I was nine years old when Guns N’ Roses released Appetite For Destruction and even at that age I was aware enough to realize that these dudes were different. Having discovered other bands like Poison, Mötley Crüe, Quiet Riot, Def Leppard, and Ratt from my friends (or my older brothers) I thought I had adequately wrapped my nine year-old head around what “heavy metal” was supposed to be. I thought I had seen it all and heard it all. I had seen the videos on MTV: I thought it was all about long hair, tight pants, no shirt, and throw in a shrill guitar solo and call it a day.
But Guns N’ Roses?
These guys looked like hard-core fucking ass-kickers. Mötley Crüe looked like ass-kickers too and they looked like they got a lot of ass simply because they were Mötley Crüe[1] but they had nothing on Guns N’ Roses. Axl Rose looked menacing enough that it was not inconceivable to think that he would pick a fight with twelve dudes if enough beer and whiskey got into his bloodstream. And Slash? You couldn’t even see his eyes, which of course to a nine year-old most likely meant that his eyes were always pissed off and that if you ever got a glimpse of them he would kick your ass. (Slash was half rocker, half basilisk.) Two other guys in the band were named Izzy and Duff, mythical ass-kicker names if I ever heard before.[2]
Even compared to Metallica (who themselves were scary-looking motherfuckers), Guns N’ Roses seemed a step higher on the hard core ladder if only because Axl Rose was all about movement. Metallica seemed to be solitary except for banging their heads; Axl Rose was all over the place. Rose was like a cross between Rowdy Roddy Piper and The Ultimate Warrior—he could’ve taken out all four members of Metallica easily in his prime.
All of this leads up to the song that totally changed my nine year-old life, “Welcome to the Jungle.” Slash’s opening guitar riff: sounding as if it is off in the distance but gaining speed on you, a perfect combination of dark introduction and bridge to inevitable aggression. Axl’s hawk-like vocals in the background: a veritable clarion call to attention. Steven Adler toying with the cymbals: a nice tease before the song reaches its proper start.
By the time the song begins to take its full form at around the half minute mark (thanks to Adler’s thunderous boom leading the way) you—and your friends and my nine year-old self—realize that this is not a regular metal/hard rock song that became popular simply out of catchiness, or because Guns N’ Roses’ image was predicated on some tweaked combination of raw talent (like Van Halen) and L.A. anything-goes partying culture (like Mötley Crüe).
No. This was a band seemingly comprised of the scary dudes you went to school with[3] that, instead of singing about how awesome it is to get drunk, get high, get ass, get in fights, produced a song that told you that L.A. was a fucking jungle. That it will eat you alive. That you can taste the bright lights but you won’t get there for free. Add to this Axl growing up in Indiana and you have yourself a powerfully lucid interpretation of what L.A. is like, reported to us Midwestern kids by a former Midwestern kid.
The accepted theory of why hair/heavy metal and hard rock was destroyed in the early ’90′s is that Nevermind and its four chords and inscrutable lyrics provided a point of no return for the new school of disaffected youth looking for more realistic-sounding angst in their music. To be sure, this theory holds real weight. But I think, in a way, “Welcome To The Jungle” also acted as a tipping point for the genre’s demise too. It was so fresh, so raw, so unabashedly Fuck You that it outdid itself. Yes, bands like Mötley Crüe and Warrant and Poison remained popular but collectively, I think, what Americans really wanted was the next great Guns N’ Roses album.
We bought G N’ R Lies and both Use Your Illusions but it all seemed to lack the raw aggression. Axl yelled more but it didn’t feel the same, and as we realized more and more that maybe there wasn’t going to be another “Welcome To The Jungle” or “Sweet Child O’ Mine” the band began to devolve and splinter, combined with Rose’s insistence on control of everything (culminating in an odd music video involving dolphins). And this allowed the Nirvanas and Pearl Jams and Alice In Chains of the world to step in.
Which also leads to this final ironical nugget: while “Welcome To The Jungle” may have inadvertently helped the demise of the hair/heavy metal genre, we could have never collectively appreciated Nevermind or Ten without Appetite For Destruction. Which means that maybe—just maybe—Appetite is more significant than Nevermind, which means that the ass-kickers win again.
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[1] Even Mick Mars got women, and he could probably be best described as “squirrelly looking in a demonic sort of way.”
[2] I mean, seriously, “Duff” and “Izzy”—those are names you have to earn, right? Those nicknames don’t just get thrown out to the smart kids or the non-partyers.
[3] We all went to school with kids who had long hair, smoked, and wore t-shirts and/or jackets that broadcast which anti-social bands they listened to but you could always kind of tell who the fakers were and who the real ass-kickers were. Guns N’ Roses looked like five dudes who had all of the aforementioned qualities in spades, but with the added possibility that they also beat the shit out of their shop teachers.
