The egos have landed

Axl Rose and Kanye West dropped their larger-than-life albums this week. And one of them lives up to the hype.

By Simon Reynolds

Read more: Hip-Hop, Music, R&B, Music Reviews, Arts & Entertainment, Reviews

Axl Rose and "Chinese Democracy" (left); Kanye West and "808s and Heartbreak."

Nov. 29, 2008 | The egos have landed. Earlier this week, Guns N' Roses' long-awaited "Chinese Democracy" and Kanye West's "808s & Heartbreak" were released on consecutive days, setting up a titanic struggle for the Billboard No. 1 album spot. On first glance about as distant from each other as imaginable, Axl Rose and Kanye West have a surprising amount in common. They both see themselves as arch-individualists in a pop world of industry-reared sheep.

Just how mavericky are these guys? Axl Rose made his fans and record company wait nearly two decades for the follow-up to "Use Your Illusion I" and "II," funneling millions of man-hours and dollars into a project that always had about a million-to-one chance of not failing to live up to expectations -- the "Heaven's Gate" of hard rock. Kanye West didn't keep anybody hanging around (he likes being in the public eye and ear), but he has defied expectations with this, his fourth album in five years: He's a rapper, but on "808s & Heartbreak," he sings, and instead of his usual up-tempo, uplifting hip-hop, the album largely consists of morose ballads.

Both performers intend their albums to be received as masterworks of "capital A" Art. West has paved the way for "808s" with talk of his compulsion to make "pop art" and his desire to take hip-hop to the level of the Beatles, Hendrix and Led Zeppelin. At the American Music Awards, he proclaimed, "We're going to push this music to the point where it was like in the '60s, in the '70s." On the song "Welcome to Heartbreak," he declares, "I can't stop having these visions," while his MySpace page features the pompous motto "Our work is never over."

Guns N' Roses, of course, always aimed to enter the pantheon of classic rock, signposting their ambition with ballsy, overblown covers of songs by Bob Dylan, the Sex Pistols and Paul McCartney and attempting to top the success of "Appetite for Destruction" with the hubris and gigantism of "Use Your Illusion I" and "II." "Chinese Democracy" and "808s & Heartbreak" are each full of rage and anguish, of the sort you'd half-think megastars would be able to pay somebody else to feel on their behalf: Axl strikes typically embattled, I-won't-change-for-you (and certainly won't speed up my work-rate) postures, while West's torment emerges out of romantic pain and "It's lonely at the top" self-pity.

Most intriguingly, the records have something else in common: a sound that draws your attention to the technological artifice of recording. The difference is that "Chinese Democracy" is the victim of its means of production, whereas "808s & Heartbreak" turns the digital denaturing of sound into a positive aesthetic. Rose strives for majesty and produces a monstrosity, while West turns damaged sound into beauty.

It would be lovely to think that the vigorously polished turd that is "Chinese Democracy" could serve as the tombstone for an entire era of mainstream rock marred by misguided production techniques pushed by the record industry and radio alike. "Chinese Democracy" takes the two hallmarks of recorded rock sound of the modern era -- compression and an overreliance on the digital editing platform Pro Tools -- and amps their signature defects to a hideous intensity.

Compression is not intrinsically evil. It can make records sound more exciting, and equivalents to the effect were used as far back as the '60s. The process "simply reduces the difference between the loudest and quietest parts of a piece of music," in the words of technical writer Paul White, creating the illusion that it's louder. It makes songs jump out at the listener. Your most common encounter with excessive compression is probably TV commercials, which is why when the ad break comes on you'll often find yourself reflexively lowering the volume. Over-compression in music squeezes the depth out of the sound: Noisy guitar rock in particular sounds muddy and yet flat, a plane of overbright blare that tires the ear. But "the loudness war" keeps escalating because labels need their bands' releases to be "competitive" on the radio, where stations add further compression to compete with rival broadcasters. And there is a generational shift toward tolerating degraded sound, as more and more people listen to music primarily as MP3s, which are then heard via computer speakers and iPods.

Pro Tools, like compression, is not invariably abused, but it does encourage fruitless perfectionism, with the temptation to add and remove and tweak and restructure, which often results in a densely layered, supersaturated sound. One common Pro Tools function is "drum sound replacement": If, say, the snare drum doesn't punch through to your satisfaction, you can either create another one in laboratory conditions or take it from a CD of sampled drum sounds, easily replacing every snare hit in the drummer's performance.

The result, audible on "Chinese Democracy," is a bionic precision that forgoes any real looseness and swing (one of Guns N' Roses' virtues back when it was an actual band circa "Appetite for Destruction," as opposed to Axl Rose plus a teeming ensemble of hired hands). Pro Tools makes it easy, once you've got a perfect take of a guitar part or backing vocal, to cut and paste that element repeatedly across the song, in the process creating a subtle monotony that may not rise to the forefront of the listener's consciousness but is felt as a subliminal absence.

Pro Tools is just a  tool, of course, and the defects of "Chinese Democracy" ultimately come down to the humans using it, and the infinitesimal aesthetic choices they made during its unnaturally prolonged creation. Another problem is the excessive number of talents that have passed through the project: There were six guitarists, including Rose (but excluding guest players Brian May and David Navarro, both left on the cutting-room floor). "Chinese Democracy" has almost as many credits as a modern-day action movie, and there is something about its overall sound that reminds me of CGI. Like the fight scenes or exploding cities in CGI-addled movies -- in which no stunt men were ever in jeopardy, no debris ever hurtled -- the sound of "Chinese Democracy" is spectacular but numbing, a simulacrum of rock's wildness and untamed energy.

Here and there, the methodology pays off. Some of the song intros are eerily ethereal in a way that suggests the more interesting record Rose might have made if he hadn't been wedded to making a rock 'n' roll record. And on "Shackler's Revenge," space opens repeatedly for a thrilling piece of digitally sculpted techno-rock, a corkscrewing riff like rotating knives in a slaughterhouse. But the bulk of that song succumbs to overload, with squealing solos and Rose's shrill vocals jostling to dominate the upper frequencies. "There Was a Time," "Catcher in the Rye" and "Riad n' the Bedouins" gesture at defiance and intensity, but the sound has no bite: It's like being mauled to death by a toothless pitbull, a horribly drawn-out way for your ears to die. "Madagascar" features a sample from "Cool Hand Luke," the prison boss drawling, "What we have here is failure to communicate," a curious act of self-plagiarism, since the exact same sound bite was used on the song "Civil War" back in 1991. But the "failure to communicate" unwittingly encapsulates the album's inability to connect. Nothing can cut through the smog of sound.

Guns N' Roses was always a phallic band -- Sunset Strip sex pistols from the name down to the "feel my serpentine" imagery of "Welcome to the Jungle." Doors hagiographer Danny Sugerman even compared Rose to the young Jim "Death and my cock are the world" Morrison. There's a gross tumescence to the sound of "Chinese Democracy" redolent of the 4-hour erections induced by Viagra: engorged but devoid of desire, a meaningless show of strength.

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