Appetite For Destruction at Twenty

Can it really be that Guns 'N' Roses' Appetite For Destruction is twenty years old? The realization first hit me a couple of months ago when I pulled that seminal album out of my collection for the first time in a couple of years. It sounded as groundbreaking, as brilliant, as age-defining as ever, and then I realized that it was released in the summer of 1987, and for a brief, meteoric period they were the biggest, most exciting, most unpredictable, most rock and roll band in rock and roll.



It collapsed so quickly, and we've spent well more than a decade waiting for Axl Rose to release Chinese Democracy under the GNR name. Rolling Stone has a great cover piece on Appetite, which they excerpt here. It's almost impossible to believe that album could be twenty years old. It seems like just yesterday. And when the first vertiginous sounds of "Welcome to the Jungle" come directly at me from my speakers, it's the late 1980s, Axl & Slash rule the world, and the world is still ahead of me.

Wistfulness

Over at Ephblog I have an essay on age and regret and recreating an idealized past. Think of this as a kinder, gentler, more reflective dcat.