Read Online Fargo Rock City by Chuck Klosterman - Free Book Online Page A

Morrissey, they couldn’t say who they were, but a big part of them wanted people to figure it out.
    Morrissey was “their voice”—a person who spoke from their minority perspective and was able to inject his feelings and ideas into the mainstream culture. If you were recognized as a Morrissey fan, it said something about who you were: To guys like Raihala, it meant either (a) you were gay, or (b) you were certainly comfortable with the gay lifestyle. I would guess there are many members of the gay community who buy Morrissey albums even though they don’t especially care for the music, just because it seems like the proper thing to do. His music and social posture built a persona, and that persona ultimately stretched far beyond his albums. But since he’s still a mere pop singer, his disciples can only connect with him through the appreciation of his records. Raihala now owns thousands of CDs and listens to new music every day, but he says he can still sing along to all seven Smiths studio records in their absolute entirety.
    Interestingly enough, Appetite for Destruction is probably the only record I could karaoke from beginning to end. Part of that is because I’ve listened to it so much—but the larger explanation for why I did is probably similar to Raihala’s adoration of Morrissey. My motivation wasn’t as specific—it did not derive from a singular issue—but it was reflective of my personality in the same way.
    I don’t think it would be accurate to call Axl Rose “my voice” or even “our voice,” because Guns N’ Roses was way too popular. While Morrissey was famous, he was never famous the way Axl was; total sales from all those Smiths LPs would not equal the 15 million-plus copies of Appetite that sold worldwide. It’s unrealistic to think any rock singer can represent an audience of that size. But Rose did represent his core audience, which were people who came from the same place. The fact that he was a rural kid (born in Lafayette, Indiana) was a huge factor, particularly because healways seemed to weave it into the music. All those Appetite songs made L.A. seem (quite literally) like a “jungle” the band had parachuted into. GNR rhythm guitarist Izzy Stradlin was also from Indiana, and he once said, “Nobody goes to Los Angeles. L.A. is where you end up. ” So that was how we came to view Axl: He was the guy who took our small-town paradigm and applied it to the real world—a world that had once seemed glamorous and now seemed like a twisted, sinister paradise city.
    Of all the L.A. metal bands, Guns N’ Roses talked about Hollywood the most (even more than Junkyard, a band whose first single was specifically titled “Hollywood”). Mötley Crüe had a song called “Danger” that described the seedy underside of Los Angeles, but they always seemed like a band who belonged in southern California. Vince Neil looked like a surfer (he was kind of like a belligerent version of David Lee Roth), and Nikki Sixx had bounced around that scene for years.
    L.A. Guns was actually named for its place of origin, but that was yet another accentuation of Axl’s obsession. You see, Rose was the original singer for L.A. Guns, and he briefly stole that group’s guitarist (Tracii Guns) to form an early incarnation of Guns N’ Roses (one can assume the name was an abbreviated version of “Mr. Guns and Mr. Rose”). Izzy Stradlin promptly joined this group after brief stints with Shire and London and another GNR precursor called Hollywood Rose (who were sometimes known as the Hollywood Roses and briefly included Axl as the frontman). While in Hollywood Rose, Izzy, and Axl quit working with Tracii to hook up with Slash (who—at the time—was auditioning for Poison). Somehow, Axl managed to keep Tracii’s stage name for his band. It’s all very confusing and incestuous, and it