10 Rock Songs That Took Shots At Other Artists
6. Get In the Ring - Guns N Roses
No band can ever claim to be safe from the critics. Even if you are being praised to high heaven by every single fan who has come to see you live, it only takes one nasty guy with a pen to tear you through the mud and make you look like the biggest joke in the music industry. It's become one of the few things you have to accept as a musician, but you know that someone like Axl Rose wasn't exactly going to take kindly to people tearing him to shreds.
After coming off of Appetite for Destruction, Use Your Illusion's double album experience seems to tell you just about everything you need to know about Axl as a person, from his soft side on November Rain to some of his strange outlooks on politics in Civil War. Towards the end of the second disc though, Get in the Ring is where Axl seethes with anger at everyone who has spoken out against Guns N Roses, inviting them to see if they could hold their own if they ever said that stuff to his face.
This isn't subtle either, with Axl naming off real journalists in the back half of the song before all of the music is muted to make way for a sketch where all the members of Guns N Roses come together to lay a smackdown on these journalists. While everyone is at the liberty to heckle back at their naysayers, this is practically a full on power fantasy that Axl has that somehow got set to music.