Review - Chinese Democracy

When I was in the fourth grade, my elementary school had “Dress As Your Idol Day.” While other students came to school dressed as Cal Ripken Jr. or Emmitt Smith or (how cliché) their father, I took the high road: I dressed as Axl Rose. Why my parents not only allowed to this happen but also helped to handcraft a Guns N’ Roses t-shirt for me I’m still unsure of, but I think the reasons for my choice were justifiable. Namely, that when Axl Rose was confronted with adversity, both personal and musical, he simply pressed on with a fiercer determination and even grander bombast. In other words, he quite literally marched to the beat of his own drummer – who he then fired. At nine, I found this to be admirable.

Seventeen years later, not much has changed. Chinese Democracy is an album of retribution, a not-so-quiet “f you” to those who’ve questioned Rose over the years, and even perhaps to those who didn’t. At 71 minutes, it’s a monster of a record that just may be the most preposterous of the new millennium. Taking a look at the liner notes alone, 11 musicians are given allowances for thank yous, 8 different engineers are credited with supplying the record’s “pro tools,” and 9 of the album’s 14 songs feature at least four different guitar players. And in spite of all of this, or perhaps because of it, the album also happens to rock.

Despite early reports that the album would carry an industrial sound, there’s quite a bit here that sounds like the Guns N’ Roses of old. “Street of Dreams” could easily take its place alongside “November Rain” and “Estranged” in the band’s catalogue of ballads, “Riad N’ The Bedouins” would comfortably find a home on one of the Use Your Illusion albums, and the bluesy “I.R.S.” sounds more like Appetite era Guns than anything the band has put out since 1990.

And yet for all this, it’s the fresher-sounding material that really makes the album go. “Better” is the record’s lone masterpiece, a gritty stomper of a rock song that effortlessly blends genres while carrying along its waves a classic Rose melody. The ballad “This I Love” is even more surprising if not as impressive. Here, Rose howls about love on the rocks accompanied by the kinds of emotive piano and string arrangements that made Evanescence an international powerhouse nearly five years ago. It’s clear by the time the synths fade on Democracy’s last track that the singer never lost his penchant for writing a good tune, but also that like all things in the Guns N’ Roses universe, nothing is that simple.

The true debate over Chinese Democracy will inevitably focus not on the music as a singular piece but rather on whether or not it warrants the two decades of production and millions of dollars spent making it. Indeed, one of the few frustrating things about listening to Chinese Democracy is hearing the moments where Axl very apparently strove too hard to make up the time. While the absurd number of audio samples in “Madagascar” (Martin Luther King Jr., Cool Hand Luke, Braveheart, and Seven, just to name a few) ultimately make the album more outlandishly Axl-like, songs such as “Catcher In The Rye” and “There Was A Time” suffer as they twist and turn one time too many, turning promising melodies into meandering opuses. The songs become “what could have beens” for a band all-too-familiar with such scenarios. Still, you can hardly blame the guy for trying.

What makes the record a triumph, for me, is that nothing on it feels tentative or half-assed. Despite his oft-reported preoccupation with public perception, it’s clear that Axl made the record that he set out to make long ago. Chinese Democracy is a grand, imperfect, and best of all, interesting rock record, and for someone who’s had that adjective used pejoratively towards him so many times before, Rose deserves to hang his hat on that.

Grade: B+