The Two Essential Trilogies

Hey.

Kids.

Do you want to go beyond?  Go further into the days of future passed than ever you have heretofore previously dared to tread?

Yes?

Then i dare you... to watch the trilogy of Guns N' Roses videos from the Use Your Illusion era.

...oh, yes.

But you're not done.

Now, watch also the Aerosmith Alicia Silverstone Trilogy...

....and now you see.

Now you understand.

Full satori achieved.  That is what the world was.  That is what music was.  These are the monuments that white people will leave unto the world when we pass out of it.

The glory, the glory.

 My mind is saturated with glory. You know, i'd never really seen these videos.  I was vaguely aware of November Rain, but not the other two.  Guns N'Roses put out a lot of material in their relatively brief career.

The pomposity.  The pomposity and self-seriousness of these things is amazing.  We've lost this.  A music video today has to be clever in some way, so that it might become viral.  If the makers of the video don't have any clever ideas, then the default thing is to have people partying and clubbing and dancing in a lighthearted manner.  But back in 1993?  This was rock music, this was serious business.  They walked in slo-mo and ascended the tops of skyscrapers and sang in front of orchestras and walked the city streets, with the look of grave determination on their faces.  Why?  Because their manner had to reflect the gravity and deep feeling of the music.

Axl Rose leaps from an aircraft carrier into the ocean.  A bandmate (Duff?  Izzy?) tosses him a life preserver but he rejects it angrily.  He sinks beneath the waves.  In the ocean he finds peace and stillness.  Two dolphins swim around him, and before his peace becomes infinite, he grabs one of their dorsal fins and is carried off to salvation.  That happened.  I wonder how long it took to get that shot right.  Did Axl spend all that time underwater, or was it a trained SCUBA body double?  Axl emerges from the waves, and we see that Slash is standing in his trademark pose, wailing away with his guitar on top of the ocean.  Slash can walk on water.  I've always known this.

All three videos feature prominent use of helicopters.  All the helicopters made me realize... Guns N'Roses were Dethklok.  They were Dethklok in real life.  That is to say, the makers of the Metalocalypse cartoon wanted to recapture that time when a rock band of genuinely talented but still-kinda-average guys could dominate the mono-media and become insanely successful, and engage in any manner of expression they chose.  Nothing was too big. 

It was all right place, right time.  I've seen it written that Axl Rose is, technically speaking, a very talented vocalist.  But his voice is strange, abrasive, and gravelly.  His voice was perfectly suited to the style of music at the time.  What would his life have been if he was starting off in the '60s, or the '70s, or today?  He might have been a successful singer, but probably not what he was in his time.  The '80s were a road that rose up to meet him.

Oh, the past. 

The one thing that broke the illusion of total domination was the too-short jean shorts that Axl wears in the Don't Cry video.  There's no getting around it, he's wearing Daisy Dukes.  It's a tragic choice.  Meanwhile, Slash always looks cool.  You can't make Slash uncool.  In one of the videos, i forget which, you see Slash tearing through the desert in a bad-ass classic car with a hot blonde female passenger.  He's smoking a cigarette and she's screaming, haranging, slapping at him, being an abusive biatch.  Slash just kinda smiles and drives the car off a convenient cliff.  The vehicle plummets to the canyon floor below and explodes in a fireball.  Then you see him playing his guitar elsewhere.  He's fine, 'twas all fantasy. 

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