Guns N’Roses, [I]dude! [/I]Dirty, low-down, stinking, rotten, sweaty, balls-out, hairy-palmed, chicken-strangling, dog-raping, cranium-crushing, third-cousin-twice-removed fucking shitheel redneck badass swaggering rude tats-plastered king-bastard LA fuck-rock! With mungency!
You’ve seen that rockumentary [I]The Decline Of Western Civilisation Part II – The Metal Years[/I] where a bunch of Max Factor-plastered fat [a]Robert Smith[/a]-lookalike [a]Hanoi Rocks[/a] wannabes with electrocuted poodle hair simper pathetically about how they’re gonna make it big time, yeah? Well Guns N’Roses crushed their dreams. Flat! They were butch, brutal, unmistakably male AND horribly heterosexual and had a guitarist called ‘Slash’ and rocked like hugely tusked and massively cocked mastodons on methadone and they killed LA Poodle Metal stone-cold dead – stomped the fucker – then nailed down the coffin lid and firebombed the funeral parlour with manly gusto. [I]And [/I]they couldn’t even spell their own name properly. Fuckin’ cool!
And we all thought – Dude! Metal is BACK! Like bandana’d blond bad-boy GNR vocal chore handler Axl Rose was the RAWK Jesus Christ to Ian Astbury of The Cult‘s Moses and Zodiac Mindwarp‘s John The Baptist. Hallelujah! The second coming! But we were wrong! Axl sang about [I]”faggots and immigrants”[/I] spreading AIDS and pissed a load of people off. Then he got his cock out and actually, literally, [I]physically [/I]pissed [I]on [/I]some of his fans and then – worst of all – turned into a shit-awful embarrassing cabaret singer covering Sir Paul Fabmacca songs and it all went kersplat-wheeze-choke-splutter-clunk and that, my children, is how we ended up with the aptly monickered Limp Bizkits. Shame.
So do we [I]need [/I]this 22-track, two-CD live retrospective? Does their music stand the test of time? Is it one of rock’s great live albums? Will it inspire millions of kids the world over to burn their Belle & Sebastian CDs, swap their Es for rhino tranquilliser cut with ground-up crack, baby pelvic bones and desiccated pygmy chimp adrenal glands? And will these kids then strap on bandanas and brutally-studded snakeskin bike-boots, get themselves savagely tattooed with the slogan ‘JUST SAY NO! TO EFFEMINATE EURO-FAG MOCK-ROCK!’ and then deluge us with a testosterone-driven tidal wave of penile-demented HEVVY MEDDLE!?
Well no, no, no, no and no – actually… There’s none of the frantic amphetamine haste of The Ramones’ ‘It’s Alive’ or of the fizzing teenage screaming that made ‘The Beatles At The Hollywood Bowl’ such a classic album. In fact ‘Live Era…’ totally lacks any of the ruff-edged immediacy that is an essential prerequisite for any truly great rock’n’roll live recording. All you can hear is an obsolescent but very professional rock band going through their stodgy antediluvian paces. Which is a bit boring. So it looks like the poodles win after all, then.
Cool ‘tude, crap tunes. All in all, an excellent Christmas prezzie. For your gran.
Muthaf–er.