What set Guns N' Roses apart?

Polished = their sound: both are well polished rock bands as far as the final product. Lyrics are not really amenable to polish definitions, they are what they are. GnR could have had lyrics about fuzzy bunnies and the album would still have sold well at the time.

 

axl rose to Kurt cobain, 'tell your bitch to shut up'
Kurt cobain to Courtney love, 'shut up, bitch'

 

No my son that was not my desire, I was digging for fire.

 

I feel stupid every time I read one of your nirvana tantrums.

 

Guns 'n' Roses? I think of them as the Mike Tyson of heavy rock, coincidentally coming at around the same time. They had the same, uncompromising attitude at a time when rock meant poodle haircuts and chart friendly sounds. They arrived with grit, swagger, no shortage of sex appeal, one lethal guitarist and a bagful of killer riffs.

But added to all that, they brought along a bona fide modern classic in Appetite for Destruction. Still a knockout even 25 years on. At the time, nobody else, short of Metallica and Nirvana (and the latter was a different bag entirely), came close.

 

RATT, ministry, and mode???
that is eclectic taste, lol!

cheers,
rob

 

I disagree. Guns N' Roses brought reality back to rock in a time when the lyrics was all about having a good time. Which wasn't really realistic for many people in the Reagan era. The riffs helped but I think their lyrics resonated a lot more with late 1980s and early 1990s America, a time of recession, more than anything Warrant or Poison was offering. Music trends happen when they do for a reason; the earlier Glammy, upbeat rock fit the more upbeat, highly productive earlier '80s. GNR came up in a post Iran-Contra, George HW Bush/early Bill Clinton era recession world.

 

Well, someone had to put Courtney in line.

 

Some serious over thinking going on in this thread. I was a fan when they came out, and I liked Bon Jovi too, saw them on the New Jersey tour, saw Poison on the Open Up tour, saw Motley Crue on the Girls Girls Girls tour, and on and on. Guns were awesome, I loved them, but they were another band. I still loved Maiden and Priest at the same time, saw Maiden on the Seventh Son tour, with GNR opening!

Everybody didn't drop all their other bands and jump on the GNR bandwagon.

 

Motley Crue did it first, with Girls Girls Girls. GNR did it better, but I really see them as following the Crue. And the Glammy stuff peaked AFTER Appetite was released.

 

You really do have a Nirvana-sized chip on your shoulder. How about all those teenage girls who adored G N R, were they heavy JD drinkers?

 

Still, you must have a fairly catholic definition of "polished" if you're going to include GnR as a "polished" band, at least for the first couple of albums. BJ were polished, with a very produced sound involving multiple overdubs and synthy flourishes dusting the songs, whereas GnR were only polished insofar as their performances were well recorded and arranged.

 

The last you mention cannot be undersold. I remember when I was probably 8 years old cranking the music, but turning the volume knob down really quickly to "bleep" the f-words. Looking back, I can't imagine my parents would've cared. But it certainly seemed dangerous to us at the time.

 

That lyric isn't meant to be ironic at all, btw.

 

Really? Then I assume you're talking about young (80's) bands.

 

Well you may talking about part of the 'big' pop rock picture that GnR became a part of. In the 80's some of us (adults at the time) were listening to music with lyrics about more than a good time. Although a good time is subject to interpretation. For some a one night stand + a bottle of booze = a good time. There was a lot of 'hard rock' of many stripes at the time, everything from punk to thrash to metal, bands like Motorhead, and bands that played here locally that would soon achieve some fame. The 80's had a lot of popular acts like Midnight Oil and and so on that were 180 out from the likes of Cyndi Lauper.

 

Well that is polish. They were a far cry, production & arrangement wise, from much of the music I was into at the time. The GnR sound has many of the the attributes of polish - from the anthemic and dramatic flourishes to strategically arranged solos and so on, all expertly layered. Nothing wrong with that mind you. I bought Appetite at the time and liked it since it heralded a popular return to hard rock and suggested a turn away from the often bubbly sounds of the 80's.

 

Well, it wasn't nearly as good as Jane's Addiction's version, but I also think that Jane's was a better band from the same time. I think G'nR brought a straight forward boogie style back to hard rock which was lacking in the majority of the hair metal scene. Some of this was the record company not screwing with what they were doing and the result was huge success...probably not expected, but it worked.

 

When they first hit the mainstream, there was nothing 'fake' or BS about them. They weren't pushing a Glam Metal image - just a hard rock street level approach.

I felt at the time that Faith No More broke some ground for them - FNM were a fairly popular MTV band at the time or just prior to GnR hitting.

 

Axl's love of Czech music probably influenced some of the work.

 

Songwriting and Axl. I think L.A. Guns, the logical comparison, was more talented musically but weren't quite as good in the songwriting department. Phil Lewis was a pretty good singer, but didn't have that nastiness that Axl had.

 

Yeah but I'm talking in terms of the mainstream hard rock scene. Metallica and Motorhead weren't exactly the mainstream bands they'd become in 1988. I think GnR opened the door for a lot of these 'real' hard rock or heavy metal bands to break through and become acceptable to mainstream America. I don't think for example Metallica would've become as huge as they did in 1991 if GNR hadn't made it 'okay' for a mainstream hard rock band to not look totally pretty and to talk about deeper themes in music. GNR were far from the first band to be 'real' but in terms of the '80s hard rock scene, in the mainstream, reality was very rare. Even with Aerosmith, 70s Aersosmith was about partying and chicks and muff diving, it wasn't about people overdosing. You didn't get stuff from them like 'Janie's Got a Gun' until after GNR broke through.

 

And as far as Motley Crüe...They were too tied in the public mind to the makeup, to 'Girls, Girls, Girls', to be real, even if some of their songs offered reality. I mean, Guns N' Roses offering up chaos - 'Appetite for a Destruction', shaking up hard rock with controversial songs like One in a Million, while Crue was partying with Dr. Feelgood.

 

I'll always contend GNR was the bridge between hard rock and grunge. Perhaps not in sound, but in lyricism and reality. Pearl Jam and such bands were doing sonically everything that the glam bands had done but without the excess or pomp. Nirvana was the opposite extreme. Guns N' Roses and Metallica straddled the border between the two worlds which is why they were still huge, relevant rock acts after 1992 while bands like Def Leppard and Poison were swept away.

It's why Metallica and GNR when they've released new records went Platinum and why they've not been relegated to the state or county fair circuit. Their realism transcended the era in which they broke through. Metallica, GNR and Nirvana are among the few bands of the late 80s - 90s that aren't automatically and only associated with that era.

 

Yeah, L.A. Guns and Faster Pussycat both put out good first albums around that same time, but they weren't as good as Appetite.