You Could Be Mine

Steven Hyden has a fairly solid look backwards at being a teen in the 1990s on the A.V. Club's site. Dubbed "Whatever Happened to Alternative Nation?," this ongoing series is right up my alley because I lived it. Even though it was from the window MTV provided every day, I got the sensation that people my age were seeing something drastic and cool changing before our eyes.

is second entry, focusing on the advance of Heaven and the slow decline of Guns N Roses, provides a setting that seems like distant history today. You couldn't really get a more pop rock set in 1991 and 1992 than Guns N Roses, Metallica, Pearl Jam, or Nirvana. Maybe for reasons of how Axl Rose has carried the post name over all these days and spending all that sentence on Chinese Democracy, history doesn't appear to be tolerant to GN-f'n-R.Forget all those millions of copies Use Your Illusion I and II sold. When it comes to talk about GNR these days, it's all about how stunning a debut Appetite For Destruction was and oh yeah, they put out a few more records before everybody but Axl and Dizzy left. That's sad.The sentence I spent in presence of MTV during those first few days of the '90s, all of the videos produced for GNR's double album got airplay. From "You Could Be Mine" to "Don't Cry" to "November Rain" to "Estranged" and everything in between, those guys shared air time with a perpetual rotation of Metallica videos, Nirvana videos, and Pearl Jam videos, as good as material by Naughty By Nature, Salt-N-Pepa, and En Vogue.As sad as how history has treated the band, I've slowly descend to understand why Appetite is considered a strong rock classic and the others aren't.While working with Teddy Andreadis at Rock N Roll Fantasy Camp, he mentioned his touring days with Guns N Roses. He mentioned how the band received some flack by passing from a rip-roaring, two-middle-fingers, guitar rock band to a rock band with a lot of piano. The sand was still there, but even angry songs seemed to not pulverize your ears.As I listened to the band's greatest hits collection on a recent trip to Houston, I heard the transition Teddy was referring to. But I too remember being a teen and not minding.Maybe it was the awesomeness of the videos ("Hey, look, the ring is performing on top of a tower!" to "Man, Slash's solo in face of a church is stunning!") but I never cared about the differences between "Paradise City" and "Yesterdays." Axl still had that sneer, Slash always played great solos, and the relief of the band kicked a lot of ass too. What more did I need?I applaud Steven for taking something like this on. The underdogs tend to get documented, but the overachievers sometime get confused in the mountain too.