Armagideon 2 - The Late Show: Guns N' Roses' "Chinese Democracy"

I've spent unhealthy amount of time over the past four or five years following the grotesque saga of Guns N' Roses, its elusive frontman (you know his fucking name) and the ridiculously long-aborning "Chinese Democracy," which finally hit stores to amazingly little fanfare last month. For a week or so I entertained the thought of trying to get my hands on a promo copy so I could review it in advance, but there were many more important matters to tend to and I'm not in college anymore. Besides, the band actually took the step of streaming the whole blasted thing on MySpace in the days leading up to the release, and if I were a good blogger I'd have simply checked out the stream and dashed out a review as fast as possible. But I'm not a good blogger (yet), I tend to procrastinate and so my review appears about a month after anybody who gave two shits made up their mind. Doesn't matter, really, because the last time this record would have mattered in any broader sense is long past.



It's amazing that the most expensive, most tortuously anticipated album in rock history is but a blip on the cultural radar upon its release in 2008. Bloggers and critics and fanboys and the remains of Axl's cultish legions were atwitter at the prospect of "Chinese Democracy"'s actual release, while everyone else had more important things to worry about, like the economy and the new president and Lil Wayne's sizzurp problem. Certainly Axl didn't help his own cause, staging a press blackout that would've looked like business as usual if his 17-years-in-the-making opus weren't actually, really upon us this time. Best Buy, the album's sole U.S. retailer, did what they could to promote the damn thing; without so much as a music video to excerpt, they were reduced to panning across snapshots of album artwork in T.V. ads for their prize product. Even for someone as notoriously erratic as Axl, the almost complete lack of publicity on his or the band's part was bizarre.



Then a funny thing happened a couple weeks ago: Axl showed up to chat and answer questions on several fan forums, promising a rerelease of "Chinese Democracy" with new artwork and even a video for the song "Better" (Like the album itself - we'll believe it when we see it). Asked to explain his silence upon the album's release, Axl went into his usual spiel, making vague references to various lawsuits, perpetual villain Slash, those liars in the press, "my attorneys", that two-timing sonofabitch Slash, "my lawyers", fellow recluse J.D. Salinger and that backstabbing asshole Slash. OK, dude, tell us what you really think about your old bandmates. But for fuck's sake, get back on MTV or pick a fight with Ralph Lauren or make a $4 million dollar video with Francis Ford Coppola directing like Old Axl. If nothing else, I guarantee you that Kurt Loder will shit his pants.



So what about the album? Well, "Chinese Democracy" is of course one of those records that you can review without actually hearing it, at least if you're an ideologue of a certain stripe. For indie-rock partisans and overly sincere progressives, it's bombs away. Really, I don't blame them, as almost every review of the album has made the following righteous points:

1) Taking 17 years and $15 million to make an album is disgusting.

2) You can't fake the kind of chemistry and raw firepower that makes for great rock n' roll, no matter how hard you try; professionalism and obsessive craftsmanship is no substitute for youthful enthusiasm. Essentially, "Chinese Democracy" is not and never could be the gauntlet that was "Appetite For Destruction".

3) "Chinese Democracy" is so self-referential, so insular, so far removed from the here-and-now, from anything else that's happening in music or the world right now that it's only relevant within the context of GN'R and Axl Rose's personal history. Absent of any real meaning or significance beyond itself, can a work of art be truly great or even good? Why should any normal person care?



Point taken. To be fair, "Chinese Democracy" is not a great work of art. But it comes closer than I would have expected. The explosive interactions of the old group are nowhere to be found; what's left is long on "craft" and short on memorable songs, but Rose has packed so much detail into these tracks over the years that they're fascinating even so. Ersatz porno-groove with flamenco guitars? Sprawling, portentous synth/sample intros? A page or ten from the Andrew Lloyd Webber/Jim Steinman songwriting notebook? Not one but two orchestras over a succession of meandering ballads with maybe one chorus between them? All present and accounted for, all godawful ideas on paper, all somehow listenable, even enjoyable, in practice. Give him this: the motherfucker believes in his schlock vision, and for that we should be...grateful? Heh heh. Awed, maybe.

