I find it unjust that history has condemned GnR to the same aesthetic trailer park as Warrant or Motley Crue. 'Appetite for Destruction' was a perfectly fine hard rock LP. Not so good, it is true, that the band deserved to be the biggest thing in Anglosphere pop culture at the turn of the nineties, and it is on this point that White male privilege and other unsavory forces played a part; forces that would eventually ruin the band. It was the pressure to live up the mythic, (and soon to be retired) status of 'Greatest Band in The World' that made the Use Your Illusion albums such bloated absurdities and has sent Axl Rose down that very same rabbit hole of bloat ever since. Still one must not hate the player. In the summer of 92 when all legal currency on Earth was available to them of course they took it. What would you have done?
GNR also get a bum rap for Axl's 'Shut your bitch up' tiff with Nirvana, an incident that has since been mythologized as the moment when progressive hipsters seized control of White youth culture from the meatheads and have held it ever since. this is a morally satisfying narrative. But real history doesn't work in narratives. Shit just happens. The actual story of how the weirdo gene line of Velvet Underground Stooges and Bowie came to be seen as Rock n Roll's true path is a very long one in which Nirvana come in only at the very end, and actually did very little of the real work.
At any rate the VMA incident was only a handful of years before the rise of Korn, Limp Biskit, etc.
The era of stupid White thugs achieving far more than their natural talents warranted was far from over. The only thing that had really changed was a new mandate to only ever sing about hate and misery instead of sex and fun. GnR were unquestionably superior to what comprised mainstream rock in my own teens and early twenties. Whatever value you place in that is entirely up to you.
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The old stereotype of 'rednecks' being the largest source of reactionary opinions in this country isn't actually so. That's just another system justifier, placing the blame for common prejudice among those White people who have less money and are thus somewhat 'less White. the truth, as this increasingly internet famous woman from suburban Cleveland makes clear, is that it's the Upper-Class Twits of the world who are the source for most of our problems. Spending one's life around mostly social subordinates allows peculiar notions to grow without challenge, and what the hell is her trouble with nuns anyway?
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