Chinese Democracy, now that we've had time to think (and forget) about it

(and I think that's possibly the best outcome, because after all the time Axl spent on it, it could have been a complete disaster, the "Heaven's Gate" of rock)

Got the damn thing cheap on CD the last weekend. Haven't litened to quite all of it yet. So far I'm inna "but jeez it's not godawful or anything" kinda state o'mind.

nah I think a complete disaster would've been overall a way better outcome than the kind of shrug this elicits. even Use Your Illusion has way more cringey/campy/over the top moments, CD feels surprisingly small and unambitious by comparison.

Yeah, except GnR's least ambitious album (The Spaghetti Incident) is also their second or third best.

I don't care either way, and yet I feel the need to express my apathy by voting.

i wasn't saying ambitious GnR = good GnR, just that the album that took 13 years or whatever felt oddly scaled down compared to the one that took 2-3 years.

That's not that surprising, is it? Taking that long = lots of rethinking/rerecording/reworking = a much less spontaneous-sounding result because it's been analyzed to death before it could make it out of the studio.

yeah but i mean...Axl's raging id is all UYI with crazy rants and spoken word bits and 9-minute epics, and people pretty much expected when the rest of the band left that he'd go even further over the edge. by comparison Chinese Democracy isn't especially indulgent; a lot of songs that sound kind of like "Estranged" or "November Rain" but aren't nearly as long or over the top, no profanity-laced tirades, etc.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

The sorrows:

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/18/axl-rose-sues-his-former-manager-for-5-million/

lol wow Azoff hardballin

Mr. Rose also accuses Mr. Azoff of name-calling. “Out of spite and vindictiveness to cause Rose emotional distress and harm,” his suit says, the lawsuit Mr. Azoff filed in March uses Mr. Rose’s adopted name, William Bailey, instead of his legal name, W. Axl Rose. “Azoff knew that the name William Bailey carries significant emotional damage.”

When asked to comment on Mr. Rose’s suit, Mr. Azoff said in a statement on Tuesday: “On advice of counsel I cannot respond at this time, but will discuss in my upcoming book, ‘My Life With William Bill Bailey.’”

oh man that is cold

ice cold

http://thegreenroombar.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/bill-bailey-l.jpg

w. axl rose, yesterday

Axl was adopted?

No. His birth dad did a runner iirc

Was raised by mom and stepdad

Lots more about Irving Azoff.

azoff manages the eagles so you know he's gotta be some kind of hardcore SOB.

This is the only opinion on "Chinese Democracy" you need: http://estebanbuttez.blogspot.com/2009/01/buttezview-guns-n-roses-chinese.html

Yours at Best Buy for the princely sum of $1.99:

http://a1.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-ash4/208344_10150547813235578_827245577_17914532_3019586_n.jpg

Haha, wow, I'm imagining them to still have warehouse overflowing with this record. Every now and then my local Best Buy puts back up the original special display endcap in the hopes of shedding more copies of this. The major drawback of these exclusivity deals? Target seems to be having trouble dumping their stock of that 3-disc Prince set as well.

Yeah, and Wal-Mart's taken a bath on most of their exclusives. The Eagles and AC/DC were their only hits.

<iframe title="YouTube video player" width="480" height="390" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/WkGsRv1JB1o"; frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkGsRv1JB1o&feature=related

So Best Buy is selling this album for 1.99 this week. Lol they tryin to unleash the backlog of unsold exclusive units?

Look up a couple posts, they've been selling it that cheap for a while now.

oops...this is what happens when I ILX from my phone in a hurry, haha.

Chinese economy.

eheh, funny I listened to this yesterday. bad. sometimes awful.

Holy shit the VINYL is 1.99 too? Woooooow. Getting me a copy, that's an 18 dollar markdown!

ILM will totally love this album in 2045

as a major proponent of both LULU and Use Your Illusion, I am probably the most likely to start championing Chinese Democracy at some point in the next 30 years but I kinda doubt it'll happen

Love Use Your Illusion, don't care about LULU, hate Chinese Democracy. Saw the band a few weeks ago in a small club, and the new stuff just sucked the life out of the show. Might as well have been written and played by robots.

Isn't it about time for ilxor contrarianism about this record to start cropping up about now?

The Fall be better than Guns & Roses.

how many Chinese Democracy songs are they still playing live?

and christ, they had such a long time to make a decent album cover, and they end up using a shit picture and a windows default font.

in theory, I could be willing to try again to like this now. funny, I thought about this just a few days ago... might be the right time !
I'm pretty sure I could enjoy at least a couple of songs. I remember a few bits that weren't so bad.

xpost They played maybe ... five live? And those are long songs. Long, boring songs.

I want to say title track, Shackler's Revenge, Madagascar, some other boring song ...

ILM will totally love this album in 2045

Would 'ave loved that post even more yesterday.

I think I listened to it twice. Of course two times isn't a fair amount of listens to judge a record properly, but I couldn't handle slogging through it a third time.

considering how many people have probably gone WORST ALBUM EVER without even listening to it i think 2 whole listens makes you an expert tbh

ahah. It think I've listened to it more than twice though !
talking about this makes me want to give it a go tonight...

