Would ‘Use Your Illusion’ have worked as a single album?
You think of Los Angeles and music plays. Depending on your taste, those sounds may vary wildly from surf rock to hippie music, west side hip-hop to the fiery distortion of glam, but the music is inevitable all the same. It’s hard to imagine any scene in one of the culture capitols of the United States going through a dip, but that’s precisely what was happening to rock in the 1980s… until Guns N’ Roses came along.
It wasn’t that the rock scene was stagnant, but hair metal was taking over, and the genre had lost a lot of substance in the process. Songs were predictable, and very much like the hair of those in the bands, the whole thing revolved around volume and not much else. It was a scene that was scraping the bottom of the barrel, and yet, during this period of desolation, along came Guns N’ Roses, who injected venom back into the LA scene.
With hair that could rival any of the other bands on the circuit and a sound that completely blew them out of the water, Guns N’ Roses were immediately impossible to ignore. Whether you loved them or hated them, the band’s energy, paired with the face-melting guitar work of Slash and the biting vocals of Axl Rose, was as undeniable as it was loud.
Their debut album, Appetite For Destruction, was one-note, but what a sweet-sounding note it was. The music was hard; each guitar chord was laced with more distortion than venue walls knew what to do with, and Rose’s lyrics were sung with vigour. It was an aggressive album with songs about sex, drugs and partying. It felt like the perfect album to establish a sound that Guns N’ Roses could stick to, but that wasn’t the case.
After the poorly received second album Lies, Guns N’ Roses were keen on exploring new sounds and styles of music, which they did on their record Use Your Illusion I and II. For their third and fourth release, they decided to release two records on the same day with some of their most experimental music to date. Some tracks like ‘Double Talkin Jive’ still had that heavy Guns N’ Roses sound, but they also wrote ballads, tracks that varied in style and structure, operatic in their conception and bordering on ten minutes long.
It’s clear that the mindset of the band was one where rules didn’t apply. Anything the band wanted to give a go, they did, which included acoustic songs, heart-wrenching big numbers, covers of Bob Dylan and Paul McCartney and recordings taken from operating theatres. Because of this vast range, the songs were put onto two records. Of course, as is always the case when a band tries many new things at once, some songs are better than others.
While Use Your Illusion I and II contain some of the band’s most famous numbers, such as ‘November Rain’, ‘Estranged’, and ‘Knocking on Heaven’s Door’, they also contain some duds. The band could have trimmed down both albums and just put the good songs on one record, but would it still have proven to be a success if they did that?
The bottom line is it would still have done well. The good songs on Use Your Illusion I and II are too good to be ignored. That being said, the double release didn’t just facilitate the creation of some mediocre songs; it also showed how ambitious the band were. Guns N’ Roses proved they were more than just another hair metal band; they were experimental music lovers who wanted to push their creative boundaries. It set a precedent for the band and stands up as one of the best and most ambitious records they’ve ever made.
