Axl Rose’s troubled birth called “Chinese democracy”
In 1993 i Guns N’ Roses released their fifth album “The Spaghetti Incident?”an album of covers. Few would have imagined that fifteen years would have to pass for the sixth step of their career, until November 23, 2008, when it was consigned to history “Chinese democracy”. Since then the band of Axl Rose he never made another album, and sixteen years have already passed since then. So, while we wait to have the Californian group’s future album in our hands, let’s go and re-read what he wrote for us Franco Bacoccoli Of “Chinese democracy”.
Some say thirteen. Fifteen more. Some say sixteen. Irrelevant. Even if it were seven, the years of distance that separate “Chinese democracy” from the previous studio album, “Use your illusion I” and “Use your illusion II” released at the same time in September 1991, would be many. In 1991 in the USA the president was Bush. But father and not son. In 1991, in Italy, Marietto Chiesa was not yet a crook and politics was the pre-Mani Pulite one: Craxi, Andreotti, De Mita and so on. From 1991 to today, epochal events have happened, and in all this time Axl Rose has only created fourteen songs. Less than one a year. The Beatles, but also others, in the 1960s were capable of recording an entire album in five days. It is therefore normal and logical that not great expectations have been placed on “Chinese democracy”. But huge. Also because, as soon as it arrives in retailers, the album will sell like hot cakes.
In the USA the new birth of GNR – or, rather, of Axl Rose with a host of other musicians – could reach 1 million copies in the first week.
Quotes from the good times of discography, when even the latest rubbish sold 100,000 copies simply for the mere fact of existing. Axl Rose, to meet expectations, would have had to create a masterpiece. How else can all these years be justified? “Chinese democracy”, as far as one can understand after the first and (for the moment only) listen, is just a good album. Excellent, at times. But it’s not stratospheric and it’s not a masterpiece. The familiar sounds of the GNR saga are all there; there are, especially, the songs that start as ballads and then turn into hard cannonades. There are sharp guitars. There is the courage of a person who wants to do his own thing, and let others screw themselves. However, even if many things have changed, “Chinese democracy” also seems like “Use your illusion III”. It sounds like an album from 1998. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, on the contrary.
Rose’s very troubled birth starts well, ends well and in the middle there are a few hitches.
When the title track starts from the starting blocks, for those who loved them, for those who lived on “Civil war”, “Welcome to the jungle”, “Paradise city”, “Don’t cry”, “Sweet child o ‘ mine”, “November rain” and “You could be mine”, it’s as if Guns had never left. The piece is thunderous and really seems to want to rekindle the flame that had gone out after the two “Use your illusion”. “Shackler’s revenge” begins almost like Sisters Of Mercy, then continues on well-known territories with dry guitars, pressing rhythms and melodic structures. “Better” is a tight and tumultuous ballad, with Axl who in the lyrics seems to be complaining about a girlfriend who left and was half crazy. In ballad style, tormented but less urgent than the previous one, it is also “Street of dreams”. The piece has the potential to become a stadium classic, the kind with the lighter (or mobile phone) turned on. Just one more listen and we could have fallen in love with this piece. “If the world” is a bizarre, almost atmospheric composition, played monstrously well but more than a killer it seems like a filler.
“There was a time”: almost as above. The six-string solo is very beautiful, but it seems like a normal song turned bad just because these are GNR and not Stereophonics. You have to be a little taken aback. So too “Catcher in the rye”, which could be defined as “medium strength rock”. “Scraped”: vocals aside, it could also be any hard song from the early 1980s. “Fire of unknown origin” by Blue Oyster Cult, 1981, comes to mind. “Riad n’ the bedouins” flows, for “Sorry” we return to the typical structure of “Use your illusion”; enveloping ballad that slowly becomes a thunderous composition. In the middle a solo that not even Gilmour does.
“IRS” is the classic Gunsian rock, well shot, which brings the album back on the right tracks.
The tone of “Madagascar”, a piece that has been known for years, is melancholy; the heart of the song offers single phrases with samples from Martin Luther King. “This I love”: Axl sings like a newly caged tiger. A composition that only Il Compianto, the most lamented vocalist of all, Freddie, could sing better. Is it possible that the gem you don’t expect is hidden in the most atypical piece on the album? Maybe yes, maybe yes. And, if you’re sad, turn the volume up to ten: this song might seem magical, immense. And it would have been great to end like this. Instead Axl stuck the crap in it: “Chinese democracy” ends with “Prostitute”, a meatloaf larded with all – absolutely all – the spices of GNR, a song so full of suggestions that it doesn’t go anywhere. Overall a good album, but period.
