By 1993 Guns n’ Roses’ recording career was dead in the water. A stopgap covers album was dashed off and sat in stores like a white flag. Its release coincided with an explosion of vital new artists with new values, which made their excesses seem hoary and regressive. In 1994 they released a note for note cover of “Sympathy For The Devil,” as if to signal that they were utterly out of ideas.

Except they weren’t. Axl Rose had some ideas – kick out the other members and control the band name. He would drag his new version of the band into the zeitgeist. His vision – a marriage of the grandiosity of Elton John songwriting with ’90s techno metal – was a good one. His Elton fixation had elevated Gn’R’s balladry beyond the usual power ballad tropes, underpinning epics like “Estranged” and “November Rain” with more sophistication. Now he wanted to incorporate new styles that had inspired/usurped him. Had Chinese Democracy been released in 2000, it still might have been overshadowed by drama. But the reaction would have been better than its eventual release eight years later. I’m reminded of Norman Mailer who spent the ’70s writing an abstruse Egyptian novel, only to finally release it in 1983 after the big Egypt pop culture boom was over. Mailer and Rose both represent the big male artistic ego, who keep chasing the whale, until they come to realize that they are the whales themselves, Sixth Sense-style.

In 1999 the new song “Oh My God” was a clunker, confirming the worst fears about this new direction. It was an odd choice for such a perfectionist to let loose on the public, and may have pushed back the pending release of the album. A few years later Axl’s performance at the MTV Awards was not received well. He looked rusty, yelping before a group of imposters. A version of the new song “Madagascar” came off like some theatrical Meatloaf ballad. That it was crowbarred between two classics with his pitchy vocals was not a good look. Even worse – the tour fell apart as the band no-showed a sold out concert in Philadelphia. Promoters and label execs were not happy. What the hell was going on here?

Chinese Democracy was finally released in November 2008. There were no videos, and very little promotion. The old music industry was in flux, between the death of physical media and birth of streaming platforms. Who was the audience for this thing? OG fans? They’d aged out of the new music game. A reunion album with the original guys and classic sound might have had a shot. But this material was busy and dense, moody and melodramatic, lacking the sugar rush hooks of their hits. Rumors circulate that the big bosses were done with Axl’s nonsense, and finally gave him just enough rope to hang. The money was in a reunion, so Chinese Democracy had to be a bust. So here came his masterpiece, oblivious, like Joe Pesci at the end of Goodfellas.

The opening of the first song “Chinese Democracy” does not bode well. The main riff is so rudimentary that it reminds me of a wrestling theme song. 14 million dollars and a legion of industry pros for that? Still – the song is good enough, a quirky new wavey rave up. I’m not sure what it’s trying to say, other than, “It don’t really matter.” Which is the story of this album. One senses that Axl wanted to make some big statements, but his lyrics like everything else here got jumbled up with indecisiveness. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. We’ve got enough entrenched opinions and ideologies in the world. Still the album would have been better served with “Better” as the lead single. All the crammed in hooks and riffs suit its narrative of pinballing pride and doubt in the wake of a failed relationship.

Lyrically Chinese Democracy is very whiny. We know the Guns Rules For Relationships were always toxic (“Used To Love Her,” “Back Off Bitch”). Here Axl is in rumination mode, and still toxic. Wallowing might be the right word – “I’m sorry for you, not sorry for me.” Lord knows Axl Rose can hold a grudge. You picture the narrator of some of these songs parked outside the home of an ex, just barely adhering to a restraining order. Art Tavana in his excellent Billboard piece on the making of this album likens it to a Bret Easton Ellis character. It’s still far removed from American Psycho‘s strict conformity and consumerism gone bad. Conformity is not in Axl’s arsenal. Maybe an amalgamation of Patrick Bateman and an LA scenester, after twenty years of therapy and psychics, masseuses and personal assistants.

That doesn’t diminish the album’s sonic achievements. One of the tragedies of the death of the old music industry was the elimination of its professional class – producers, engineers, A&Rs, techs. The people we took for granted, or looked at with jaundiced eyes for how they applied market influences on “pure” art. Now we sense the loss of the teams who made classic albums look and sound how they do. What’s the difference between some Bandcamp release and Dark Side Of The Moon? Perhaps not the talent of the musicians so much as that infrastructure behind them. Chinese Democracy was their Alamo. Thousands of tracks and edits and overdubs. The hardest boss in a videogame. How many players fell trying to mix this behemoth? But they did it. After all those years of excess and indulgency, and the tyrannical eccentricities of its creator, somehow CD coheres into a certain vision. Which is what?

“Catcher In The Rye” is a centerpiece. Anthemic piano verses devolve into a mess of wailing solos and vocals before landing back down to the final refrain. Its theme is intriguing, referred to by Axl as a tribute to John Lennon. Which it most surely is not, given its whiffs of a conspiracy theory involving JD Salinger’s Catcher In The Rye, infamously carried by Lennon’s murderer among other lone nuts. But the song really seems to be about generational panic. Middle aged Axl, still holding on to the rebel spark of youth while the list of what he cannot control keeps growing.

Only a few times do we miss the old Gn’R gang. Maudlin ballads like “Street Of Dreams” and “This I Love” would have benefitted from the martial rhythm section that propelled “November Rain” into an oddball totalitarian march. “There Was A Time” would have fit right in the Use Your Illusion era, with its visions of haunted rock star excess. Otherwise this album is very much its own thing, like a mad circus in a shaken up can of Dr Pepper. The miracle is that it works, as an update or maybe a sidebar of their sound. Compare it to Metallica’s Death Magnetic from the same year, a “return to form” that took no risks and featured a song called “Unforgiven III.” Chinese Democracy was the biggest and most expensive risk in the history of the music business.

For all his faults and eccentricities, Axl Rose is a compelling character. In recent years he’s calmed down, reuniting with the old crew for world tour victory laps largely free from the chaos of previous decades. He’s been an outspoken critic of all things Trump. We still have only glimpses of the mad gestation period for this album, a story that could make for a great book or TV drama series. One is reminded of King Richard II, the play in which a wounded tyrannical king becomes a street poet. Reverse it – that’s the story of Axl Rose.