People are going to talk and, in the interest of covering all the obvious bases, getting what they’ll say out of the way early makes sense. Yes, Chinese Democracy is the long-awaited first full-length release of original material in seventeen years; those terms eliminate the band’s contributions to the End Of Days soundtrack and 1993’s The Spaghetti Incident which was all covers. Yes, it’s been so long in coming that the existence of the record has, until now, become regarded as an urban myth, Yes, right about now the governing bodies at Dr. Pepper are probably kicking themselves for announcing that if the record ever surfaced, they’d give soda away for free. Finally, yes – this permutation of GNR is almost all-new and all-different with the only returning members being Axl Rose (who had been the easy vote for this generation’s Brian Wilson) and keyboardist Dizzy Reed (who will go down in history as the most patient man in rock n’ roll). With these already-well-known factors comes a staggering amount of expectation. When your band’s music is the most iconic of a sound and time, phoning in a return is not an option because there’s a rose-colored (how ironic) history to it that people remember; people had their first dance, first kiss and lost their virginity to “November Rain,” took their first shot with either “Mr. Brownstone” or “Paradise City” playing in the background (which it was depends upon what kind of shot and how it was administered) and got into their first bar fight while “Welcome To The Jungle” was on the jukebox. That, in any language, is a storied history.
With all of that in mind, in the caustic and abrasive opening seconds of Chinese Democracy’s title track, with the right kind of ears listeners can hear W. Axl Rose echo the sentiments of Henry Ford when he said, “History is more or less bunk. We don’t want tradition, we want to live in the present. The only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history we made today.”
In other words, this Chinese Democracy ain’t your dad’s Guns N’ Roses; in fact it’s the most earnest and epic recording Axl Rose has ever made – even if it’s not the sort you’d expect. Rather, Chinese Democracy is not a Guns N’ Roses record at all so much as presenting itself as the score to a Greek tragedy titled The Story Of Guns N’ Roses. The music does bear a passing resemblance to the sound and style that made GNR the dangerous, unpredictable and sometimes incredible mainstream Harley-riding rock band of the 1980s but the performance appears here with an adamantine clarity and precision that doesn’t usually appear on rock records; the professional and painstakingly clean delivery is a regular fixture in orchestrated film scores though. After the grinding, gang vocal-dominated blow-outs of “Chinese Democracy” and “Shackler’s Revenge” that function as a sort of overture for these proceedings, the band locks easily into a form of glossy and dramatic but also eerily canny and staged production that works here because there’s no way it could possibly not; every aspect of the record is painstakingly measured, thus illustrating the immense care that has been taken to present Guns N’ Roses as a larger-than-life and exaggerated construct. For example, while anonymous guitarist Buckethead has synthesized the licks and style that the original GNR cultivated for the better part of a decade and worked it into his own maniacally over-the-top attack – and he then proceeds to throw it in every available corner of the songs as if he’s been placed in a state of constant, climactic overdrive. Likewise, the appearance of a string section in tracks including “Street Of Dreams,” “If The World,” “There Was A Time” and “Madagascar” adds theatrical tension to the proceedings and also makes the Phantom Of The Opera rave-up ”This I Love” is a more ominous cliffhanger than either “November Rain” or “Estranged” turned out to be with Axl Rose hanging from the brink by the thinnest of threads. Of course, that isn’t the case and he proves it when he returns for the bring-it-on-home redemption song “Prostitute.” Outside of the fact that Slash’s fantastic riffing is absent from these proceedings, it’s an incredible production.
But it is most definitely about as genuine as a theatrical production. Chinese Democracy is undeniably a presentation of Guns N’ Roses as product – an epic stage show. Is it a bad thing? Not really. Certainly Axl Rose had to come up with something that would set this new, creation from his old band and this showing is respectable enough. Rose’s voice has clearly not left him and the music’s decent but, presumably because he couldn’t get clearance from the firm of Hudson, Sorum and McKagan to do a reasonable facsimile of the arena-sized and gritty rock n’ roll that, for a time, made Guns N’ Roses the biggest band in the world. Chinese Democracy is Rose’s adept way of side-stepping comparison, but it only half works. Were it not released under the name Guns N’ Roses, it would probably be the toast of the mainstream new rock community; hailed as a triumphant comeback for a fallen superstar. What the album will actually represent or be regarded as remains to be seen.
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