Appetite for Destruction is one of the biggest selling debut albums in rock history, which is a mystery to me, because it’s an almost unceasing cacophony of scathing, strident guitars, shrill vocals, and thoroughly toxic lyrics about taking drugs, getting drunk, brutally copulating with your girlfriend and then, perhaps, punching her in the face. It’s profoundly and willfully uncommercial; a thoroughly nasty record evocative of the rough, chaotic, consumptive lives of American rednecks in trailer parks and hick towns across the United States at the height of the acquisitive, I’m-alright-Jack Reaganism of the 1980s. But therein, perhaps, lay the album’s appeal; a sudden fulmination of the fuck-you punk spirit and sound at a time of Simon Le Bon drinking cocktails underwater and Prince pogoing around on stage like a deviant pixie. And, like many of the late 70s punk records, Appetite provides us with an invigorating sound and philosophy which becomes increasingly hard to listen to the longer the album goes on.
From what I can gather, Axl Rose was the real deal; a church-going cherub from the Midwest who, at age 17, abruptly transitioned into a hard-drinking, drug-guzzling teenage tearaway upon discovering that he was adopted and that his biological father was a petty criminal who had abandoned him as a child. Young Axl served three jail terms and, in order to avoid further trouble with the law, fled the Midwest for Los Angeles, then the site of the burgeoning and preposterous hair metal movement. That’s where he formed Guns N’ Roses, presumably to try and ride the crest of the wave generated by the likes of Mötley Crüe and Skid Row – hard acts to follow indeed. But Axl and his sidekicks soon proved themselves to be not only musically more accomplished than their cartoonish contemporaries, but also more authentically savage, more in debt to punk and hard rock than the candy floss glam beloved by the likes of Dokken.
It was out of the sex-drugs-rock’n’roll whirlwind of the Sunset Strip that Appetite for Destruction was born, the brainchild of a bunch of Hillbilly delinquents who had fled backwaters for the bright lights of Los Angeles. Two of Appetite’s most notable and popular songs deal with this transition from the idyllic Midwest to the Gomorrah of LA, and to the wanton immorality of life in the urban sprawl, a common trope in rock history. The music writer Simon Reynolds has argued that the purveyors of “authentic” and “natural” rock tend to eschew city life as decadent and corrupting, whereas the doyens of a “glam” mentality celebrate the city’s promise of anonymity and inauthenticity as sources of pleasure and reinvention. If we accept this dichotomy, then Guns N’ Roses sit on the glam side of the divide, though perhaps uneasily.
“Welcome to the Jungle” opens Appetite for Destruction in blistering fashion, with snarling guitars and howling winds, Axl’s lyrics fully acknowledging and celebrating city life’s self-indulgent, pleasure-worshipping immorality and dog-eat-dog ruthlessness, while also, in a surprisingly downbeat middle section, warning of its perils. “Paradise City” is riven with similar ambivalences; its lush chorus brings to mind the prim, idyllic, uncomplicated towns of the American Midwest, but its strident verses return us to the neoliberal jungle, where the meritocratic American dream has been reduced to a farce, and Captain America appears as a mere court jester.
If the city is a place where impulses, desires, and potentially sociopathic tendencies can be indulged in at will, then Appetite provides us with myriad songs which narrate the potential consequences of pursuing such a lifestyle. Perhaps the primary example of this is the singularly vicious “Night Train”, in which our conscienceless narrator is likened to an animal, a cat on the last of its nine lives, with a dog-eat-dog smile, carrying a rattlesnake suitcase. He sends his wife to the booze store, sneeringly declares “bottoms up” while knocking back the liquor, and then it’s time to crash and burn. It’s the purest and most brilliant distillation of Appetite for Destruction’s nihilistic rage and drug-addled consumptiveness, although “Out ta Get Me” comes a close second, with its nasty take on a wanted criminal hiding from the police, claiming that he’s innocent, but sneakily acknowledging that bad things happen after whiskey is procured and imbibed. “Mr. Brownstone” also deals with substance abuse, though it’s more contained than “Night Train” or “Out ta Get Me”, probably because its protagonist is shooting up rather than getting smashed.
If Appetite for Destruction were a psychiatric patient, the average shrink would surely take one look at its impulsive, venomous, substance-abusing self-destructiveness and diagnose borderline personality disorder. This verdict would only be strengthened by a cursory analysis of Patient Appetite’s tendency toward “splitting” – extreme black and white thinking, the unintegrateable idealization and denigration of, especially, romantic partners. Many of the album’s songs are about women, but these appear either as treacherous, promiscuous harlots, fit only for rather violent-sounding sexual intercourse, or they are pure and unspoiled goddesses, subjects of sentimental devotion.
