Few albums embody rock’s essential contradictions as vividly as Guns N’ Roses’ Appetite for Destruction from 1987. It is both high art and primal sleaze, anthemic yet nihilistic, precision-engineered yet volatile, an album of self-annihilation that became a commercial monolith to rival Michael Jackson’s Thriller (1982).
Released into a late-’80s rock landscape bloated with posturing glam rock, Appetite for Destruction exposed the raw, ugly nerve of rock stardom—violence, addiction, exploitative sex, and survival. Yet its coiled intelligence and multi-layered emotional impact make it a far better album than you might think, and its central message – the ugly reality of humanity is better than hypocrisy or quiescence – is one that endures.
The initial lure of rock ‘n’ roll was that it prized sensation above all other musical considerations: impact was practically the sole criterion. Igniting a craving for sensation, however, had broader cultural implications. As the critic Ian MacDonald wrote of the Beatles’ “I Want To Hold Your Hand” in 1994’s Revolution in the Head:
If it has any message at all, that of I WANT TO HOLD YOUR HAND is ‘Let go – feel how good it is’. This though (as conservative commentators knew very well) implied a fundamental break with the Christian bourgeois status quo.
The break that MacDonald notes is that desire would no longer be held back but would be acted upon swiftly lest the moment – the sensation – pass. Within the Western world, that essentially meant either consumer or sexual desire. Thus, the Beatles were at the basic consumer level associated with endless merchandise deals. They were depicted as “Four frenzied Little Lord Fauntleroys who are making £5,000 every week”, spending and consuming avariciously in pursuit of every passing fancy, from Lennon’s suit of armour to Harrison’s fast cars to Ringo’s liking of baked beans.
As Paul McCartney noted in “When I’m Sixty-Four”, previous generations had been expected to scrimp and save. Now, with expanding shopping possibilities (the first credit card was invented in 1958), the Beatles were avatars of a new consumerist society where, instead of Heaven representing the ultimate delayed gratification, people were actively encouraged to go out and spend, to enjoy themselves – and thus to seek out pleasure from daily life. Which, of course, implied sexual adventure as much as shopping.
This was the first cultural revolution of rock ‘n’ roll, helping to move advanced economies from a productivist (concerned with factory, site and yard, or the national output of steel) to a consumerist mindset, where class distinctions are more defined by what and how you buy. This was foreshadowed by the 1950s rockers, their early deaths, and the vulgarity of Elvis Presley’s Graceland.
By the mid-1960s, it was codified into an entire mode of production, predicated on ephemeral products for the young, made from plastics and nylons (rather than wood or stone or wool – thus necessitating further sales). This meant the world of the disposable fashions of Carnaby Street and teen magazines and PVC clothing and singles and cigarettes and fizzy lager, taking over from the old slow world of tailoring, broadsheet newspapers, cigars, albums, real ale, knitting, and “making do”.
Entering the Jungle
Guns N’ Roses arrived in 1985, from the belly of the LA ecosystem but apart from it (none were Los Angeles natives; the closest was Slash, who had been born in England but moved to LA when aged five): their influences were deeper and richer, their anger more genuine, their musicianship more blues-oriented. They were inspired by the gritty raunch of Aerosmith and the Stones more than the soulless shredding of Van Halen derivatives, while also drawing on the bar-boogie of AC/DC, the layers and complexities of early Queen, the vicious explosiveness of the Sex Pistols and the Damned and The Stooges, the soaring ballads of Elton John, the raw funk of early Prince, even the lyrical proficiency of Bob Dylan.
Axl has been greatly underestimated as a lyricist. At his best – in songs like “Coma” and “Estranged”, he combines exceptional self-knowledge and frankness with a verbal dexterity and street poetry that Lou Reed might envy. Where the anger of the hair metal bands felt contrived – the LA bands in Penelope Spheeris’ 1988 music documentary The Decline of Western Civilization II: The Metal Years had no quibble with the system; they hated Russia and wanted to live off their investments, like good Americans – Guns N’ Roses smouldered with a vicious paranoiac energy that felt ready to explode at any moment.
As musicians, Guns N’ Roses left other bands for dead. They could do funk, they could do acoustics the equal of the Stones on 1971’s Sticky Fingers (best heard on 1988’s GN’ R Lies), they could do vicious punk, they could do blue-eyed balladry, they could do epics, they could do anthemic rock, they could do boogie. Lead guitar player Slash had a sound of incredible hypercharged electric fluidity perhaps unheard since Hendrix; his solo on “Sweet Child O’ Mine” has regularly been voted one of the ten greatest songs of all time.
