“We all played a little harder”: when Living Colour confronted “racist” Axl Rose
During the 1980s, you could bet that any live performance of ‘Cult of Personality’ would see Living Colour emit the type of upbeat, anarchic energy that threatened to hold a mirror up to society’s prejudices. In this case, it was in the face of Guns N’ Roses’ Axl Rose, who, while touring together, made sure he gave the hard rock entity a good reason to fight back.
Uncompromising from day one, Living Colour set a new bar for explosiveness in hard rock, infusing the genre with subtle notes of jazz and funk to create a sound that was unequivocally barrier-breakingly powerful. Emerging in the late 1980s as what seemed like a fully established sonic entity, Living Colour achieved an awe-inspiring feat by bursting onto the scene with songs like ‘Cult of Personality’.
At the crux of this fiery dynamic was Vernon Reid, whose virtuosic guitar playing gave the group the type of searing intensity that stemmed from an authentic inner viscera, both from sheer musical passion and raw personal experiences. Reid’s explosive solos bend, power chords, rhythms, and emotional charge on stage made him stand out as one of the most defining guitars of the time, earning the band recognition against names like Guns N’ Roses.
However, in a music industry plagued by racism and racial bias, audiences were particularly critical of Black artists during the ’80s, even if they appeared alongside other white-dominated bands. This was the case during the same decade when Prince opened for The Rolling Stones and was pelted with food and other objects by angry hecklers wanting him to get off the stage. For Living Colour, sharing the stage with the Stones and the Roses would be a little less hostile, but that didn’t stop them from getting heat from one of the band’s very own: Axl Rose.
At the time, the Roses were being scrutinised for their use of homophobic and racist stereotyping in ‘One in a Million’, and Reid made headlines after speaking against it to the media, which evidently irked Rose. Speaking to LA Times, Reid recalled a moment during their opening night when he encountered a frustrated Rose backstage, who approached him with a fervour that seemingly stemmed from absolutely nowhere.
“First thing out of his mouth: ‘You got a problem with me, man?’ I said, ‘What you talking about?’ So then he goes on, ‘It’s in the media that I’m some sort of racist, man. I ain’t no damn racist,'” he said, claiming that Rose refused to back down and “went down this long list” to prove that he wasn’t what people were saying he was. Interestingly, he allegedly referred to a handful of harmful epithets to prove his point. To make matters worse, the Roses then took to the stage, and Rose introduced the song with a string of slurs.
The following night, Reid felt determined to share his position on the matter. When Living Colour went on to perform, just before ‘Cult of Personality’, the guitarist took the opportunity to call out racist and homophobic language, setting the stage for a fiery rendition that would go down in history as one of their most emotive performances yet. “We all played a little harder,” recalled Will Calhoun, adding, “I broke a few more sticks that night.”
Although Living Colour never professed to be a solely political band, especially not concerning race, instances like these reminded them of the harsh realities that permeated many of their own spaces. Muzz Skillings shared this sentiment when looking back at Rose’s toxic outburst and how, in their experience, it proves that “certain attitudes don’t change.”
Even though figures like Rose feel an unwavering sense of pride when “proving” their anti-racist position, it becomes even more damaging when they weaponise racism for personal gain or attention, perpetuating the very issues they claim to oppose.