I always make it through the first few songs before getting tired of it. Should really listen to the whole thing. I like "Better" pretty well, sorta almost.

NOT EXACTLY A GLOWING RECOMMENDATION! I couldn't do it. I couldn't let it go without qualifications.

Better was one of the other "new" songs they played.

Why anyone would listen to this more than twice is beyond me. Not every album deserves two listens, let alone three. I think this one's exhausting not-goodness is pretty prima facia.

"Better" is dope imo

this is a really exhausting record but parts of it are good imo

definitely doesn't deserve josh's ire

(anybody could play buckhead).

no, only one contender!

http://932413476.r.lightningbase-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/bucket.jpg

the history of buckethead is so wtf : http://www.bucketheadland.com/visitorcenter/VIC1.html

"Chinese Democracy - the movie (3D)" would be so gorgeous...

http://www.metalinjection.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Faxl-150x150.jpg

It would have to be Chinese Democracy:3-D in IMAX.

ahah. and Axl would want to record a whole new soundtrack for the movie !

Wow, I've been reading some of these Brain interviews. Is he the only guy who has talked about this stuff in detail?
― Josh in Chicago, Monday, April 2, 2012 11:03 PM (3 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The only bandmember, yeah.

It's weird to me how most people concede that Better is awesome but won't give it up for There Was A Time. Buckethead pwns on that song, man.

some dude otm

Buckethead doesn't own on anything, ever. I was just in Louisville, and the science museum there has a traveling exhibit on guitars. About 2/3rds of the electrics are dedicated to these stupid shredder hybrid models, including a little installation dedicated only to Steve Vai, who has this clip playing on a loop of him soloing in the dark with flashlight eyes, colored lights on his frets and lights on his fingers. That's what I think of when I think of Buckethead, only with nunchucks and a KFC bucket on his head.

- Brain slowly realizes that his job is to recreate Frieze's takes, fill for improvised fill; not to add something new, but just strictly to replace Frieze

I'm trying to figure out how this reconciles with the notion that insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

I'm trying to figure out how this reconciles with the notion that insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

this is just some folksy axiom that stops making sense when you think about it, especially when we juxtapose it with these other coffee mug proverbs:

- "if at first you don't succeed, try, try again"
- "the key to success is persistence"
- "never give up on your dreams"
- etc.

All those could apply to Chinese Democracy!

I guess my point is that implications of insanity would probably be better associated with the thing you're trying to accomplish rather than the act of doing something over and over.

(and yes, the description of drum tracking above indicates insanity)

^ It's not trying them again that is crazy, it is hiring a different drummer to play the parts exactly the same as the drummer that preceded him.

it's funny because you'd think Axl would be walking around thinking of new ways to screw over Slash or Duff some more and write them out of GNR history but he's too busy making new grudges and getting revenge on friggin Josh Freese

there's this rumor, not sure if it's true or not, that George Lucas wanted to recreate this creek that he used to play in when he was a kid, and he ordered people to meticulously take notes on the original creek, and then in the new creek, place rocks in the exact same locations that they were in the original stream.

I heard he was making the creek better, inserting cool new sassy-talking rocks and making it so that the fish totally provoked you before you caught them on a hook

guys don't you get it, he wanted the same drumming but with Brain's FEEL

Buckethead doesn't own on anything, ever. I was just in Louisville, and the science museum there has a traveling exhibit on guitars. About 2/3rds of the electrics are dedicated to these stupid shredder hybrid models, including a little installation dedicated only to Steve Vai, who has this clip playing on a loop of him soloing in the dark with flashlight eyes, colored lights on his frets and lights on his fingers. That's what I think of when I think of Buckethead, only with nunchucks and a KFC bucket on his head.

― Josh in Chicago, Thursday, April 5, 2012 1:52 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Whatever dude, the There Was A Time solo is fucking badass

sO I've finally given this another try and went through THE WHOLE album !
actually, it's not that bad.
many songs are not worse than what's on UYIs (which doesn't mean much since there are many tracks I don't like/don't care about on the UYIs...).
and I was surprised to find many that are actually not bad/better than many tracks on YUIs : street of dreams, there was a time, catcher, IRS, prostitute.
I think it might be the GnR album I would rather listen to these days !

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHQw9449ppo

will totally rep for "catcher in the rye" and "there was a time," although this is kind of an exhausting record to listen to. there's no space that's not crammed with sound.

find this band totally loathsome in general and am now listening to this on YT for yuks and... I dunno this mostly sounds like how I remember UYI sounding back when I heard it in college.

So any bets on when the follow up to Chinese Democracy is going to happen?

well that was tiresome, I almost made it to the end but I gave up with four minutes left to go. so much of that proto-Jim Dandy shrieking blech.

I love Guns 'n Roses, like this album, but despite this, it is still my lifelong dream to throw a potato at Axl Rose during a concert.

― Heroin Kills (Brad Nowell's Soiled Undergarments), Sunday, May 9, 2010 2:24 AM (nine years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Why "potato"?

― t**t, Monday, May 10, 2010 12:36 PM (nine years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Taste's very Estranged!

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/Lm5rAq8K1kE/maxresdefault.jpg

aww, mr and mrs potato head are still very much in love

I just bought it for the first time for $1.39.
It was a compact disc.