“It’s So Easy” is the most shockingly misogynistic song on the album; its guitars are seething, searing, its drums rollicking and unhinged; its malignant protagonist engages in some mirthful pyromania before fleeing the scene of the crime, and then returns home to gleefully punch his lover in the face. Once again, however, this thoroughly toxic song is overtaken by an unexpected sadness after the second verse, whereupon our suddenly contrite narrator laments the fact that he cannot be satisfied, and asks his black-eyed, fat-lipped partner to accompany him to an unknown destination. This, then, is a life of chaos, drunkenness, violent mood swings and, indeed, violence.
But the full-on punk of “You’re Crazy” suddenly sees Axl audaciously present himself as a romantic in a world of cold, unsentimental, sex-obsessed trollops; he’s been looking for a steady lover, but the women he meets aren’t interest in his love, they only want “satisfaction” – which is mysterious indeed, given the gentlemanly conduct described on “Night Train” or “It’s So Easy.” “Anything Goes”, meanwhile, adds some high-risk and animalistic sexual activity to the mix in order to complete the checklist of the album’s symptomology. It is very difficult to imagine Sting, Bono, or even Prince singing about shagging someone in a back alley, but this is redneck sex; aggressive, unpretentious, bereft of pristine bourgeois expectations or feminine illusions, utterly indifferent to the consequences of acting on impulse.
And yet, like so many other rock albums, Appetite for Destruction’s whores are accompanied by a litany of Madonnas. “Think About You” is an incongruous number indeed, because the music sounds much like all the other songs on this hard, strident, rather punishing listen of a record, but the lyrics are a juvenile, Luther Van Dross-style totem to romantic love, which is ironic indeed, given the misogynistic excesses of “It’s So Easy” and “Night Train”. “Sweet Child o’ Mine” achieves a better balance between music and lyrics; it’s the only bright, wholesome-sounding song on Appetite, more pop-rock than hard-rock; it never descends into punk or thrash; and the lyrics, ostensibly about Axl’s girlfriend, are disconcertingly oedipal: her smile reminds him of his childhood, her hair reminiscent of a “warm safe place,” perhaps a womb. The guitar solo is oddly plaintive, while the closing section is full of almost childlike hope, longing, and need of direction. It’s a triumph, though it sticks out like a sore thumb on this ferocious record.
And so we are left with the borderline dichotomy of substance abuse, risky sex, and misogynistic denigration vs. the starry-eyed idealization of eternal and unspoiled love. “Rocket Queen”, the album’s closer, careens between these extremes in a single song. Its opening verse presents us with the familiar psychopathic narrative, the razor tongued brigand who and can happily stab his lover in the back. And yet, startlingly, by the end of the song the tables have turned, and our narrator is first intensely, almost sentimentally sympathetic and, finally, pleading with his lover not to desert him. I Hate You, Don’t Leave Me indeed.
Ultimately, only one song on Appetite for Destruction indicates a capacity for integrating and transcending this dynamic of idealization and denigration, of perceiving the potential for redemption in the worthless slut. At first, it doesn’t sound promising. “My Michelle” starts by outlining the unhappy parentage of its subject – deadbeat dad, porn star mother – and we are perfectly entitled to expect another four-minute screed about a reprehensible woman of loose morals who needs a good slap to keep her in line after she returns from the liquor store with Axl’s whiskey. But the song turns out to be surprisingly sweet, sympathetic, and heartening. It acknowledges and graphically describes the madness of Michelle’s life, but it insists that, someday, she will fall in love, and it encourages her to never give up until that sweet dream is achieved. Michelle is Appetite’s lone tart-with-a-heart, the only feminine presence on the record who is able to embody both the Madonna and the whore, at least to some degree.
Overall, I’m fairly unconvinced of the merits of Appetite for Destruction. The three opening songs are thrilling, in a feral, spittle-flecked way, and I can definitely enjoy and appreciate the album’s in-your-face air of white trash defiance and mayhem. But it very quickly gets old, the sound starts to grate and – apart from the strategically positioned highlights of “Paradise City” and “Sweet Child O’ Mine” – every song starts to sound the same, an interminable cacophony of scything guitars and scathing, shrieky vocals. I had the same problem with Never Mind the Bollocks, which this album somewhat reminds me of. In my opinion, the Sex Pistols were one trick ponies, whereas Guns N’ Roses demonstrated their greater range and depth with songs like “Sweet Child o’ Mine” and, later, “November Rain.” Overall, however, Appetite for Destruction might provide us with a cohesive and consistent hard rock snarl but, after a while, it’s headache-inducing, like rubbing sandpaper against your brain for an hour. As with punk rock in general, the idea is more appealing than the experience.
6/10
Highlights: “Welcome to the Jungle”, “Night Train”, “Sweet Child o’ Mine”