Lose Your Appetite

When I was fourteen years old, my friend Burke put a brand new cassette into his cassette player, hit play and said, "Listen to this shit." It was 1987 in Berlin, NH. Metal bands and Hair bands showed their influence on every single kid in town in the form of big hair, leather jackets, and concert T-shirts for bands like Whitesnake, Megadeth, and Dokken. I had just moved to town from Littleton, NH, where the kids I hung out with listened to U2, The Violent Femmes, and The Beastie Boys. Trying to fit in with these new cool kids was not easy and trying to like their music was even harder. But that cassette that Burke played was different. Instantly, I dug it and twenty years later, I still do. The album, of course, was Appetite for Destruction.

When Guns n Roses released Use Your Illusion I and II, I was in line at midnight the day it was released. I ran home, popped it into my compact disc player, and listened to the entire thing without stopping. When it was over I felt the same as I do today. It is a bloated, boring, piece of horseshit.

I never purchased The Spaghetti Incident. Hearing the cover of Nazareth's Hair of the Dog was enough to convince me that superstardom and enormous egos had destroyed their ability to make inspired music, and clearly it had because this was an album of cover songs.

And now, "the world's greatest Guns n Roses cover band, Guns n Roses" are finally going to release their decade in the making album, Chinese Democracy on November 23rd. The first single is out. You can hear it here: http://www.q1043.com/pages/news/gunsnroses/

The disappointment I felt after listening to it was the same as when I saw The Phantom Menace and my opinion was equally as strong. It is a bit, fat, stinking, unispired and over produced turd.
The riff sounds like the bastard child of Rock You Like a Hurricane and TNT.

Good albums are organic. They are made in a natural place. Appetite came from that place. Chinese Democracy sounds like it was made in China.