Guitarists Slash and Izzy Stradlin were superbly complementary, the former capable of astonishing pyrotechnics (from the sinister breakdown in “Welcome to the Jungle” to the funky intro to “Mr. Brownstone” to the incredible two-minute outro to “Paradise City”), the latter a composer of riffs perhaps inspired by Keith Richards but with far greater snarl. Singer Axl Rose might have been a technically poor vocalist, singing from his throat rather than stomach, but he could move from a baritone to a nasal, raging banshee wail in a millisecond, in a move suggesting not just technical prowess but genuine emotional instability.
Bassist Duff McKagan had escaped the spreading opioid endemic of the Seattle punk scene, but was a much more advanced musician than the strict 1-2-3-4! of punk, and would practise George Clinton and Parliament grooves with drummer Steven Adler. Rhythm guitarist Izzy Stradlin was the Keith Richards of Guns N’ Roses, whose low-key cool obscured the fact that he was the band’s main songwriter. Drummer Steven Adler could pound the drums in a blizzard of bleached-blonde hair and drumsticks, but he was a master of feel and groove, able to shift gears on a dime and giving Guns N’ Roses’ songs a swing missing in most rock music of the period (except AC/DC, whose “Whole Lotta Rosie” the band covered).
Guns N’ Roses songs were the killer. Appetite for Destruction is an astonishingly accomplished album for a debut. It has a balance and proportion, in the way that took Pink Floyd (for example) about seven albums to attain. Not only that: the songs might look like epistles of the mean streets of Hollywood, with their heroin dealers, strippers, violent police, porn actors, unreliable women, posing scenesters, life on $2 a day, and drug dealing.
They also had an emotional complexity far from the elementary party-all-night ethos of Poison, or the bad-boys-having-fun Dionysian celebration of Motley Crue. Appetite for Destruction said life in the urban jungle was hell, but it celebrated survival; it admitted the pleasures it afforded while evoking their terrors. There was nothing bright-eyed or naïve about it, but neither did it feel jaded. It thrilled with the visceral energy of a young man (like so many classic rock albums), but also was able to reflect on the dangers of where this brought them.
This complexity was built into Guns N’ Roses’ approach. Their very name was a Yin-Yang counterpoint, suggesting not just cocks and pussies, but also violence and tenderness. Axl Rose was a huge fan of Queen, but not their anthemic stadium-pleasers like “We Will Rock You”: he was deeply influenced by Queen II, their most progressive and complex work, and its influence on Appetite for Destruction is profound if disguised.
Rose said during his August 1989 interview with Del James at Rolling Stone, “With Queen, I have my favorite: Queen II. Whenever their newest record would come out and have all these other kinds of music on it, at first I’d only like this song or that song. But after a period of time listening to it, it would open my mind up to so many different styles. I really appreciate them for that. That’s something I’ve always wanted to be able to achieve.” So, where 1974’s Queen II has a Black side and a White side, Appetite for Destruction has Side G (concerning urban debauchery and violence) and Side R (concerning sex and relationships). Its songs likewise move through multiple styles and time signatures in a manner that is initially hard to assimilate.
Though Queen would retain multiple styles (going from disco to funk to proto-punk to folky pop-rock on albums like Jazz), these would be carefully segmented on different songs rather than conjoined on suites like “The Prophet’s Song” or, most famously, of course, on “Bohemian Rhapsody”. There’s a shape and balance to these songs. On Guns N’ Roses Sides G and R, they build up to their longest songs (“Paradise City” and “Rocket Queen”, both lasting over six minutes), and with the sort-of-power-ballad “Sweet Child O’ Mine” followed by two short blasts before building to the mini-epic closer “Rocket Queen”.
Taking the complexity from Queen II, Guns N’ Roses built equivocality into the structure of their songs. Several songs on Appetite for Destruction have codas, as though commenting on what the main section has just articulated: this of course came from Eric Clapton’s “Layla”, as well as songs like “Symptom of the Universe” by Black Sabbath and “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking?” by the Stones. For Guns N’ Roses, it feels less like an appealing contrast and more like an explication of their entire musical approach.
