Which ones are they? No snark - I’ve only ever listened to it once and I’m genuinely curious.
I’ve never listened to it (bought Appetite as a Manics-obsessed teenager, liked it, never bothered with the others) but I’m sorta fascinated by it existing, in the same way I’m fascinated with The Room or Michael Bay movies - stuff that’s pure and unfiltered creativity from a mind that clearly works in a pretty unique way.
Never really cared for Chuck Klosterman’s writing but he did a good review of it at the time
Throughout Chinese Democracy , the most compelling question is never, “What was Axl doing here?” but “What did Axl think he was doing here?” The tune “If The World” sounds like it should be the theme to a Roger Moore-era James Bond movie, all the way down to the title. On “Scraped,” there’s a vocal bridge that sounds strikingly similar to a vocal bridge from the 1990 Extreme song “Get The Funk Out.” On the aforementioned “Sorry,” Rose suddenly sings an otherwise innocuous line (“But I don’t want to do it”) in some bizarre, quasi-Transylvanian accent, and I cannot begin to speculate as to why. I mean, one has to assume Axl thought about all of these individual choices a minimum of a thousand times over the past 15 years. Somewhere in Los Angles, there’s gotta be 400 hours of DAT tape with nothing on it except multiple versions of the “Sorry” vocal. So why is this the one we finally hear? What finally made him decide, “You know, I’ve weighed all my options and all their potential consequences, and I’m going with the Mexican vampire accent. This is the vision I will embrace. But only on that one line! The rest of it will just be sung like a non-dead human.” Often, I don’t even care if his choices work or if they fail. I just want to know what Rose hoped they would do.
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Quite a few bands released albums called Chinese Democracy around that time - Warrior Soul were probably the most well known act to do it (they later re-released theirs as Destroy The War Machine) but there was a fair few more.
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I’d say Better, Sorry, Shackler’s Revenge and Rhiad are all pretty good.
Better and Sorry (although cut out about 2 mins please) are my favs.
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Bunch of nobodys.
Isn’t it just the thing where someone disappears so far up their own arse that they lose the ability to filter out their own worst creative impulses?
I love this record. The title track is my favourite but ‘Shackler’s Revenge’, ‘Better’, ‘There Was a Time’, ‘Sorry’ and ‘Madagascar’ are all highlights for me. Sure, there are some fair criticism that can be thrown at the album but ultimately the songs hold up for me.
If anyone has kept their ear to the ground you’ll know that several roughly mixed outtakes from 99-01 have leaked very recently (‘As It Began’, ‘Atlas Shrugged’, ‘The General’ (in part), ‘Going Down’, ‘Hardschool’, ‘Perhaps’, ‘Silkworms’ & ‘State of Grace’) amongst other things. They make for an interesting listen. Good stuff on the whole.
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Speaking of 99, you just reminded me that this exists…
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That was a good song.
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Have recently listened to some of those leaks and some of them I like. Interested to know what remains of those leaks these days though beause they must be 20 years old some of those recordings and sound incomplete be very surprised if they make the next album.
Yeah it’d be interesting to see if anything official comes of them. I imagine many of these tracks have probably been re-recorded probably a stupid amount of times since then and probably changed a fair bit (compare the early demos of ‘Silkworms’ and ‘Going Down’ and you’ll see what I mean) but most will have probably past their time now. I hope ‘Atlas Shrugged’ and ‘The General’ are in serious contention though.
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I don’t like guns n roses but this thread has inspired me to listen to this album. Surprised it was 2008, in my head it was a lot earlier. Anyway, sounds a bit naff.