Guns N Roses: Ranking Their Albums From Worst To Best

4. Chinese Democracy

It was an album fifteen years in the making that resulted in the breakup of one of the greatest rock bands of all time and turned Axl Rose into the Howard Hughes of sleazy rock and roll music. A lot of us hoped, a bit naively perhaps, that Chinese Democracy would somehow come and turn rock and roll on its head. We wanted some of that vintage danger and excitement that we remembered from listening to "Nightrain" for the first time. We didn't get that. Instead, we got a very polished, totally disparate album full of good-to-great songs that sounded like they'd spent fifteen years being cooked up in a studio. Rose's perfection had risen to such a level that people wanted him to fail spectacularly. And although it wasn't nearly as bad as everyone wanted it to be ("Bette" is damn near perfect), there's an overall lack of personality on the album that's a little disconcerting, especially coming from a musician who had more of it in his hair than most modern rock bands have in their entire lineup. Most of the individual songs fail to come up with their own identity, morphing in and out of whatever hook Axl felt like laying down in the studio that month. So Chinese Democracy is really more of a hard rock jam band experiment than it is a proper album, with a rotating cast of players coming and going during each riff. If you take Chinese Democracy for what it is--the a musical pastiche from one of rock music's talented semi-recluses--it's actually pretty solid. It doesn't have a clear direction, but neither did Use Your Illusion. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9-wvOkSmF4