Mossback meets Guns 'n' Roses

National Review, Oct 21, 1991 by Andrew Ferguson

LATELY I've had the vague sense that large matters are being played out without my knowing quite what's going on. And, let's be frank, I don't know what's going on. The other evening I switched on Entertainment Tonight and sat glassy-eyed, watching the parade of movie stars, recording stars, soap-opera stars, and sitcom stars for 15 minutes before I was roused by a name I recognized, and then it was Paul Anka's and he doesn't count.

To recoup, I've been trying to follow the fall television season in the papers. I too am concerned whether Doogie Howser, MD, will lose his virginity before Christmas, but not overly so since I wasn't aware that Dr. Howser was a virgin. I didn't know they let virgins on TV. And of course I don't know who Doogie Howser is.

I'm similarly spotty with the bestseller lists: I know who Erma Bombeck is, and P. J. O'Rourke, the patron saint of all conservative journalists; but the name M. Scott Peck is new to me, even though Mr. (Dr.?) Peck's The Road Less Traveled has been riding the lists for 411 weeks. How could I have missed it? More troubling: What else have I missed?

My ignorance is in no way intentional. Total detachment from popular culture seems to me a fogey's crotchet. It calls to mind my father's blank stare when I hollered "Peter Fonda!" after he asked me whose picture I had just tacked to my bedroom wall in 1969. Imagine, in the days of Easy Rider, not knowing who Peter Fonda was. But these days I feel myself lost in a cloud-world of unrecognizable Peter Fondas.

Last month, I read that record stores across the country had stayed open the night before, to accommodate the midnight release of two new rock 'n' roll albums. The two were actually a set, with the titles Use Your Illusion I and Use Your Illusion II, by Guns 'n' Roses. Nationwide, five hundred thousand units sold by 2 A.M. Then sales slowed to a mere five hundred thousand a day. And one of those sales was made to me.

I saw it as a chance to reconnect to that wider world. Though I'd never heard Guns 'n' Roses, I had heard of them. Individually they are called Slash, Axl, Matt, Duff, and Izzy, five dwarfs from a Disney hell. A file of their press clips reads like a police blotter--one member was recently arrested for allegedly dropping a wine bottle on a neighbor's head, another for urinating in the galley of an airliner. This is the pop-music business, of course, and incidents like these could be dismissed as good PR. I put down my $13.99 for UYI II. (The last time I bought a rock 'n' roll record the price was $5.99--an observation only a mossback would make, I know.)

YOU DON'T have to listen to UYI II for very long before you realize that for some people urinating in airplane galleys and dropping wine bottles on their neighbors represent not public relations but a way of life. Guns 'n' Roses' music is rooted solidly in the discovery that by turning a Marshall amplifier to 10, and simultaneously turning the volume control on an electric guitar to 10, a guitarist can play chords drained of all tonality. Add drums with a heavy echo effect and a singer with more vibrato than voice, and you've got the sound. You've got Guns 'n' Roses.

No, you can't even dance to it. The Gunners stick to 4/4 time, of course, but they mix it up with half time and double time, and as I listened the thought occurred: Dear God, they're being arty. I grabbed the lyric sheet. Apart from their terrible potty training, their lyrics are considered their most objectionable aspect, full of mysogyny and profanity and sadism. But the lyric's most striking quality is their--how to put it?--stupidity. The rhyme schemes are stunning.

And when you're talkin' about a vasectomy

Yeah

I'll be writing down your obituary.

I checked: For as long as artists have explored the mysterious commingling of sex and death, this is the first time anyone ever thought to rhyme vasectomy and obituary. They go on:

Why do you look at me when you hate me?

Why should I look at you when you make me hate you too?

A good question, but don't try to scan it. And, this being contemporary showbiz, sooner or later the social conscience barrels through.

I don't need your civil war

It feeds the rick while it buries the poor

Your power hungry sellin' soldiers

In a human grocery store.

As I turned off UYI II, my only thought was of the $13.99 I would never see again. It was the thought not of an outraged moralist, but of a man who has succumbed to galloping fuddy-duddyism. As the fogey within me asserts itself, I worry that I will struggle vainly against it and wind up like one of those potbellied guys you see waddling through America's college towns, dressed in colored T-shirts and bell-bottoms and sporting handle-bar mustaches, the guys who refuse to get the message, which is this: the popular culture has passed them by, as it must all of us. For me, Guns 'n' Roses delivers the message with brutal finality. It's time at last to put away childish things, time to face the music: an old Rosemary Clooney album, say, or maybe Tony Bennett.