The long-awaited and nearly mythical Chinese Democracy has finally arrived, and Axl Rose is nowhere to be found.
It’s been reported that the Guns N’ Roses front man (and tortured genius or egomaniacal buffoon, take your pick) has been missing for two months on the eve of the release of his magnum opus. It’s been 14 years in the making, and the man just can’t step forward and take credit for the finished product.
It’s a fitting conclusion to rock’s most infamous ordeal.
With the album on the shelves, the public has been left in an oddly familiar situation—just like the last decade and a half, we’re wondering where Axl is, how he’s doing, and what exactly he’s thinking.
I wasn’t even a huge Guns N’ Roses fan growing up, but like many others, I’ve been anticipating this album ever since I first heard about it. I longed to experience the purported masterpiece in the making that tortured its creator, principally because there’s nothing I love more than a sweeping epic. My favourite pieces of art are usually those that astonish and take my breath away. While I’m normally a huge supporter of ambition, Axl Rose’s Chinese Democracy was simply too much for me to handle. To my dismay, the album I had waited for turned out to be so overwhelming and loaded with frills that I felt physically tired and a even little queasy by the time it was over.
To me, Chinese Democracy proves one thing beyond a shadow of a doubt: excess is the opposite of the rock n’ roll spirit.
After the millions of dollars wasted on the making of this album, it’s easy to forget that Guns N’ Roses came from nothing, sleeping together in the same filthy one bedroom apartment as they crafted their classic 1987 album Appetite for Destruction.
20 years later, the excessive funding and massive ambition Appetite spawned has led us to Chinese Democracy, a sprawling 71-minute mess of wailing solos, orchestral flourishes, and multiple bridges stacked one on top of the next.
It’s the sonic equivalent of a rich, bloated Elvis Presley being undone by the endless number of fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches he could finally afford. It’s musical gluttony—so epic it makes Oasis’ Be Here Now (another famous crime of excess) sound like it was recorded overnight in a garbage can.
And that’s precisely the problem—there’s so much of everything that nothing in particular gets the chance to stand out.
The saddest part of it all is that the minute details (the ones that Rose obsessed over) are mere filler, obscuring the melodies that are best at their most simple. Rose should have trusted his instincts and let his considerable songwriting talent speak for itself.
The album’s most promising moments, like the sneering title track, the towering chorus of “Shackler’s Revenge,” and the stunning power ballads “Catcher In the Rye” and “Street of Dreams” are weighed down by needless arrangements and interludes.
By the time each five-minute epic concludes, you’ve completely forgotten the part of the song you wanted to hum.
Along the way, Axl employs many different voices, most of which are so shockingly incongruous (no surprise, given that it took 14 years to produce 14 tracks) that the album often resembles a compilation. There’s the familiar screeching menace (“I.R.S.”), the off-Broadway leading man (“This I Love”), and even a brief and confusing Count Dracula impersonation (“Sorry”).
And that’s ignoring the songs that just plain suck (“If the World,” “Scraped,” “Riad N’ the Bedouins”).
But the sheer amount of incredible solos and brilliant melodies make it clear that Axl Rose slaved over this album, and he deserves to be commended for it. In a way, I’m strangely proud of him. But the bad decisions far outweigh the good ones.
One lyric from “Better” sums up the entire Chinese Democracy ordeal: “The melody inside of me still searches for solution.”
No matter how long he worked on it, no matter that it’s now sitting on the shelves—in Axl’s mind, the album is never really done. Maybe that’s why he can’t face up to the current barrage of both positive and negative criticism. Axl’s right back where he spent the last 14 years—alone, hiding out.
In the end, Chinese Democracy is the sound of one man doing everything he can to produce something perfect, battling all of his natural instincts along the way. The result is disappointing, because the final product turned out to be simply too much of a good thing—too much of everything.
