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Green Day inducts Guns N’ Roses into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

Appetite for Destruction is the greatest debut album in the history of rock and roll,” Green Day singer Billie Joe Armstrong asserted at this year’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony. When they’re not too busy keeping the punk flame burning with American Idiot The Musical (“gorgeously wrought”—New York Times), Green Day like to show their hearts are still in the right place with a rebellious gesture, such as flying to Cleveland to toss three original members of Guns N’ Roses’ salad at a $25,000-a-table dinner for industry executives. Just because they’re punk doesn’t mean they can’t be good team players.

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Appetite for Destruction is the most tedious debut album in the history of shit. Compared to Gn’R’s first effort, Chinese Democracy sounds like Sgt. Pepper. When it appeared 25 years ago, Appetite was a total snore, a prolonged whine in a dead language. Today, familiarity has made listening to it an excruciating labor. Guns N’ Roses was not, as some people think, a great band that was destroyed by W. Axl Rose’s narcissism; his narcissism was the band’s only asset. What Gn’R lacked in brains, guts, style, taste, and talent, they made up for in attitude, which consisted of their ostentatious heterosexuality, shameless deployment of tasty licks, and casual swearing. They were every bit as outrageous as True Religion jeans and Ed Hardy iPhone skins.

On its release in 1987, Appetite was already music for middle-aged alcoholic stepfathers who thought Molly Hatchet was “dangerous,” too. We must fart long and loud in the faces of those who proclaim this album a classic. A classic what? A classic trashcan for BBQ blooze-rock riffs? A classic proto-Kickstarter campaign for a piece of ass and another mosh with Mr. Brownstone? A classic bully pulpit for some bigoted yokel who wanted to announce to the world at large that he liked pussy, though not as much as he liked fucking your sister up the ass in her Sunday dress?

Guns N’ Roses “Welcome to the Jungle” live

“This ride was not about parties, glamour, or power ballads,” Billie Joe said at the ceremony, describing the first time he heard “Welcome to the Jungle” on MTV. “It was about the seedy underworld of misfits, drug addicts, paranoia, sex, violence, love, and anger in the cracks of Hollywood. It was a breath of fresh air!” As it turned out, the ride was precisely about parties, glamour, and power ballads, and Axl soon identified the “niggers,” “immigrants,” and “faggots” who peopled Hollywood’s cracks as the villains who would bring you to your sha-na-na-na-na-na-na-knees. But Green Day is much too polite to mention these things while appearing before their bosses to burnish the Gn’R myth, which goes like this: once, the Sunset Strip was full of candyass hair metal bands, who were a bunch of gay posers, but then Guns N’ Fuckin’ Roses emerged to blow them all away with dirty-ass rock and roll.

In truth, Guns N’ Roses rehabilitated hair metal. The year before Appetite came out, Slayer’s Reign in Blood, Cro-Mags’ The Age of Quarrel, Metallica’s Master of Puppets, Candlemass’ Epicus Doomicus Metallicus, and Sepultura’s Morbid Visions had all dealt crushing dickpunches to the subgenre of Cinderella and Mötley Crüe. Then these clowns turned up, festooned with the most embarrassing Hard Rock Cafe tokens—bandanas, biker jackets, top hats, dangling skull earrings, assless chaps—and topped off with gallons of hairspray. They pissed out a weak tea of Skynyrd and Aerosmith riffs and passed it off as a hearty stew. They made impotent displays of aggression directed at the women who fucked them, the bands that were better than them, and their own fans. Satisfied, the rock media dutifully established Gn’R’s limp boogie as the absolute horizon of rebellion beyond which there is none more rebellious, paving the way for such artists as Warrant, Mr. Big, Ugly Kid Joe, Slaughter, and Extreme. My thanks to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Green Day for recognizing this historic achievement.

Axl “gets in the ring” at Hellfest 2012

But seriously, no shit, I cried the day they broke up. I was expecting great things after “The Spaghetti Incident?

Previously – Balancing the Books