Kansas City Blog

Sure, a lot has happened since Use Your Illusion I & II came out (we're not counting The Spaghetti Incident), but just because I have a kid and a wife and a mortgage and I went to bed Saturday night at 10:30 doesn't mean I'm too old to rock. Even wore a T-shirt with a skeleton riding a motorcycle and a devil in the sidecar on it to go get the album. Yeah.

I got my copy on double vinyl -- CDs were the norm by the time I was a freshman in high school, circa 1989, so I'd never really had that moment of excitement of ripping the shrink wrap off a big rock record the day it came out and racing home to put it on the turntable. Who knows if I'll ever get the chance to do it again?

It was a cool feeling. Would've been even cooler if Chinese Democracy had a better cover. It's a bike. A bike with a basket on it. The significance is lost on me.

Really, Axl? That's the best you can do? Because the original cover you had for Appetite for Destruction was a picture of a robot rapist, with another sinister robot with big-ass teeth looming menacingly above getting ready to do the rapebot in. The Pitch doesn't advocate rapebots, but I think we can all agree that's a way cooler album cover than a stupid picture of a dumb bike.

As for, you know, the actual record, Chinese Democracy is pretty damn good. Not 15-years-in-the-making good, but pretty damn good nevertheless. "Better" will sound ridiculously awesome on the radio, even if the verse sounds to me a lot like "Walk Through the Fire" from the Buffy the Vampire Slayer musical. Which is weird, because on the very next song, "Street of Dreams," Axl sometimes croons like he's channeling Jason Segel's Dracula puppet from Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Chuck Klosterman points out in his Chinese Democracy review on The Onion's AV Club how one line of "Sorry" is sung in the style of a Mexican vampire, so perhaps Axl was just in a vampire kind of mood. Or maybe Axl is a vampire. That would explain maybe a year or two of delay, although I doubt it could be that much harder to make this record working only nights.

When I heard "Sorry" for myself, I too noticed the Mexican vampire action, but I kept picturing Axl's multitracked backing vocals being performed by tiny little henchmen that are miniature Axl duplicates (and BTW, when I think of Axl, he's always in a kilt), like the Heat Miser and Snow Miser have of themselves in The Year Without a Santa Claus. "Sorry" also has my favorite lyric on the album: You close your eyes/All well and good/I'll kick your ass/Like I said that I would. Totally Axl.

My friend Matt Shaw points out that "This I Love," in which I hear a Barry Manilow vibe, would make an awesome video. While the opening piano part plays, we fade in on a shot of an introspective Axl singing from behind a rain-spattered window. He can take it no longer -- he and his ex have unfinished business, so the video follows his journey to her apartment. But when Axl finally arrives, there are police everywhere -- she's dead! Cut to a shot of Slash and Buckethead. Are they guilty of this nefariosity? The camera slowly tracks out as Axl delivers the final line, I'll never say goodbye. Somewhere in all this, there are also dolphins. Winner of Best Video at the 2009 VMAs, guaranteed.

As soon as side 4 ended, we put side 1 right back on, and I'll probably keep on listening to Chinese Democracy. There are times when it sounds absolutely like Guns N' Roses. It's epic and pseudo-industrial at turns. Other songs veer toward power balladry and coffeehouse electronica. Oddly, "If the World" sounds just like Us-era Peter Gabriel. I have no concept of what is going on in "Riad N' the Bedouins."

I don't have any idea why Chinese Democracy took nearly 15 years to finish. We've established that it couldn't have been the cover art. The electronic flourishes for the most part aren't anything but window dressing, so hopefully they were responsible for no more than a year or two's worth of delay. (Accounting for no more than 30 seconds of that time should be Axl realizing that under no circumstances should he use the tape he has of Shaquille O'Neal freestyling over one of the tracks. Even though I'm really curious to know that would've sounded like.)

I think the biggest bummer about Chinese Democracy is what a letdown this whole nonevent turned out to be. We've been talking about this record for years, it's finally here and ... crickets. Nothing. Maybe everybody already listened to it when it started streaming on MySpace last week. But I figured I'd waited this long. A couple more days wasn't going to kill me.

For the piles of cash Best Buy has to be forking over to be Chinese Democracy's exclusive retailer, no one at my local store seemed to be very excited about it. There was a small sandwich board outside and a display at the front of the music section, and that was it. When I checked out at 9:45-ish, the cashier told me he'd sold maybe two or three copies. About five people were in line when Best Buy opened, but none of them were there for Chinese Democracy.

But I was. And so was that other guy.