Guns N' Roses - Paradise City

Guns N' Roses - Paradise City (7" Black Vinyl, Artwork Sleeve, Single) [1988] US.

1. Paradise City [6:46] *

2. Move To The City [3:42] **

* Album Version. Taken from the LP "Appetite For Destruction".

** Album Version. Taken from the EP "Live ?!*@ Like a Suicide".

Hi. Welcome to another edition of 'Shit I Own', by me. :) I was thinking the other day, if you saw a wheat-thin guy with long strawberry-blonde hair running around like a madman, rockin' an oversized bright-pink fishnet t-shirt, stark-white super-short spandex tights and super-white high-top pump-up Nike sneakers, would you think to yourself: "Wow, this guy's really cool!"? Probably not. If he happened to be rollerblading down Hollywood Blvd, you'd probably pull out your 9mm gat and f'n super-soak the fucker. But... what if the dude broke out with some Raspy ass vocals and fuckin' killed it? Hmmm... I guess if anything, that's a good way to test the power of your music. Not that that's what Axl was doing, since he's obviously GONE INSANE since the UYI sessions. (You can see it evolving further after those recordings with their live shows when things got Ghetto Extravagant!) So sad. It's this type of insanity that makes a band leader forget about what's really important. [Note: A bit like Glenn Danzig, I feel bad for both of them since they both fuckin' tripped out and lost their main players.] I guess we all at one time or another lose the best thing we've got going in life huh? Yeah... they regret it. I can tell. Their subtle facial twitches may not be noticed by the laymen, but to me, they may as well be crying tears of blood. Don't you cry tonight, Axl.

It's a damn shame that those two ego-tripped their strongest supports out the door only to overproduce unremarkable and regrettably forgettable music later in their careers. Glenn at least slowly worked his way back in the right direction through 6, 7 and 8, perhaps ending up where 5 should have been with 9. But even through his rough times at least he kept putting out albums. It took Axl fifteen years to finally get his baby "perfected", and even then, it doesn't sound like anything near his former self. He took things too far, and while I have at times complained about songs being overly-simplistic, the stuff on Chinese Democracy doesn't even sound like music half of the time. There was no reason to go "above and beyond" the expansive materials utilized on the Use Your Illusion albums. And for an Axl solo album, he sure as fuck had a lot of different people playing on it. Glenn seems to have gotten back to core band direction and sound. As for Axl Rose, I don't see him ever working on another song that sounds anything like Paradise City. He's got his head in too much shit obviously and I can't imagine him sitting down with a band and creating real music anymore.