100 Best Albums
- JUL 21, 1987
- 12 Songs
- Appetite for Destruction (Super Deluxe) · 1987
- Appetite for Destruction (Super Deluxe) · 1987
- Appetite for Destruction (Super Deluxe) · 1987
- Use Your Illusion I · 1991
- Use Your Illusion II · 1991
- Appetite for Destruction (Super Deluxe) · 1988
- Appetite for Destruction · 1987
- Use Your Illusion II · 1991
- Use Your Illusion I · 1991
- Use Your Illusion II · 1991
Essential Albums
- 100 Best Albums Early on in the history of Guns N’ Roses, Axl Rose was driving around with his friend Michelle when Elton John’s “Your Song” came on the radio. Gee, Michelle said, I wish someone would write a song that beautiful about me. So, Axl went home and tried. The first draft didn’t sit right—it was too reductive, too romantic, too much like a song—so he started over: “Your daddy works in porno now that mommy’s not around/She used to love her heroin, but now she’s underground” (“My Michelle”). Yeah, it was bracing, Michelle said. But it was the truth. It isn’t just that Appetite is mean—though it is. It’s that it never flinches at how it feels, no matter how ugly. The drug songs aren’t about getting high, they’re about blacking out (“Mr. Brownstone,” “Nightrain”). The sex songs don’t relish the physical act so much as the power that comes with it (“Anything Goes”). When they give you an anthem, it’s against a backdrop of filth and misery (“Paradise City”). And when they give you a ballad, it’s with the paranoid sense that nothing so pure could actually be real (the dark outro of “Sweet Child o’ Mine”). Conquering their conquests isn’t enough: They want to degrade them and trade high-fives about it later (“It’s So Easy”). At the time, the band was considered an antidote to the slickness of pop-metal—something like The Rolling Stones to the early ’60s. But a better comparison is the Sex Pistols: rude, fearless, unencumbered by metaphor. Some bands make sloppiness sound liberating; Guns N’ Roses make it sound menacing, the howl of something unstable and sleepless. The album famously ends on a happy note: “Don’t ever leave me, say you’ll always be there/All I ever wanted was for you to know that I care” (“Rocket Queen”). But only a few bars earlier, it just as famously captured the sounds of Axl and a stripper having sex in the studio. Appetite bears its crumbs of hope, but it puts you through hell to get them.
Albums
- 1988
Artist Playlists
- Rock has produced few bands as nasty, divisive, and maddeningly brilliant.
- The hard rockers' videos are sleazy, arty, and sometimes surreal.
- Browse the set list from the legendary rock band's 2023 world tour.
- Meet the rock heroes who inspired these earth-scorching dominators.
- Grab the mic and sing along with some of their biggest hits.
Singles & EPs
Live Albums
More To Hear
- Everyone thinks this song is about Hollywood street life.
- Hair metal was fun—but GNR took you to the dark side.
- Eight years ago, Axl Rose cheated death and a fake news report.
- Strombo toasts to 35 years of Guns N’ Roses’ smash studio debut.
- Jenn celebrates Guns N' Roses' 'Use Your Illusion I & II.'
- On Appetite for Destruction's influence.
About Guns N' Roses
The qualities that make Guns N’ Roses so divisive—the public altercations, the controversial outbursts, the scandalous decadence—are also the things that make them so captivating. After all, rock fans passionately embraced the collision of ’70s hard rock, heavy metal, and punk captured on GNR’s 1987 debut, Appetite for Destruction, precisely because it exuded a gritty, dangerous vibe light years removed from the glossy hair bands of the day. “Welcome to the Jungle” may be a fantastic air-guitar jam, yet it is also an enraged dispatch from the seedy back alleys of the American Dream. Even “Sweet Child O’ Mine,” an uplifting ballad at first, ultimately drowns in singer Axl Rose’s self-doubt. It was only natural, then, that stardom would prove tumultuous for a fast-living GNR who rode wave upon wave of controversy and turmoil. Yet they only grew more ambitious. While Slash still unloads plenty of Stonesy riffs on 1991’s Use Your Illusion I and II, the albums’ cornerstones are epic psychodramas such as “November Rain” that reflect Rose’s love of Queen’s grandiosity. Another album of original material wouldn’t surface until 2008’s Chinese Democracy. By then, however, GNR essentially was a solo project for Rose, who made a hard turn into seething industrial rock. With hopes for any kind of reunion of the original lineup all but extinguished, Slash and bassist Duff McKagan shocked fans by announcing their return to the fold in 2016. In addition to headlining Coachella, they embarked on a world tour that became one of the highest grossing of the decade, a fact that speaks to GNR’s legacy as one of the most popular, if also most contentious, bands in the entire history of rock.
- ORIGIN
- Los Angeles, CA, United States
- FORMED
- March 1985
- GENRE
- Hard Rock