Everybody’s Doing The Time

Guns N’ Roses “Paradise City”

I’ve come to the conclusion that when people think abstractly about the concept of the “rock star,” whether it’s in casual conversation or corporate rhetoric or in hugely successful rap songs, they’re basically thinking of Guns N’ Roses, and Axl Rose in particular. While there are other figures who probably are mixed up in this – Kurt Cobain for the people fixated on authenticity, Jagger/Richards or Led Zeppelin for ‘70s classicists – Axl Rose represents all the attitude and every excess that goes along with the term.

To some extent, this is by Rose’s own design as Guns N’ Roses is the postmodern synthesis of nearly all the major tributaries of popular rock aesthetics up through the mid ‘80s: metal, glam, blues, and punk most obviously from the start. By the time they released the Use Your Illusion albums that would expand to prog, folk rock, rock opera, and Beatles-derived pop. Guns N’ Roses united all of this with a musical and visual aesthetic that was as iconically rock as it gets while rooted specifically in the late ‘80s. The look they and their cohort in the Los Angeles scene in the ‘80s refined and codified the appearance of the “rock person,” and their stylistic influence continues to this day.

Guns N’ Roses made themselves a living, breathing representation of rock values and aesthetics at a time when this canon was becoming formalized both in the development of the “classic rock” radio format, the recent opening of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and in the pages of Rolling Stone, a magazine with a vested interest in establishing and maintaining a canon built around what they had been covering for 20 years. While the construction of a critical canon is always self-conscious affair, the beauty of Guns N’ Roses’ achievement is that their synthesis of all this rock history was almost certainly an intuitive move coming out of natural fandom for all the popular bands of the past 15 years or so up to the point they got together. It looked and sounded authentic because they’d internalized all the same things their audience had – they were sharp critics and analysts of all that music, but that was filtered through strong songwriting instincts and a genuine “give ‘em what they want” populism.

“Paradise City” is the pinnacle of that impulse in their catalogue. The song, written and recorded long before they’d ever played arenas much less a stadium, is built to be the ultimate mass-scale rock experience. It’s hard to imagine the starting point for this track not being something along the lines of “we need the best concert-ending song ever.” It’s starts off as a cousin to “Sweet Home Alabama,” is built around a big sing-along chorus hook, and moves through big riffs, punky verses, solos and more and more opportunities for everyone to sing along. “Paradise City” is extremely eager to please, but it never feels cheap or condescending, and there’s so much momentum in the song that it never feels overwrought, plodding, or clumsy. As with everything on Appetite for Destruction, Mike Clink’s production is sleek and professional but allows for a ragged, wild energy to come through in a way that sets it apart from most other big mainstream rock albums of the mid ‘80s. “Paradise City” is mixed to evoke a massive scale so that it feels like you’re front row in your personal stadium concert.

This much is clear if you listen to the earlier version of “Paradise City” recorded live in session at Sound City that is featured on the expanded “super deluxe” edition of Appetite for Destruction. It’s a great raw version of the song and it feels a bit more edgy and ferocious, but the song doesn’t ask to just sound like five guys in a room playing instruments. “Paradise City” demands to be presented as an idealized experience of rock music, performed by untouchable iconic figures. The sound of it needs to imply your presence, to make you feel included. A lot of rock music thrives on feeling like a document of a special moment in a studio, but songs like “Paradise City” are more like works of fiction that ask you to complete it by imagining the most perfect and magical experience of the music.

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