By Ann Powers
November 23, 2008 in print edition F-1
When Axl Rose announced in December 2006 that the new Guns N Roses album, Chinese Democracy, would be issued the following March the last false ending to a drama nearly as long-lasting as the Vietnam War and culminating today, as the hordes rush to exclusive retailer Best Buy to snap up the final version he briefly stepped out of the smoke-machine haze that surrounds him and feigned modesty. Vouching for the veracity and passion of his work, he seemingly aimed to lower expectations, writing, In the end, its just an album.
That may be the most ridiculous statement Rose has made in 17 years of whoppers. Just an album! Sure, and Citizen Kane was just a movie. And Brando as Don Corleone was just a mid-career acting gig.
Everyone with a passing interest in rock knows the abbreviated history of Chinese Democracy. Recording for the album, the follow-up to Guns N Roses mammoth, chart-topping Use Your Illusion project, began in the early 1990s. Soon, though, Roses authoritarian grip squeezed the life out of the original lineup, including his lead guitarist and artistic foil, Slash, and it went splat. Out of that goo rose the post-Guns band Velvet Revolver on one side and Axl, increasingly alone, on the other.
For the next decade and a half, Rose continued to work, running through band members like so many speed dates. Some, like avant-garde guitarist Buckethead, fled; others, like longtime keyboardist Dizzy Reed, stuck. This amorphous Guns N Roses toured with varying degrees of success and spent time recording in 14 different studios in L.A., Las Vegas, London and New York.
Meanwhile, Rose got older (hes 46 now), decided he looked good in cornrows, and spent something like $13 million on a project few thought he would complete. The powers behind the already failing music industry gave a collective bloodcurdling scream.
The wait is over
And now its here. The album thats been referred to as a white whale more times than Melvilles own Moby Dick has been stabbed through with a spear and brought to ground. Fourteen tracks, no blubber.
Half the songs classify loosely as ballads, while the others are more forcefully up-tempo, but nearly every one makes unexpected stylistic switches. The effect is theatrical, with voicings and arrangements often taking precedence over riffs and grooves, making Chinese Democracy more like the score to a rock opera than an arena-oriented assault.
Like Brando and Kane mastermind Orson Welles, Rose is a macho refusenik whose career path illustrates how hard it can be for an ego-driven man to separate lofty ideals from fleshly indulgences. And though its probably too cryptic to have the impact of the masterpieces to which Ive dared compare it, Chinese Democracy does reach that far. Roses fight to become and remain an auteur in a pop world increasingly hostile to such individualists has become a performance in itself. Chinese Democracy is its finale, the explosive end to a period of silence that, in retrospect, had its own eloquence.
It isnt exactly an accessible album, though many hooks and bombastic rock moments surface within its layers. Contrary to early reports, Rose didnt plunge into the nu metal style industrial rock that hed embraced a decade ago with the lone track Oh My God. Had he done so, producing an albums worth of static-laden ravers, like the albums first single and title track, he might have embraced middle age as a respectable experimental rocker. Conversely, had he fulfilled the dreams of the rabble who cant get past Appetite for Destruction, reconnecting with Slash at the old intersection of punk and metal, he would have roared back as the king of the charts without making much artistic progress.
Instead, making this album has transformed Rose from a hungry contrarian to a full-blown desert prophet, howling mightily in protest against a pop industry that encourages its stars to innovate only within the realm of what sells best. At the same time, hes resisted the nostalgia that would have sent him after a purer time or sound, preferring to invest in a foggy future. Purity is the opposite of what Rose seeks on Chinese Democracy. Convolution is everything as he spirals toward a total sound even he cant quite apprehend.
Chinese Democracy is a test for contemporary ears, an album that turns in upon itself instead of reaching out to instantly become a ring tone. Nothing on it immediately reveals its essence. Even the songs with hooks, such as the sing-song rant Better and the grande olde ballad Street of Dreams, derail themselves in subtle ways, requiring the listener to reconsider her first judgment. This will frustrate plenty of listeners; lovers of edgy music may find it too melodic and rooted in the blues, while fans seeking simple catharsis may rue the many shifts in tone and tempo.
