No. 20 - 🔫 🌹Lose your illusions about Use Your Illusion edition 🔫 🌹
There's a heaven above you BBY
“This is how an asshole plays piano.”
That’s how Rob Harvilla describes the opening notes to “November Rain” on his 60 Songs that Explain the 90s podcast. The asshole in question, of course, was Guns N’ Roses singer Axl Rose, who by 1991 was generally regarded as both an asshole and a musical genius.
You need to be both those things to come up with a pair of albums as obnoxiously grand as Use Your Illusion I & II, which both turn 30 on September 17th. Neither record is anyone’s favourite Guns album. In fact, there are many fans who downright loathe their excesses. But as the records that introduced me to the band, I’ve always had a deep affection for them both, even if I recognize their objective flaws.
One of the great things about “discovering” a band when you’re young is that you tend to accept their entire recorded output as unimpeachable. This is how I received Guns N’ Roses, a fait accompli in greatness. I used to listen to them endlessly on my Walkman while completing my weekly route delivering the North Shore News. So my perspective on them is forever skewed.
Much of the animus towards the records stems from what came before: Appetite for Destruction, the band’s 1987 debut, was a breath of fresh air amidst the Sunset strip’s gaggle of Aquanet pretenders. Where bands like Poison, Cinderella and Motley Crue were pushing aspirational anthems about girls and money, Guns spun arena anthems out of the Strip’s dark underbelly. Both records are violent, paranoid and misogynistic (GnR Lies is the one with the explicitly racist lyrics). But where Appetite was born from lived experience, Use Your Illusion I & II were bloated and petty, made by certifiable rock stars enthralled with their own fame and fortune.
Still, as bloated and petty records go, these two are hard to beat. To me, they are perfect examples of an artist taking a sound so far out that no one will ever top it. Like Smashing Pumpkins Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness did for alt-rock and Kanye’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy did for maximalist hip-hop, Use Your Illusion I & II pushed 80s hard rock into new territory, specifically pop and classical music. Call it baroque hair metal.
Whereas Appetite presented Guns N’ Roses as a gang - a gang of degenerates, but a gang nevertheless - Use Your Illusion was the Axl Rose plus some other (very famous) guys. The members of Guns N’ Roses were at odds with Rose during the long, labourious recording process; reportedly, at no point were all five band members in the studio at the same time and almost a third of the two records’ 30 tracks had existed in some form previously, many rejected for the band’s debut. The popular line is that the albums were too long, with too many slow songs and not enough rockers, and that the whole thing should have been edited down to one LP. But how do you write epic power ballads like “November Rain,” “Estranged” and “Don’t Cry” and not release them all (in “Don’t Cry’s” case, twice)?
Use Your Illusion I & II have both sold seven million copies in America alone, an insane number that can only be considered a failure when your previous album is one of the best-selling albums of all time (which Appetite for Destruction is). Yet, even in the age of streaming “November Rain” has racked up more than 500 million listens. That’s a 30-year old song that literally millions of people around the world already own and by rights should have gotten sick of more than 20 years ago. For all their faults, the Use Your Illusion albums connected with people back then and they continue to connect with people now.
Of course, the problem with pushing a sound as far as it can go is that an artist inevitably creates a benchmark that even they can’t top. Some bands try and fail, others veer left down some other creative path. But Guns never even really tried.
Much hay has been made from the fact that Nirvana’s epochal Nevermind dropped a week after the Illusion discs. To their credit, Guns N’ Roses faired better than pretty much all their peers against the alt-rock onslaught. They probably would have continued to find success in the 90s if the band hadn’t fallen apart. Original drummer Steven Adler was fired before the Illusion sessions really got going, and guitarist, songwriter and Axl’s childhood friend Izzy Stradlin left shortly after its completion. By the mid-90s Axl was the only original member left and it would take another decade or so for him and his band of replacements (including actual former Replacement Tommy Stinson) to release the hot mess that was Chinese Democracy. Use Your Illusion and its subsequent tour essentially broke one of the biggest bands in the world, yet they still managed to wring two classics out of all the acrimony.
