Buckethead, Bumblefoot, and Brain

Not the title of a Roald Dahl book. Sadly.

An article in last week's NYT led me to contemplate, as I often do, the legacy of Guns n' Roses. Apparently, Axl and whoever else is serving time in what surely is the dreariest gig in rock are releasing a new song--obscurely titled "Shackler's Revenge"--in September, as a track on the Rock Band 2 video game. The announced deal between Microsoft, MTV, and Universal points to the new tactics music labels are using to counter the staggering fall in record sales since music downloading and copying software became widely used. I had always thought that the fun in playing Guitar Hero and games like it was rocking along to songs you already know; now, apparently, it's in paying for and consuming new songs by utterly irrelevant bands. What's next, Chris Brown's Doublemint Gum jingle on Guitar Hero 4?

But . . . Guns n' Roses. Sorry, "Guns n' Roses," which now means Axl Rose and random dudes from Nine Inch Nails, The Replacements, and Axl's hometown. Not to mention Buckethead, Bumblefoot, and Brain--as if dudes with cool nicknames could replace Slash and Izzy. Still working on that fucking record, ten years later.

Guns n' Roses was once the greatest rock n' roll band in the world. Raw, edgy, and punk as fuck in that glam way, back when those two things were really kind of the same thing, they channelled the Stones and Aerosmith but made them dirtier, meaner, smellier. Appetite For Destruction is a nearly flawless punk album--even though Slash and Izzy rip blues riffs that Greg Ginn could never have learned, Axl's snarl was scarier and his tales of the urban underbelly are more gripping than anything Henry Rollins ever barked incoherently into a microphone. Even the power ballad is dark: Slash's bitter solo over the long minor-key coda to "Sweet Child O' Mine" turns the world's shittiest love poem into some kind of nightmare.

Of course, Guns n' Roses then became the worst band in the world--or rather, the exemplar of everything that sucks about rock n' roll. By the time Axl was turning into Brian Wilson by way of Howard Hughes, they'd already released an unforgivably sloppy acoustic half-album (featuring the unforgivably stupid "One In A Million") and perhaps the ultimate paradigm of the over-indulgent, massively pretentious double album: the Use Your Illusions, which sure rocked back in 1991 but sure seem pretty unlistenable now. "Get In The Ring?" Really? Two versions of "Don't Cry"? Those terrible Dylan and McCartney covers? November Fucking Rain? The grungy assholes who ruled the Sunset Strip and out-Motleyed the Crue would have thrown a Jack Daniels bottle at the TV screen and trashed all their gear if they could have seen the embarassments they'd become.

What's sad about it is that by the time Axl famously threatened Kurt Cobain at the 1992 MTV Music Video Awards, he had completed the transformation Cobain himself refused to ever make. A punk kid, hating his shitty Indiana town, getting beaten up by the jocks and robbed by the black dudes, moving to L.A. for his shot at some kind of redemptive rock and roll glory--and then he's Peter Frampton, he's Rod Stewart in the 70s, he's Phil Spector, he's writing suck-my-cock songs and changing his costume every other tune, blowing all his money on pig roasts and music videos and cocaine and firing Slash. Oh, and getting Sebastian Bach to be his spokesman--just like Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash!

FUN TEST: How long you can watch this clip of Axl N' Chumps playing "Welcome to the Jungle" in 2002?



I lasted twenty seconds or so before turning it off in disgust, which puts it right up there on the Unwatchability Index with George W. Bush and 2 Girls 1 Cup.

The October Protocol does not recommend that you spend any time looking for the actual 2Girls1Cup video.