14 songs, 14 years
HIGH NOTES
The "Greatest Band in the World" releases its long-awaited new album.
With the release of the Guns N’ Roses album, Chinese Democracy, 14 years of rumours, suspicions, assumptions and predictions shrouding the album have finally been put to rest. On a more unfortunate note, the release of the album has also meant that the music and entertainment media worldwide have lost one of its easiest potshot targets.
But who can blame the media for their jokes over the years about the “pending” release of the album. Any reasonably intelligent person would agree that 14 years is a ridiculous amount of time to spend on 14 songs and, furthermore, reports that the cost of making the album eventually bottomlined at approximately $13 million, make it quite an exclamatory extravagance.
But it wasn’t our money or our time spent, and so if Axl Rose, the self-proclaimed leader of the band and only current member from the original lineup, wanted to indulge his fantasy of making the greatest rock record ever, then so be it.
Though we aren’t really sure if he did say that he wanted to make the greatest rock record ever, just like we aren’t sure that he continually worked on the album for 14 years or even spent the amount of money that he is reported to have spent on making the album. Sounds like a lot of Chinese whispers, but that’s the thing with these rock-n-roll tales, you can never entirely trust them.
But then again, who really cares? I’m not very quick to admit it these days, but my first introduction to popular music came via Guns N’ Roses videos on the first days of MTV in India. I had every album they made (not a great achievement, given how few there were) and considered myself a G N’ R fan. The world has changed a lot since the release of the last Guns N’ Roses album in 1993, and to say that the band have lost their relevance would be quite an understatement.
And so, if it wasn’t for the constant media mention and jokes that Chinese Democracy was at the receiving end of, I really would not have cared about a new album from the band, just like the millions of other people around the world who used to be fans of the band and are now probably well into or edging close to their 30s and are happier car-pooling to Coldplay concerts and trying their best to be considered Radiohead fans.
But then, there will always will be those who do care about G N’ R, and these are the people who, out of curiosity or possibly love, or maybe both, downloaded songs from the album when they were leaked onto the Internet before the release. These are also the people who streamed the album hundreds of thousands of times when it was previewed on MySpace last week. All of this suggesting that the band still means a lot to many people around the world. Given all of this activity, it’s a safe bet to assume that the album will do pretty well for itself on the sales front either.
To their credit, though, Chinese Democracy does sound surprisingly good. It’s highly doubtful that it’s the greatest album ever made and it’s doubtful that it will help retrieve the title, “Greatest Band in the World”, for Guns N’ Roses. That battle is currently still on between Coldplay, Kings of Leon and U2. All thanks to that mischief-monger, the music media.