there’s only one person who seems to understand what Use Your Illusion was all about, and that person’s name is Axl Rose. Rose was looking to make the kind of album that would make every single person forget about what they had made on Appetite for Destruction, and while you can hear the budget on display throughout every single note of this record, it does have more than a few moments where people started to scratch their heads.
But even though countless artists and the band themselves have pointed out that the piano ballads were dumb, that’s the most low-hanging fruit you can lobby towards this record. In fact, a song like ‘November Rain’ is enough to be considered an iconic song of its era at this point, and the idea of someone putting any scorn on that tune is either tone-deaf or not paying attention to where the band had been going for the past few years.
No, the real problem has to do with what was going on around the record. It was bad enough that they had stretched the album out to a double record of all new material, but someone here is the album that should have come out after Appetite, that never saw the light of day. Tunes like ‘Civil War’ could have been a decent epic for that kind of album, and songs like ‘Right Next Door to Hell’ and ‘Bad Obsession’ were examples of them cutting loose and making a hard-edged version of something that The Stones might have done.
That is, until you look at the lyrics of every single track. Rose is far from a bad lyricist when looking at some of the best songs on the project, but considering how much drama was surrounding the record before it even came out, some of his complaints read like a rockstar high on his ego. His tales of heartache do sound genuine, but it’s hard to really take that passion seriously when he spends an entire song complaining about music journalists who don’t like his music.
And that’s all before the band even went out on tour. Use Your Illusion was the kind of record that deserved a massive trek across the world, but when looking through every show, it’s not like the band were having a good time by the end. Rose wasn’t even showing up to some shows or arriving super late to everything, and if Izzy Stradlin only lasted a few months on the road, everyone else wasn’t exactly happy that Rose was throwing parties behind the scenes that they didn’t know about.
Every single piece of the tour and the album already showed a band on the brink of disaster, but the real damage came in September of 1991. Even though they were on the same label, Nirvana was out to leave bands like Guns N’ Roses in the dust, and while Kurt Cobain did have a few public spats with Rose over the years, it wasn’t hard to see who came out the victor. Sure, Rose could talk a big game, but since the rest of the world was pairing things down and making more authentic rock and roll, Use Your Illusion only served to look even more embarrassing when looking at the over-the-top videos for a song like ‘Estranged’.
The image of Slash emerging from the water to play a guitar solo wasn’t where their audience was anymore, and while there are probably a lot of Pearl Jam fans that also bought Use Your Illusion, it only took a couple of weeks after the tour ended before the rest of Guns started licking their wounds and trying their best to keep things together on “The Spaghetti Incident?” before Slash bailed on the whole thing.
The world seemed to be their hard rock oyster when GNR set out to make the best album of their lives, but even if the songs themselves range from questionable to downright excellent, the next wave had them dealing with something they never thought they would have to worry about: being boring. No one cared about the ‘World’s Most Dangerous Band’ anymore, and even if they had given it their all, Use Your Illusion is always going to be their most ambitious album and also a scapegoat for why everything went wrong.
