Guns n Roses are about to release a new version of their breakthrough album from Appetite for Destruction. The album first came out in 1987 and the new version promises stacks of new tracks and recordings from the record company vaults.
The album remains the most successful debut album on the US charts and included the hit songs Sweet Child of Mine, Welcome to the Jungle and Paradise City.
The new version of the album contains the 1988 EP GnR Lies, plus b-sides, unreleased tunes, demo versions and a couple of covers, and fans will be eager to hear two work in progress recordings of November Rain – the track that ended up on the band’s follow up LP. All up there will be five discs of music and multimedia.
One thing is missing though. One in a Million – the track that opened the 1988 EP GnR Lies has been omitted. The song had been widely criticised for it’s anti-immigration and homophobic lyrics, and was filled with racist language and gay slurs.
Lead singer Axl Rose had defended the lyrics in a 1989 interview with Rolling Stone magazine.
“Why can black people go up to each other and say, ‘nigger,” but when a white guy does it all of a sudden it’s a big put down?,” he said. “I don’t like boundaries of any kind. I don’t like being told what I can and what I can’t say. I used the word ‘nigger’ because it’s a word to describe somebody that is basically a pain in your life, a problem. The word ‘nigger’ doesn’t necessarily mean black.”
In the song he also sings about his dislike of immigrants and people who are gay with the lyric, “Immigrants and faggots/They make no sense to me/They come to our country/And think they’ll do as they please.”
Rose has said in interviews that he focused on the two groups because he’d had problems with them in his past. At the time he described himself as “pro-heterosexual” and said “I’m not against them doing what they want to do as long as it’s not hurting anybody else and they’re not forcing it upon me.”
The singer said he had been traumatizsed by a man who once let him crash on his hotel room floor, but then later attempted to sexually assault him.
In the years that followed Rose said some of his biggest idols were gay including Freddie Mercury and Elton John.
After Freddie Mercury died in 1991 Guns N Roses performed at his memorial concert, performing Bohemian Rhapsody with Elton John.
Source: Pitchfork