Only the lyrics seem unfinished, often tailing off in mid-phrase and overall failing to generate the heat of the anthemic. There are several puzzling allusions to foreign lands and geopolitical struggles, none of which bear any apparent relation to the obsessive introspection of the rest of the record. Mostly they scream "writer's block"; there are few real hooks or grabby images here, and without any real hits the record has tumbled down the charts precipitously in recent weeks. A would-be masterpiece, "Chinese Democracy" is perhaps the most extravagant monument to a dead end that the vanishing music industry has yet foisted upon us. You may find Rose's excessive perfectionism intriguing, disgusting, or plain depressing. Or maybe, like 99% of the listening public, you've simply moved on. I don't blame you.

Hercules & Love Affair - some initial reactions

Lotta hype about these guys. Listening for the first time on this blustery December day, and of course it's not quite the watershed the hipsters have been priming us for, but it's pretty damn good.

I've been raring for a return to album reviews for like three years, and I figure it's only fair to mark the occasion with a knee-jerk style post in the blogosphere spirit of the day (ok, I'm dating myself here - kneejerk blog posts are so 2005, but I never latch onto trends until long after they've run their course anyway, so this is something you and I are just going to have to get used to).

As with a lot of modern dance music and pretty much anything that's endorsed by Pitchfork these days (about that - what the fuck, Schreiber?), the self-titled debut offering by Hercules & Love Affair offers some terrific grooves undercut by irritating vocals. Unlike a lot of modern dance music, the grooves don't just fritter away - these guys know their history, and if you can learn to hear past Antony's unholy cross between an ethered Scott Walker and potato-shaped tabloid queen Boy George (N.B. I mean the "queen" part as a compliment; it's the rest that's an insult, as the former George O'Dowd hit his Fat Elvis phase long about 1998, and from the sound of it Antony's already well on his way) you'll find the kind of beatmastery Larry Levan could only dream of.

In a development I never could have anticipated amidst the rockist fuckery of my teenage years, I've lately been evolving into the same sort of disco geek who used to frequent Levan's legendary Paradise Garage throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s - the golden age of modern dance music to my ears. So the nagging percussion, synth squiggles and mathematical basslines of this record are manna to somebody like me, although I still wish they were unhip enough to hire actual singers. Meanwhile, I look forward to untangling the grooves in weeks to come, which are proof positive of what I'd already figured out: disco geeks are the smartest music fans in the world.

Disco Lady Vs. Uncle Jam

"Disco Sucks". We're almost 30 years removed from the sorry summer of 1979, when such was the rallying cry of rockist neocons and crypto-bigots everywhere. We like to think we're past it, but in fact the disco/rock split informs how we hear just about everything we hear today, consciously or not. Soulja Boy, anyone? 16-year-old kid creates dance, sneaks in dirty reference, ruins hip-hop - did I miss something?

Stupid little dance tunes have been rock n' roll's bread and butter since Louis Jordan invented the shit. Cowering helpless at the feet of the Rock Godz (all that rollin' was just jive; no room for teenyboppers in the house of worship...) we tend to forget the original impulse that begat Messrs. Berry, Presley, Diddley, Penniman, Dylan, Lennon, McCartney was to get all the kiddies to dance - and in Eisenhower's 1950s dancing to a brand new beat was a subversive act indeed. Hate to break it to the Tull contingent, but if we didn't have 13-year olds twisting and shouting to those four longhairs with funny accents in 1964 we wouldn't have "Sgt. Pepper" and hence art-rock.

As everybody ought to know by now, "Pepper" along with Dylan's 1965-66 output was the bedrock upon which the towering edifice of Rock criticism was built - and the point at which meaty beaty big and bouncy "rock and roll" became static, self-serious, self-regarding "Rock". And it was sometime after this that all pop music which didn't aspire to the pomp and circumstance of "high art" became suspect in the minds of would-be revolutionaries and displaced jazzbos everywhere. Before the Beatles came along and Changed the World almost nobody took pop seriously, so maybe this was progress. But the good ol' boys at FM radio seemed to miss the point entirely as they set to the task of resegregating the airwaves long about 1968. By the outset of the 1970's, the deacons of industry had succeeded in dividing the pop audience into "Top 40" and "Rock" (read: white) and "R&B" (read: black) constituencies, and despite the advances of hip-hop and music video fragmentation continued apace for decades afterward.

-To be continued-

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