Axl Rose names “the best lyricist that ever existed”
Rock and roll has never been solely about the lyrics. Although Bob Dylan may have flipped the game in the 1960s in terms of how rock could sound with a message behind it, there were just as many artists who were looking to write mindless songs about partying and get millions of chanting along with them. Guns N’ Roses may have looked like the kind of mindless band from a distance, but Axl Rose said that his roots as a lyricist stretched back to Bernie Taupin.
Then again, it’s hard to really take a lot of Rose’s greatest lines at face value. For every great comment he has made about street life on Appetite for Destruction, there are also more than a few clunkers in his catalogue as well, including thinking that the use of racial slurs was okay on the song ‘One in a Million’.
Anyone coming to a Guns N’ Roses looking for sensitive music had clearly picked the wrong band to follow. This music was meant to scare off anyone trying to ride the wave of hair metal, but it wasn’t that far away from some of the masterpieces that Taupin wrote with John.
Since he wasn’t known to play any instrument, Taupin was more interested in telling stories whenever he penned a lyric. Even if the song didn’t exactly make sense from one line to the next, you could tell that it was meant to set up a picture in your mind before it dealt with anything cerebral.
That mentality resonated with Rose, later recalling to MTV, “Bernie Taupin to me is the best lyric writer that ever existed in the face of the earth. Elton was just amazing in the studio and the recording of everything. To me, that’s my classical music because some of his stuff is classical, you know”.
In case anyone was wary about Rose’s love for John’s work, though, ‘November Rain’ was the kind of song where everything changed. The hardened Guns N’ Roses fans may not have liked hearing the grand piano on the song or the band trying their hand at a ballad, but when looking at the lyrics, this was just an extension of where Rose had been heading.
Throughout Appetite for Destruction, every dangerous song like ‘It’s So Easy’ is counterbalanced with a tender lyric like ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’ or the back half of ‘Rocket Queen’. Compared to other bands looking to write about sex and drugs until the end of time, Rose felt like the middle ground between Bernie Taupin and John Lydon half the time, usually taking the basis of a song and layering his usual bad attitude behind it.
If anything, ‘November Rain’ was what Rose had been building towards for years but never had the resources to do it. Now that they were famous, a story about a love lost and hearts moving on to different people feels like it could have been his hair metal equivalent to ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’. Rose may have painted pictures just like Taupin…it’s just that the pictures were a bit uglier than most were ready for.