April Fools Record Club - Guns N' Roses, "Chinese Democracy"

This is not a bad album. Only foolishness, in my opinion, is the drawn-out, cluster-too-many-cooks boondoggle that Mr. Rose fostered throughout the making of this record that began in 1997 and finished all aspects of recording in 2007.

"Chinese Democracy" 

Drummer on the track came up with the Scorpions' re-riff. Some of the nu-metal flourishes abrade when comparing to the slick metal punk of Appetite but feels like an exciting progression from Use Your Illusion.

"Shackler's Revenge"

Sounds exactly like anything off of Buckethead's 2005 release "Enter the Chicken".

"Better"

I can't nail down what alterna-metal this most sounds like, but it's definitely of its time: 2004 - 2007.

"Street of Dreams"

I do not like auto-tuned Axl.

"If the World"

Axl's Bond/Shaft theme. 

"There Was A Time"

Axl's Trip Hop ballad. Oh those strings!

"Catcher In The Rye"

This, along with the preceding two tracks, are sonically similar and arranged similarly, at least to my non-studio engineer ears.

"Scraped"

Back to the rockin' and shockin'.

"Riad'N The Bedouins"

Is it Schnauss or not? It's Schnauss. Axl's try at a Bedouin call is, um, lacking.

"Sorry"

Uncle Cracker or Riff Raff to cover this in the next few years? I'd take Riff Raff.

And, that's it for now. Maybe I'll listen to the rest of it.

My relationship with Guns N’ Roses stretches back to listening to Appetite for Destruction as a middle schooler. I thought it was an all-time great album, and was very impressed by how many times Axl Rose said “fuck”. In spite of that, I never really got into the Use Your Illusion albums, have generally found the longer tracks from those albums a bit dull, and no longer have particularly strong feelings about GnR’s music. I still think that first album is quite good (with the exception of the gross bit in “Rocket Queen” where they sample sex moans of a couple’s candidly recorded intercourse), and a highlight of a very dumb, mostly bad, era of rock music that I nevertheless maintain a certain fondness for.

All that is to say that Chinese Democracy is better than I remembered it. It’s dumb and takes cues from embarrassing subgenres, but I think it’s pretty fun a lot of the time. That said, I think the best tracks come towards the beginning of the album, and then later on you get the boring, longer tracks. And the album itself is just way too long. Cut this thing down to a trim 45 minutes, and I think you have a very respectable album here.

Re: “Madagascar”, Axl Rose apparently said of the MLK audio: “Dr. King's words have been edited together from multiple speeches as to bring the sentiments of his messages into the context of this particular song and to present their importance as strongly as possible.” Which is a very dumb rock star guy way of signaling ones support for racial justice (and also, the editing also about as sanitized and stripped of content as you can make MLK’s speeches while still retaining some of the sense of his words). But also not surprising that the guy who wrote the incredibly racist (also xenophobic and homophobic) “One in a Million” would have a muddled and not very insightful take on anti-racism twenty years later once he’d decided that maybe he shouldn’t use slurs in his songs.

Also, looking over the Wikipedia page for this album, I was amused to discover that the AV Club gave this album an A-, with Chuck Klosterman as guest reviewer.

I think Rando has already hit the crux of it. If Chinese Democracy was felled by anything, it's the colossal weight of expectations against that frankly ridiculous budget and decade-plus development cycle. One can imagine Axl Rose at his most Dewey Cox, demanding 50,000 didgeridoos and tearing porcelain sinks from the walls, all while the increasingly strange but unquestionably gifted cadre of guitarists file in to lay down the latest track's ninth solo. In fact, Chinese Democracy sold well, and it reviewed pretty well, too. For the humble listener, nothing short of a masterpiece could have felt worth the wait, and this is no masterpiece. But after 15 years since its release and giving it a listen for the first time in probably a decade, the reality of Chinese Democracy remains the same: it's just a pretty darn good rock record.

It's also too damn long. I've always felt the front half was stronger, a belief I reconfirmed in my recent listen, but I still don't know how much to attribute that to exhaustion as the album pummels well past the 60-minute mark. For some of these tracks, especially the later ones, I don't have much if anything to say. Let's listen to Chinese Democracy.

"Chinese Democracy"
Banger. Absolute banger. Chonky fatboy riff, killer tone, and all of the album's future excesses on full display. Not content to simply repeat the bridge, every iteration features a fresh blitzkrieg guitar solo noodling around in the background. The extended outro gives the song a breathless urgency. A desperation. Then capped off with that monstrous bass drum hit. Oh yeah, I'm in.

"Shackler's Revenge"
Banger. Absolute banger. In the tradition of school shooting songs, it's probably on the lesser end lyrically. "I don't believe there's a reason" was not especially helpful in 2008, and in 2023 ... well, Jesus Christ. But the thing just slaps so hard. From the abrasive opening screech, to the unexpected, offkilter, and high-as-fuck melody in the chorus (and how many Axls are singing right there?), to Bumblefoot's ultra-technical fret work on the solo. We're two for two.

"Better"
Banger. The opening threatens a much-too-early ballad before rope-a-doping into another rager. Some great stuff here. I like at 3:10 after the bridge we get, like, two measures worth of syncopated prog-metal, then some Jack White kind of Icky Thump stuff, and then back to business. You start to realize why the album took this long. It's never just another verse, never just a "repeat the chorus melody" guitar solo, never the same lick. Always be riffing. Also there's a world-weariness to Axl's vocals here that I quite like. Lyrically this is familiar ground for him, but rather than feeling redundant, it feels lived in. Like, "yep, this shit again!" One of his strongest vocals on the album for me.