Versions of these final 14 tracks have been floating around the Internet throughout Roses exile. Some may date from before the Use Your Illusion sessions. Rose kept building on them, rewriting, hiring and alienating all those producers and collaborators the albums credits, which include Nine Inch Nails guitarist Robin Finck and Primus drummer Bryan Brain Mantia, read like an Oscar night thank-you list from hell and trying everything from multitracking his voice to resemble a childrens choir to sampling the speeches of Martin Luther King Jr.
The end result is a cyborgian blend of pop expressiveness, traditional rock bravado and Brian Wilson-style beautiful weirdness. The snake-dance-inspiring rhythms that bring Roses libido to life occasionally dominate, as do the romantic piano runs that represent his heart. Neither overcomes the other, and sometimes both collide in the same song.
Playing the reference game with Chinese Democracy is a thankless task. Individual songs could be compared to everything from Queen (Rose claims that influence, though he disposed of a guitar solo Brian May gave him for one song) to My Chemical Romance, Heart, Wings, Korn, Andrew Lloyd Webber, David Bowie in his Berlin phase, U2 after Achtung Baby! and Curtis Mayfield circa Freddies Dead. Oh, and to Guns N Roses, especially the more cracked version of that band behind Use Your Illusion II. But rarely does a song settle anywhere. Its even difficult to declare the ballads pretty or the rockers simply ferocious.
Its also pointless to dwell too long on individual players besides Rose. Keyboardist Dizzy Reed and bassist Tommy Stinson appear on most tracks; they must have been the most successful at tolerating Roses megalomania. As for the albums much-touted guitar army: When five different players are featured on one song, individualism becomes impossible, no matter whos soloing. Many early Guns N Roses songs are structured as literal dialogues between Rose and Slash, with the singers wild falsetto directly responding to and setting up the guitarists rococo riffing. Chinese Democracy features no such exchanges. The real tension here is internal, and Roses alone.
Its the same push-pull that defines everything Rose has created, including his assumed name: steely, aggressive hypermasculinity versus lush, feminine openness. Roses music tells the saga of the mutually abusive relationship between the freight trains axle and the rose it crushes, a potentially poisonous flower that keeps growing back.
This is a central plotline in male-centered heroic tales, and its key to the music of artists as diverse as Richard Wagner and Led Zeppelins Robert Plant and Jimmy Page. But few artists have committed so strongly to both sides at once. Never mind the tales of childhood abuse and adult violence (often allegedly toward women) that fill out Roses biography. All of that ugliness is right there in the music, in Roses primal yowl and marauding metal-punk assaults. And anyone whos heard November Rain thats all of us knows that florid loveliness resides there too.
On Chinese Democracy, Rose reflects on the cost of making art that fully expresses that dichotomy. This is where we return to Citizen Kane, another story that plays out the tension between a wounded heart and an iron fist, and to Roses soul mate Brando, who was also a brute and an aesthete, and who tragically misstepped as often as he triumphed.
Ever the enigma
Could Rose be self-aware enough to genuinely capture this life-defining conflict? He seems to be trying on Chinese Democracy. But his lyrics, like the songs musical twists, are hard to parse; their knottiness may be the albums ultimate downfall. Its tough to imagine anyone besides Rose connecting many of these songs to their day-to-day experiences. In Rhiad and the Bedouins, he seems to be comparing himself to a besieged Middle Eastern state. Catcher in the Rye spits at mortality while nodding toward another famously blocked artist, J.D. Salinger, but its last verse devolves into incomprehensibility. Madagascar, the one in which Rose pairs his voice with Dr. Kings, is a sort of civil-rights-era- inspired retelling of Odysseus journey across a monster-ridden sea.
At least thats what it sounds like to this listener, bringing my own history and imagination into the listening experience. Whether its intentional or the result of Roses addled grandiloquence, the strangeness inherent in these songs allows for an old-fashioned rock n roll pleasure: the chance to grasp that album cover (OK, gaze at that image on your MP3 player screen) and make up your own solutions to its mysteries. Whether history declares it a tragedy or a farce, this is one album thats more than a pop exercise. And for that, Axl Rose can finally take a bow.
ann.powers@latimes.com