Thus “Rocket Queen” starts as a magnificently sleazy ode to copulation, and ends the song and the album with a tender coda hoping for friendship and that “All I ever wanted / Was for you to know that I care”. “Paradise City” ends on a double-time frenzy, climaxing the clean guitar intro and yearning chorus with vicious energy and desire. Guns N’ Roses would take this approach much further on their subsequent Use Your Illusion album from 1991, with remarkable codas on “November Rain”, “Locomotive”, and “Double Talkin’ Jive”, but on Appetite for Destruction, everything is coiled and compact, not sprawling and indulgent.
It’s Easy To Be Hungry – When You Ain’t Got Shit To Lose
Meanwhile, the philosophy of life evoked on Appetite for Destruction is brutal, simultaneously evoking, decrying, and celebrating life on the mean streets of Los Angeles. The city as urban hellscape goes back to 1970s films like William Friedkin’s The French Connection, Walter Hill’s The Warriors, and Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, and has become something of a cinematic cliché by this time. In rock music, however, the good times almost always rolled, regardless of the occasional heartbreak that gave it soul.
Its pursuit of pleasure, glam rock went from the simply hedonistic (Poison’s “I Want Action” or Nothin’ But a Good Time”) to the nihilistic (WASP’s “I Wanna Be Somebody”) to the fire-breathing (Mötley Crüe’s “Shout At the Devil”). It was always about sensation, good or bad. However, the urban themes on Appetite for Destruction were more often about escape than celebration. While the album deliberately sought to display a broad emotional range, its most genuine emotional moments suggest hunger, desire, and fear. When paired with a visceral hostility that conveyed Axl’s bipolar mood swings (and the group’s predilection for yin/yang oppositions), the mixture was as dangerous, volatile, and threatening as the Molotov cocktail they referenced on “Nightrain”.
Thus, “Welcome To the Jungle” is as much a terrifying picture of urban threat (“You’re in the jungle, baby / You’re going to dieeeeeeee”) as it is a portrayal of its debauched possibilities (“If you want it you’re going to bleed, but it’s the price you pay”). So “It’s So Easy” is a dead-eyed amoral take on being offered everything (everything for a young rock star, that is: sex, adulation, and drugs) and it meaning nothing “when everyone’s trying to please me”.
“Out Ta Get Me” is a tale of trouble with the police and authorities amplified into a paranoiac feverdream – compare it with the contemporaneous “You’re In Trouble” by Ratt, which has a similar theme, but comes nowhere near conveying the desperation and demonic energy of the hunted. The grimy funk of “Mr Brownstone” conveys both the rhythmic pleasure of heroin and the terrible prison it creates.
That’s just the first side of Guns N’ Roses’ Appetite for Destruction – perhaps the greatest first side of any rock album ever recorded. Not only are there no weak songs, but there are no weak or flabby parts in any of the songs. Every moment is vital, almost possessed of a demoniac energy.
True, the second side is slightly more patchy: “Think About You” is filler, if high-grade filler played with enormous verve and skill (note the shimmering guitar arpeggios during the chorus and Axl’s brilliant vocal outro), while “You’re Crazy” is better slowed down as heard on GN’R Lies, and “Anything Goes” (one of the band’s earliest songs) is tediously adolescent (“Panties round your knees with your ass in debris / Doing that grind with a push and a squeeze”), with no counterpoint and a nursery-rhyme-simple chorus, though musically the harmonica gives it a bluesy edge and it’s played with gleeful energy.
The three high points of Appetite for Destruction‘s side two demonstrate how Guns N’ Roses knew how to shape songs and albums. It opens with “My Michelle”, a brutally cold song (emphasised by the introduction whose guitar arpeggios glitter like icicles) about a schoolgirl whose “daddy works in porno / Now your mommy’s now around / She used to love her heroin / But now she’s underground” and who chooses now to “stay out late at night, and you do your coke for free / Drivin’ your friends crazy with your life’s insanity”. This is cleverly counterpointed by not one by two perspectives: first, by a more compassionate bridge hoping that “Someday you’ll find someone that’ll fall in love with you / But, oh, the time it takes / When you’re all alone”, and also in the final verse where Michelle emerges as a kind of Prince Hal figure:
Now you’re clean and so discreet, I won’t say a word
But most of all, this song is true, case you haven’t heard
So c’mon and stop your cryin’, we both know money burns
Honey, don’t stop tryin’, and you’ll get what you deserve
It’s not Shakespeare, but there’s a kind of vicious gutter poetry to it.
“Sweet Child O’ Mine” is the big power ballad-style song that 1980s rock bands traditionally relied on to bring the girls and the sales, though it’s not really a power ballad at all. It’s more like “Free Bird” crossed with “Voodoo Chile (Slight Reprise)” with a brief interlude by the Damned. Not only does it have one of the most famous guitar introductions of all time, it also has to my mind the single greatest guitar solo of all time. It still makes the hair on my arm stand up.