"Street of Dreams"
I was prepared to agree with ganews above about the piano-driven tracks, but you know what? For this one I'm gonna say banger. This is classically good rock ballad songwriting. "Street of Dreams" is a concert regular for GNR, one of their most played tracks off this album, and that makes total sense. This song is so naturally at home in a big venue. It's grand, it's a grower. Another great solo, though I've been unable to tell for certain who played it. Sounds most like Buckethead maybe with how it ends?

"If the World"
Okay, yeah, so taken at first listen, "If the World" is an at-best semi-boring experiment in vibes, from a not at all vibes-based band. But if you step back, you will realize that it is actually and very obviously a Mars Volta song, and that kinda, sorta, maybe ... rules? Like this is better than anything off TMV's last record and most of Nocturniquet. I like it.

"There Was a Time"
Banger. Absolute banger. This is Axl Rose with all of his didgeridoos, and it's glorious. The orchestra, the choir, the layers on layers on layers of pissed off rock opera. Even the song's title is catty. I love it. Its highlights are that undeniable signalong bridge and Buckethead's solo, his best work on the record. I was surprised to find this one is not a concert staple for them, maybe due to its length, because it's seemingly designed to bring the house down.

"Catcher in the Rye"
You know, maybe I'm just a sucker for a big outro. Two minutes in I thought we'd hit our first proper miss, but by the end damned if I wasn't grooving to it. Apparently the solo (and other background noodling) was originally recorded by Brian May, but they ended up tossing his official recording and re-recording with Bumblefoot, who's solo was inspired by Brian May's original. But I also found three other versions of that story, so I dunno. It's not a banger, but I like it.

"Scraped"
Banger. Fast, defiant, and born on the altar of the riff. A straightforward rock song on an album that maybe has too few. Axl's range is really on display here as well. I wanted more out of the drums on this one. The groove is in pocket, but if any track is crying out for a drum solo or even an over-the-top fill or two, it's this one.

"Riad N' the Bedouins"
This is one I always felt I should like more. All the pieces are there: uptempo, shouty, pyrotechnic solo. But it's always been a slight miss for me. Not a bad track, and preferable to much of what is to come, but for all its rage, it's bland. A couple reasons would be the aforementioned fatigue - we're well into this thing by now - but also the "oh, oh, ohs" abrade after the "ay-ohs" in "Scraped". Maybe these two shouldn't be back to back on the album.

DISCLOSURE:
It's at this point in the record where my memory of it falls off a cliff. I think because I often stopped listening around this point.

"Sorry"
Slow, steady, and boring. Next.

"I.R.S."
A late-album spark of energy. I like Axl's swagger here. I'm almost charmed by the exaggeration of calling the president, the IRS, the FBI, and while we're at it, a private eye, to handle his situation. Like, it doesn't hang with the first half of the album, but it's probably my favorite of anything after "Scraped".

"Madagascar"
Eh. It's certainly weird. It's a choice. But it also kind of plods along.

"This is Love"
Another piano ballad. I know this one means a lot to Axl, but it just screams, "I wonder what the beer line looks like." Finck's solo is pretty good, and appropriate to the tune, but where's the fun?

"Prostitute"
Yeah, this long in and I just can't muster the energy. This isn't playlist for anybody.

CONCLUSION:
As has been said above, some judicious cuts and this could be a really solid front-to-back album. It's an A-minus 9-track album, and a C-plus 14-track album. I enjoyed this. I'm glad I nominated it, and I'm glad you weirdos voted for it.

That review from Klosterman was a time capsule. 1. Chuck Klosterman. 2. Long review in the A.V. Club (I bet they put a chunk of it in the paper copy and then said to read the rest on their website). 3. AVC commenters—a couple of names I remembered, one I didn’t but made me laugh (Gerard Depardouchebag), another I didn’t remember but was one of many Chester A. Arthur avatars (2008 was in the interval when some guys were into fussy facial hair grooming, right?) and another was made with the Mad Men avatar creator—I used one of those for my facebook profile in HS and college. And 4., of course, a giant review for what’s essentially a big album-oriented rock album, which Klosterman notes:

For one thing, Chinese Democracy is (pretty much) the last Old Media album we'll ever contemplate in this context—it's the last album that will be marketed as a collection of autonomous-but-connected songs, the last album that will be absorbed as a static manifestation of who the band supposedly is, and the last album that will matter more as a physical object than as an Internet sound file.

It really does sound like that, and to me it sounds a lot older. I have never been a Guns n' Roses person, at all, but I knew this was a big record but for some reason I always assumed it was released in the 90s (maybe very early 00s, like right after 9/11, at the latest) and that I’d only heard about it much late. It’s true in a sense of production, and while I’ve seen aspects of it described as “embarrassing” stuff like the trip-hop elements are so far in the past that they just seem part of the past, not anything that seems out of date, or more out of date than the rest of the album. Maybe it’s even a bit less now because rocking out has become more niche in its own right.

Speaking of rocking out I’m with LazBro, though, on the last five tracks. Slow and dull, particularly since the album had actual energy before that point.



I wasn’t familiar with the guy but here’s a shorter video of him playing with nunchucks and popping and locking via from PBS, blaming viewers like you for this. Usually when I think of guitar gods with arrested development I think of guys from 1970 who, idk, never stopped getting high, drinking cheap beer, and sleeping with sixteen year olds. Buckethead’s also stuck at sixteen, but one of the most offputting versions of male sixteen. Amazing technical talent, though.

What was with the name, anyway? Did it have some kind of geopolitical edginess? An excuse to go for communist aesthetics? (I always think of The Decembrists or those Communist Party t-shirts when we’re talking about the late aughts; Shepard Fairey fits in too, I guess). Maybe we shouldn’t ascribe too much to the name because it came from the keen political genius that gave us “Madagascar.”