What set Guns N' Roses apart?

Tracii Guns is a good guitarist, but he's no Slash. Slash not only had a cool image but the talent to back it up. Similarly, with Axl, there was talent and charisma behind the bandana. He was a fascinating figure. Which can't really be said so much for say, Jack Russell.

 

To be fair, GnR were singing Appetite tunes while Motley was singing songs about Nikki's heroin overdose on Dancin' On Glass:

Silver spoon & needle, witchy tombstone smile
I'm no pup, engrave my veins with style
I've been through hell & i'm never going back
To Dancin' On Glass

Also WILD SIDE:

Kneel down ye sinners to street-wise religion
Greed's been crowned the new King
Holly wood dream teems, yesterday's trash queens
Save the blessing for the final ring, Amen!

Appetite was released July 1987, Girls was released in May.
Motley also sang about drugs, violence, sex, death on their first two albums especially.
GNR were most certainly influenced by Motley Crue

 

If LA Guns were more talented musically than GnR it sure didn't come through on their first album, which is the only album of theirs I've heard in full. I bought it with high hopes and was really disappointed - I thought it was a badly-produced album full of plodding songs that seemed to by trying too hard to be sleazy. My sister kind of dug it though, so horses for courses and all that.

 

I think the first L.A. Guns album is half pretty forgettable, and half really great. "One More Reason" is one of my favorite songs of that era.

 

I always thought it a bit strange that L.A. Guns imported British ex-Girl singer Lewis for the band. Maybe he was in LA at the time of auditions, but him fronting a hyped 'sleazy American hard rock band' seemed a bit odd.

 

Speaking of L.A. Guns...

 

A) Motörhead has never been mainstream (probably much to Lemmy's chagrin.)
B) Metallica would have been just fine commercially even if G'n'R never existed.
C) Aerosmith, in the 70's, had just as much seriousness to their material as G'n'R did in the 80's. You make G'n'R out to be this paragon of great lyrics and hot button of social topics. Give me a break. They were a hard rock band just like a 1,000 others but just happened to get the breaks that many did not. The reasons for that have already been discussed in this thread.

Honestly, your constant obsession to elevate the band mythical proportions and to claim they helped start genre X or influenced genre Y is a bit embarrassing. Isn't there a dedicated G'n'R board somewhere on the net where you could find like minded souls like yourself?

 

Moreover I think it's specifically from the Moscow Music Peace Festival which was a few months before Dr Feelgood was released.

 

I have and I just cant get past the first side - I would have made a great EP

 

I love how hipsters in late 2015 are supposedly all about Starbucks and Nirvana. Finger on the pulse, this guy.

 

They are all confined to Williamsburg too, according to him it's like 1997 all over again.

 

I think Sweet Child of Mine helped Guns n Roses tremendously..

 

It is, I had to break up the monotony, being in a small very Christian Dutch town in high school it was all Leppard and any rock that went well with beer
I was the only one with Pixies, Nitzer Ebb, NIN etc...

 

Def Leppard has 2 Diamond albums.

 

There are two kinds of people: People who view others as unique individuals and people who try to pigeonhole others into reductive little stereotypes. (I'm being ironic here, which I guess makes me a latte-sipping, Nirvana-loving hipster. Who knew?)

 

Well

1) They weren't garbage
2) They weren't the new Aerosmith
3) They certainly weren't the new Stones

So he got 2 out of 3 right. He get's a pass.

 

As for what set them apart...they just sounded great is about as basic an explanation as you can get. They didn't really sound or look like other bands around the time. Though, I'm sure someone will post a picture of one of the band members with hairspray hair in order to comment otherwise

But they really did stand out at the time. We played it constantly at home, in art class (when the Bon Jovi lover wasn't playing Bon Jovi...man that guy was a right dickhead about controlling the tape deck)...after the initial lot of bands I loved (Zep, Beatles, Stones, Who, etc) GnR were the next rock n roll band to really make an impression on me.

They had so much energy and attitude on Appetite. They just sounded different, proper rock n roll with a real edge to them.

Everything about them just seemed interesting. They sounded great, they looked great, had a great attitude. Of course for me that all ended with UYI.

 

I think you really try so hard to separate the two type of fans. You're just looking at the extremes of either fan base and it mostly exists in your head IMO anyway. It;s like you read an article about a specific Nirvana fan and then decided that's what they are all like.

Pretty much everyone I knew at the time liked both bands and no one was sipping latte's or thinking they were intellectuals. We just liked the music. Yes we were all dumb enough to drink JD but that was before we realised there's far better booze out there. It had nothing to do with GnR in any case but more to do with Motorhead.

If there was ever any separation between two bands it was Nirvana vs Pearl Jam. I rarely met anyone who loved both. Usually you liked one or the other. But even then I'm probably generalising due to my own experiences.

 

I thought it was a good idea to remember this idea considering how lots of people tend to dismiss it on this very forum.

 

What lame pocket of the world are you in (has Brooklyn become that bad and hipster-fied?)that all Nirvana fans are latte-sipping hypocrites and G 'N' R fans, you know, keep it real or something equally stupid? And when you said in your initial post that Chinese Democracy is the "stuff of legend", do you mean the legend of its bloated, prolonged development/subsequent lukewarm reception or are you actually trying to suggest that generally speaking the culture at large gives two craps about that album?

 

What set them apart from groups that made credible music was the singer's horrendous screeching squeaky voice and the quantity weak, weak songs.

 

Hard rock revival, my rear end. Appetite For Destruction finally stole the show from The Sex Pistols when no one else could over the course of ten years. It took ten years for an American band to follow up the birth of punk, "Anarchy in the UK", with a credible, melodic, and vocally and instrumentally spectacular answer. GNR did just that when they recorded "Out ta Get Me" and "It's So Easy".

 

Ace of Spades did that years before. Motorhead had been the rock and punk crossover for years. Their management had failed them for years though and a five rear wrangle ensued from 1986. They've stayed a cult band ever since.

 

Yes, they got their real break with a (great) ballad. That's where they reached beyond the hard rock audience into the mainstream, and probably quadrupled the female contingent if their fanbase.