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Ten minutes to tell you all you need to know about new Hall of Famers Guns n’ Roses

In honor of Guns n' Roses getting elected to the Rock n' Roll Hall of Fame (along with the Chili Peppers and the Beastie Boys), I give you the video that is everything about this band: insane coolness-turned-overwrought absurdity. Ladies and gentlemen, "Estranged":

Generally, most kids grow out of using "Webster's Dictionary defines X as ... " as a way to lead off their term papers by, oh, 10th grade or so. But Axl Rose is not like most kids. And the weirdness only goes on from there; at this point, these guys were already five different corporations who held periodic meetings onstage.

Did they deserve to be elected to the Hall of Fame on the first ballot? My inclination is to say no, and this is from a huge GnR freak. They had only one truly great album ("Appetite") and were more defined by what they didn't achieve than what they did. Still, this was the last of the Larger-Than-Life Rock Star Bands; Nirvana and hip-hop would combine to kick the pins out from under the rock star mystique, and the genre has never recovered. (Knowingly or not, this video is making that exact point with the whole leaving-it-all-behind scene in front of the Whiskey and the Roxy at around the six-minute mark.)

Still, if you're going to jump the shark — or in this case, dolphin — might as well do it off the side of an ocean liner.

Axl’s in town, and I’m skipping the show

Axl Rose is performing in Atlanta tonight, and barring a drop-out-of-the-sky miracle, I won't be seeing him. This marks the first time since, oh, 1988 or so that I've been in the same town as a Guns n' Roses show, and I haven't checked it out. My younger self wants to punch me in the face right now.

Shoot, for awhile there, I didn't even have to be the same state to see GnFnR; I remember driving from D.C. to Philly to see one show, waiting three-plus hours after Soundgarden wrapped for GnR to get their act together and get onstage, and then driving back to Washington and arriving home around 5 a.m. Yeah, that was kind of stupid.

So, yeah, I'm sitting this one out. I need to do a whole big writeup on GnR, a definitive statement of what-the-hell-this-band-all-means, but for now I'll just say this: I don't miss GnR enough to want to go see them again. Maybe that's a function of the fact that this "band" is just Axl and a bunch of interchangeable cats (some of whom have been in the "band" longer than Slash and Duff ever were, but I digress). Maybe it's a function of the iTunes era; any time I want to hear "Locomotive" or "Rocket Queen," I don't have to search out the CD and pop it in; I can have it cued up and playing before you finish reading this sentence. If familiarity breeds contempt, it also destroys surprise. I've heard all these songs too many times, too recently, for them to mean anything to me anymore.

Anyway, here they are just a few weeks ago in Rio. Axl doesn't sound terrible, he's just ... well, he's hitting all the right notes, I guess:

That's "Estranged," and it's one of those songs that can only be transcendent to a guy totally lost and adrift and wondering what the hell to do next with his life ... hypothetically speaking, of course. Twenty years after its release, with two decades' worth of musical and cultural distance on it, the song just sounds like the kind of overproduced sludge that was the unholy offspring of the late '80s and early '90s. (And it doesn't help that the band is clearly just going through the motions; check the guitarists at about the 5:35 mark. Paycheck!)

Perhaps it'd be better for songs like "Estranged" if you could just hear them a few times at a moment in your life when they meant something to you, and then never hear them again. "Stairway to Heaven" and "Freebird" are punch lines. "Imagine" is played in malls. The way that songs play upon your mind and your memory can't be replicated, and repeating them over and over only crushes the memories into paste. It's why Classic Rock Radio, where it still exists, is an abomination and should be killed with fire.

Anyway, Guns n' Roses still rule, but since it's not 1991, and it won't be ever again, I'll pass and stick with my memories, like the RFK Stadium mosh pit so crowded the passed-out guy near us couldn't fall to the ground, or the Hampton Coliseum free-for-all where a whipsaw-mean Axl leaped into the crowd right over my head. (You can see that particular leap at 2:35 of the "Live and Let Die" video.)

So, good luck with the show, Axl. (Judging from this review of Orlando a couple nights back, it'll go exactly like I'd expect.) Don't keep showing up late to the stage, though. People won't wait forever.

Hey, I forgot I have that song: Beck’s “Strange Apparition”

I own a metric shitload of music. Like 15,000 songs or something like that. If I started playing it right now, it'd be almost Thanksgiving before I had even a single repeat. And in that mix, some stuff gets lost. This whenever-I-feel-like-it series is about the songs that I forgot I owned, songs that pop up when I hit the ol' "shuffle" button on iTunes and let the fates choose my playlist.

Beck is quite possibly the luckiest survivor of the '90s grunge era. He (presumably) made a ton of money off "Loser" when it was a hit, and probably will continue to do so ad infinitum as it's used decades hence to score period pieces from Clinton's America. But unlike other one-hit wonders from the era -- paging Ugly Kid Joe -- Beck's big breakthrough cut was actually his creative low point. He's gone on to make music that's complex, challenging, determinedly uncommercial but always damn listenable.

Like today's track, "Strange Apparition." It starts with some Afro-skiffle percussion before Beck himself starts singing in his trademark semi-ironic white-boy-blues weary-hipster voice. (Beck, for the record, is the only guy who can pull off this attitude without me wanting to punch him in the face.) But it's not the percussion or the vocals that make this song; it's the piano. Here, dig on it:

That piano, friends, is awesome, a dead-bang descendant of Chuck Leavell's Let It Bleed-era piano work for the Stones. (Check out "Monkey Man" right about the 2:35 mark for the same kind of wandering, circular piano that's not so much leading the song as stumbling forward through it.

I absolutely love the piano in a rock setting, whether it's Leavell or Bruce Hornsby. Yes, I realize Hornsby is stretching the definition of "rock" to its breaking point, but hear me out: when you dig past the surface sheen of his adult-contemporary radio hits, the piano work there is genius -- delicate and evocative. Hey, if it was good enough for Tupac, it's good enough for you, pal.

I can play exactly two songs on the piano -- "Let it Be" and the outro to "Layla." (Oh, and "Linus and Lucy," too. Let's not forget that.) I keep promising myself I'll learn how to play for real, and piano like on "Strange Apparition" is exactly the kind I want to play -- sloppy, with a hell of a lot more feeling than technique. It's whiskey over wine, a 2am bar with your girlfriend rather than a 7:30pm reservation with your wife. (Love you, sweetie.) It does exactly what music is supposed to do -- pull you out of your world and drop you, if only for three minutes, into another.