Kool Kids Self-promotion Club
I recently reviewed the new Big Red Machine record, How Long Do you Think It’s Gonna Last? for Exclaim! It’s a collaboration between Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon and The National’s Aaron Dessner featuring a heap load of guests including Fleet Foxes’ Robin Pecknold, Sharon Van Etten, Ariel Engle from La Force and Broken Social Scene and, of course, Taylor Swift. I called it “a masterclass on the aesthetic that Vernon and Dessner have been honing across their careers.”
Kool Kids Recommendation Club
Australia’s Hatchie is back with a banger. “This Enchanted” is the first new single Harriette Pilbeam’s released since 2019’s not-as-good-as-her-EP-but-still-pretty-great full-length Keepsake. It adds a touch of house to her dreampop swirl (dream house?) as she sings about a broken heart and how when you’re with the right person, love shouldn’t be that hard. Pretty stoked for more whenever the next album for her new label Secretly Canadian drops.
I briefly mentioned Whitby, ON’s Chastity last time, thanks to Brandon Williams’ assist on the recent Ellis EP. Now he’s back with his main gig’s third full-length Suffer Summer, out in January. Williams is something of a musical chameleon, shifting his sound with each release, from the Deftones-esque thrash of 2018’s Death Lust to the more straightforward rock of Home Made Satan. “Pummeling,” the first single from the new record has a real pop-punk vibe to it, yet never leans on the tropes of the genre in a way that obscures his own musical vision.
I do a thing quite often where I’ll - unfairly! - bucket artists together, preferring one to the other (I once skipped seeing Coldplay at Richards in Richards in Vancouver because I’d chosen Travis as my Bends-era Radiohead ripoff band of choice). I like Snail Mail quite a bit, but I’ve always associated Lindsey Jordan’s music with that of Sophia Allison of Soccer Mommy due to their age, gender and general style of music that they both play. ANYWAY! Jordan just announced her follow-up to 2018’s Lush and I think she’s really stepped things up this time with the anthemic and crunchy “Valentine,” which chronicles doomed romance and Jordan’s inability to get over it. It’s the most immediate and lush song she’s made yet. Valentine the album drops on November 5.
I was a tad obsessed with Khalid’s debut album America Teen and not alone in my disappointment with his more-of-the-same-but-not-as-good follow-up. “New Normal” doesn’t suggest that Everything is Changing will live up to its name in any serious way, but it’s the most excited about been about one of the Dallas, TX-based singer’s music in a minute. The fact that it premiered during the Richard Branson’s “launch a billionaire into space” event doesn’t bode well, but let’s hope for bigger and better things.
Caroline Polacheck flew under my radar for a long time, both as a member of Brooklyn indie darlings Chairlift and as a solo artist. That changed for me - and probably a lot of people - with 2019’s Pang and “You’re So Hot It’s Hurting My Feelings.” “Bunny is a Rider” can’t quite live up to that immortal single, but it comes damn close. According to Polachek, “Bunny is slippery, impossible to get ahold of…anyone can be bunny, at least for three minutes and seventeen seconds.”
Toronto’s jazzy hip-hop trio (or hip-hop influenced jazz combo, depending on your perspective) BadBadNotGood are back after an unnaturally - for them at least - long break between records. Following 2016’s IV (one of my fav records from the past 10 years) they’ve moved up to perpetual tastemaking label XL Recordings (home of Radiohead, Sampha and Sigur Ros to name but a few) for their fifth full length Talk Memory, out October 8. The album’s second single “Beside April” features like-minded drummer Karriem Riggins and seems to portend a more instrumental-focused release than IV. I’m very excited about this one.
Ian Gormely is a freelance music journalist based in Toronto.
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