Slash Is Happy Rock Music Has Returned Where It Belongs – Underground
Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash is happy that rock music isn’t as mainstream as it once was when Axl and the boys were globe-trotting the world like five indulged princes, reports Ultimate Classic Rock.
By the time they delivered their Use Your Illusion double-punch in the early 1990s, Guns N’ Roses were the biggest band on the planet. They were so mainstream it hurt. If there was such a thing as corporate rock n’ roll, those boys were it – a far cry from the raggedy and raw street urchins who had set the world on fire with Appetite For Destruction a few years previously.
Yet just like the seasons, things change and rock music is no longer the all-powerful stadium-filling and cultural transformative force it once was.
Only recently, Smashing Pumpkins front-man Billy Corgan praised Green Day’s 2004 album American Idiot as the last blast of guitar-led music which made a real impact with the masses.
And it’s a sentiment with which the top-hatted fret maestro agrees. Slash was discussing the state of rock music with USA Today and revealed he’s happy with how things have turned out for the genre he loves.
“Rock isn’t mainstream anymore, and in some way I like that. It harks back to when rock n’ roll was more of an underground concept, when people were speaking about things that they weren’t necessarily comfortable saying in the mainstream arena.”
Talking about the genre he felt had toppled rock off the corporate perch, Slash pointed to rap.
“As far as hip-hop is concerned, it’s become so generic at this point. It’s definitely taken on a very top 40 thing.”
The guitar hero who was born Saul Hudson revealed he was currently grooving to the Foo Fighters but his favorite band for some time has been the Queens of the Stone Age because “they put out cool and interesting records.”
Slash also confessed that if it had been left to him, the current Guns N’ Roses reunion and the “Not in Our Lifetime” world tour would have probably never left the stable door.
It was apparently Axl who was willing to let sleeping dogs lie and bygones be bygones when he called his old sparring partner in 2015 to see if he was game for a little more of the same old same old.
“I don’t know if I would have had the wherewithal to call him, just because I’m introverted and it might have been hard for me.”
Slash admitted, “Prior to that it had been 20 years of not talking and letting this bad blood continue to be perpetuated by the media. It turned into something way bigger than what was really going on, so it was good to get past that and get rid of some of the negative baggage that we’d been carrying around for a long time.”
