Greatest Hits

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It kicks up another notch when the big Stairway To Heaven-style guitar riff slams in, and the scale is amped up again with audio clips of Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have A Dream’ speech, and dialogue from bleak ‘outsider’ movies, Vietnam war flick Casualties Of War and serial killer thriller Seven among them. Sign up below to get the latest from Classic Rock, plus exclusive special offers, direct to your inbox! The popular narrative surrounding the Use Your Illusion albums states that Guns N’ Roses abandoned Appetite’s gritty punk-metal cocktail in favor of swaggering, bluesy rockers and melodic anthems, suggesting that perhaps Rose had grown soft in the four years since the band’s debut. Read it, baby, with your morning news/With the sweet hangover and the headlines, too,’ sneered the singer, proving no one does ‘spiteful’ quite like him.

To me, had they trimmed the fat and consolidated it into twelve or fourteen songs, it would have been bulletproof.

Grandiose and ambitious, Madagascar sees Rose in fine, gravelly voice and on familiar lyrical ground, vulnerable yet defiant in the face of ostracism. He is still waiting for Billy Gibbons to send him a bottle of hot sauce he was promised several years ago. The frontman allegedly began writing the song as early as 1982, and a pre- Illusion rendition swelled to 18 minutes before being chiseled down to nine. Marching drums underpin country acoustic guitars, before distorted riffs and screeching vocals slice through the mix.

Chinese Democracy could have been one of the best albums of all time and it still wouldn’t have lived up to the years of hype and delays that preceded it. When you put it on, you don’t have to get warmed up to hit any of the good notes and you don’t have to know all the words – it’s a huge ‘fuck you’ to the chick that stormed out and ruined your life. However, no one can deny that Madagascar is a symphonic masterstroke from hard rock’s ageing gunslingers. But muscular riffs and vocal hooks alone do not make a GN’R classic: the most vaunted songs in the band’s catalog create a palpable sense of drama and unpredictability, the feeling that the track could implode at any moment.s triumphant Glastonbury and Hyde Park shows, there’s no better time to salute the song’s that define them. Still, every Guns N’ Roses album has its splashes of brilliance, and all were taken into consideration when assembling this ranking of the group’s 15 greatest songs.