Simultaneously fluid, electrifying, and utterly soulful, Guns N’ Roses’ “Sweet Child of Mine” is a masterful composition, moving from its opening romantic sustained mid-range notes to a jolting tension-rising intensifier to a syncopated cross-rhythmic assault to a magnificent shrieking climax and subsequent descending denouement… it’s absolutely fucking breath-taking.
“Rocket Queen” as said earlier, moves from grinding sleaze to anthemic rock to gentle tenderness. Having the chops to do so, and to sound authentic across all three emotional atmospheres, shows just how skillful Guns N’ Roses’ were – they make it all look so easy and unpremeditated, but there’s astonishing craft and artistry there.
Don’t Damn Me
Reviews of Appetite for Destruction tend to follow a familiar pattern: writers remember how empowering it felt; they acknowledge its superb musicianship and cultural importance; and they fret like a mimsy aged bachelor about its nastiness, its misogyny, its open embrace of sleaze and drugs and violence and life on the edge. For fuck sake. Appetite for Destruction is so very empowering precisely because of its nihilistic relish.
Nice boys do not play rock n’ roll, and Guns N’ Roses were not charming young artists who waited attendance upon their social superiors. They pissed on airplane aisles. (Izzy was arrested for this in August 1989). They dealt hard drugs. (Izzy, again, according to Mick Wall’s 2017 book, Last of the Giants: The True Story of Guns n’ Roses). Most were drug addicts. (Slash, Izzy, and Steven Adler have all discussed their addiction to heroin, while Duff’s pancreas exploded through chronic alcohol abuse in 1993). They lived off strippers (“If one of the guys was fucking a girl in our sleeping loft, we’d ransack the girl’s purse while he was doing her,” Izzy say in Stephen Davis’ 2008 book, Watch You Bleed: The Saga of Guns N’ Roses) and had them dancing on stage during early shows (as seen in the video for It’s So Easy).
Guns N’ Roses band members fucked in the studio, recorded it and put it on the album. (Axl this time, with the girlfriend of his bandmate Steven). They assaulted rival musicians (Duff and Izzy taped up Faster Pussycat drummer Mark Michals and left him in a hotel elevator), and they were party to one of the biggest rock stars ODing just before they had made it big, thus adding to their notoriety, as Nikki Sixx explains in the Motley Crue memoir The Dirt.
The dark aura of danger this gave to Appetite for Destruction was not just about titillating white suburban boys. It showed what men might do if they had the chance. The near-mythical Sunset Strip was where animal spirits could roam free. As Noah Cross says in Roman Polanski’s 1974 thriller, Chinatown: “Most people never have to face the fact that at the right time and the right place, they’re capable of anything.” Hence, Appetite for Destruction isn’t just a shriek from an urban hell, or a glimpse at decadence, or a desperate cry of hungry rage, or a teenage wet dream (though it is in part all of those). It is a mirror showing and recognising the most primal urges of men in all their brutish reality.
The only sins in the Guns N’ Roses universe are hypocrisy and quiescence: pretending to hold a feeling or sensation that isn’t genuine, and failing to express a feeling or idea you truly hold. Have the balls to admit your darkest feelings, Appetite for Destruction says, and life might not get better, but at least you’re being true to yourself. This is, of course, antithetical to Christianity, which pretends that you should love everyone, and to Midwestern culture, where people get along to get along, and to modern bourgeois office politics, where you smile at people before stabbing them in the back, but for many people it is enormously liberating.
Like the wording on Axl’s t-shirt during the subsequent Use Your Illusion tour – “No-one knows I’m a lesbian”. Nothing could be worse than pretending to be what you’re not. Dark honesty beats polished lies. Having the nerve to say that and live it is increasingly rare in this world, and it’s part of the reason Appetite for Destruction remains so bracing. It shows a place where our wilder impulses — rage, lust, hunger, despair — aren’t hidden, but rendered in full sonic colour.
The album didn’t tame Guns N’ Roses for commercial exploitation or glorify them. It acknowledged that this grim part of the human condition existed, especially in men, and faced that brutality honestly. Its willingness to express the extremes of human emotion -good and bad, rose and gun – can feel feral at its most extreme. In our era of fear of offence and emotional danger, Appetite for Destruction still cuts through — not because it’s violent, but because it never flinches.