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Last Topic: 11:29:11am, 04/24/2024
Last Post: 10:48:24am, 04/24/2024
ParanoidObsessive posted...
lolno
You're still missing the point of my dismissiveness. You keep saying that "they have like 3 singles that are widely known and popular, yet all of said singles come from their debut album", and that statement is objectively wrong. Speaking as a non-GnR fan who is one of the few people on this board old enough to have been listening to Top 40 radio for the entirety of their career, I'm in a unique position to tell you that you're basically full of shit.
I'm not talking about their multiple albums over the last 25 years, I'm talking about their career in the late 80s/early 90s. Their first THREE albums (four if you count Use Your Illusion I and II separately (but I won't) sold extremely well (all went multi-platinum). Their successful singles came from ALL THREE albums, and 6 charted top 10, while 2 others charted top 50 (and about 2-3 others used to get significant airplay even without officially charting). They got TONS of fucking airplay at the time, and even today you'll still hear any number of those singles still get airplay on any station that still plays music from that era (which I do, which is how I know).
No, it isn't just Welcome to the Jungle, Paradise City, and Sweet Child of Mine that gets any recognition today. Don't Cry, November Rain, and Knockin' On Heaven's Door still get pretty regular exposure, Patience still crops up from time-to-time, and even their cover of Live and Let Die gets played every now and then. And hell, I'm pretty sure I've heard Mr. Brownstone more in the last 10 years than I did when it was actually released (it wasn't a major hit at the time).
And that's deliberately ignoring You Could Be Mine, which benefited hugely from the Terminator 2 tie-in at the time, and still gets airplay now because of how big it was then.
They had TONS of airplay during that 5 year or so period from '87 to '92 (give or take), and nostalgia for that has fueled replays on "classic rock" stations right up to the current day. If you're not hearing them today, you almost certainly aren't listening to any stations that actually play 80s/90s rock, which sort of makes your observation meaningless.
Your entire premise is flawed right out of the gate, and literally nothing you've said since has really addressed that in any meaningful way.
Or to sum up - lolno.
Arguing that more of their songs are popular because you hear random singles occasionally on dedicated 80s-90s rock radio doesn't support the argument that their later work is also widely well known. You're going to the one and only place that would ever still play those songs. I'm also not a GnR fan either and I have been periodically listening to generic rock/metal stations since the 90s and I couldn't even hum a part of any of the other singles you named after Knockin on Heaven's Door. Maybe I always missed it when they happened to play those songs or maybe the reality is they just don't get as much airtime as you think. The point is non-rock fans mostly only know the singles from Appetite for Destruction because they have transcended random era throwback radio play. I'm not talking about how well known they are among people who have actively been listening to their genre the entire time. I'm talking about the general public consciousness.
Yet all that is just nitpicking because I never argued they weren't well known. My original point was and still is that GnR has a small body of work relative to their success: They have released 4 albums of original material (5 if you're being generous and count a double album as 2) in 39 years with no major hiatuses. Even a comparable band like Metallica with a famously sluggish album release schedule in recent years has twice that many. Most rock bands who have been active continuously since the early 80s have anywhere from 12-20 albums. Their last album released 16 years ago, or nearly half their career ago.
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\\[T]// Praise the Sun