Use Your Illusion I / Use Your Illusion II

In theory, the MTV Video Music Awards are an annual celebration of the year’s best music videos. In practice, the VMAs celebrate celebrities, and in 1992, that made for quite a guest list. Eric Clapton! Marky Mark! Garth Algar! The party brought together a coalition of aging rockers, buzzy new artists and Bobby Brown, all performing between a series of “zany” juxtapositions—think David Spade refusing backstage entry to Hellraiser’s Pinhead—but the ceremony’s most notable pairing would go down off-camera.

At that moment, Guns N’ Roses were the biggest band in the world, outlaw rockers flying high off Use Your Illusion I and Use Your Illusion II, a pair of megahit albums released on the same day the previous fall. They were in attendance so surviving members of Queen could present them with the Video Vanguard award for their visual oeuvre, including “November Rain,” the crown jewel in a series of morbid fantasies frontman W. Axl Rose commissioned to promote Illusion I and II.

GnR’s labelmates, Nirvana, were also there, thanks to their own hit album, Nevermind, released a week after Illusion; despite sharing distortion pedals and David Geffen’s largesse, Nevermind heralded singer and songwriter Kurt Cobain’s radically different approach to being a guitar group. Ever on brand, GnR tried to goad them into a backstage fistfight, but Kurt met Axl’s threats with signature sarcasm. Guns N’ Roses closed the night with a triumphant, Elton John-assisted performance of “November Rain,” but Nirvana—whose own shambolic set ended with drummer Dave Grohl yelling “Where’s Axl?” into the mic—left the show victorious.

It’s easy to read this moment as a changing of the guard—and make no mistake, it was—but over time, the truth becomes a bit more slippery. The two volumes of Illusion were the sequel to 1987’s Appetite For Destruction, which, like Nevermind, was a vibe-shifting perfect record, one that would inject actual menace into an increasingly commercialized Reagan-era rock scene and blast Axl, guitarists Slash and Izzy Stradlin, bassist Duff McKagan and drummer Steven Adler from Hollywood gutters to the outer reaches of the global music stratosphere in the process.

Unfortunately, no one returns from space the same. To call Illusion’s’ 30 tracks “sprawling” is a cosmic understatement. But I think of this read on Al Pacino: “Has he always been perfect? No. He strives for something riskier and more alive than perfection. Perceptive, free, unmissable? God, yes.” GnR used to open shows with Scarface samples, and if Appetite was their switchblade-across-the-cheek introduction, Use Your Illusion captures the band going Tony Montana for real, blowing up into melodramatic, widescreen dimensions despite (or arguably, because of) knowing how that double-VHS ends.

Because why not go big, right? “Highly anticipated follow-up” is a genre unto itself, a mix of artistic and commercial concerns strapped to the doomsday clock of our attention span. The open-ended budgets and creative pressures that accompany world-beating success make for combustible forces, giving us the contrarian turns of Tusk and In Utero, the spray-and-pray ramble of Wu-Tang Forever and if-it-ain’t-brokeness of Room on Fire, the naked ambition of Astroworld and 1989. Use Your Illusion swings wildly, from Dylan slow jams to Marshall stack eruptions, bloozy Stones sketches, and spoken word raps. Almost half the songs are over five minutes long; one includes an electric sitar. Vol II flows tighter, but each tracklist is decidedly a lot. Giving such free-range ideas the blockbuster treatment is a flex afforded to precious few, but Illusion’s most impressive achievement may be that all five band members lived to see its release date.

Slash’s childhood friend Marc Canter shares fly-on-the-wall insight into group dynamics in Reckless Road, a fantastic oral history of the key players and BTS characters from GnR’s pre-fame years. Every anecdote underscores how they were “more like orphans than professional artists… outsiders and runaways who found sanctuary in music.” While hair metal took over the Sunset Strip with spandex’d guitar acrobatics, GnR bonded over a love for uncut ’70s rock—everything from Nazareth to the New York Dolls—and near-constant chemical diversions. They were a legitimately feral presence (Axl was known to occasionally sleep under the stairs of the Tower Video shop he managed) with distinct, combative personalities onstage and off; break up one night, make up the next, then split a burger five ways.

Appetite immortalized this lifestyle on record, and its results speak for themselves: “Welcome to the Jungle,” “It’s So Easy,” “Mr. Brownstone.” The rawness gave even “Paradise City” and “Sweet Child O’ Mine” an edge that set them apart from the saccharine pop rock of their day. Once Nigel Dick’s video for “Welcome to the Jungle”—an iconic, L.A. sleaze Wizard of Oz—hit heavy rotation, GnR went from varying degrees of homelessness to opening amphitheaters for Aerosmith and shooting their first Rolling Stone cover (“A brutal band for brutal times”). The tour moved to Giants Stadium off GnR’s meteoric draw, Appetite was well on its way to becoming the best-selling debut album of all time, and the lives of everyone involved would change forever.

Artists only get to be the next big thing once—then they must figure out how to stick around. Some are naturally wired to make pragmatic, careerist decisions, moving like a small business or startup; others have a Wikipedia sub-section detailing riots they’ve started in various countries. At their peak, GnR were simultaneously the most popular and most controversial act in the universe, a group effort of edgelord provocation and public urination. By the time Axl was on the cover of Rolling Stone again, the Tower steps had been replaced by his “posh condo in West Hollywood in which almost everything is black, a new BMW and a parcel of land in Wisconsin on which he plans to build his dream house, and an Uzi semiautomatic machine gun and 9mm pistol tucked tightly behind a couch.” Slash’s autobiography describes a binge from this period where he KO’d a glass shower door thinking he was being chased by the Predator alien; Adler’s narcotic intake was deemed too crazy even by GnR’s own elastic standards. The band replaced him with the Cult drummer Matt Sorum, reconnected with Appetite producer Mike Clink, and enlisted keyboardist Dizzy Reed for reinforcements.

Unsurprisingly, large swaths of Illusion give pure PTSD. “Most people that have been into GnR for years don’t understand it, but they can feel it,” explained Axl. “Having a nice time is weird for people that don’t have nice times in their lives. When you don’t really know what a nice time is, a nice time is for pussies.” In its place is the antisocial propulsion of “Right Next Door to Hell,” “Perfect Crime” and “You Could Be Mine,” whose music video features Schwarzenegger’s Terminator 2 cyborg pulling a shotgun on Axl before deeming him a “waste of ammo.” At the end of “Get In the Ring,” the singer calls out and threatens to fight various rock writers and magazine publishers by name. “Most of [Illusion] is pretty fucking pissed off,” said Slash. “Regardless of whether it sounds like the blues or not, basically that’s what it is.”

The self-styled desperados also had a sadboi side—one that Appetite’s ballads only hinted at, and the audio-only version of Illusion could scarcely contain. Their MTV-conquering trauma threepeat of “Don’t Cry,” “Estranged,” and the unforgettable “November Rain” still stand as the albums’ most enduring statement: fatalistic, sepia-toned storytelling, wailing guitar solos, and a designer-clad Axl fighting personal demons behind a grand piano. Self-indulgent? No question. I would be remiss not shouting out the CGI dolphin who stars in the four-million-dollar clip for “Estranged.” But the videos’ operatic scope resulted in a kind of “Hotel California” for the post-’80s hangover; if you can never leave, might as well look cool as fuck for the stay.

I think of Rose in these videos as a hard-rock version of Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz avatar Joe Gideon, who starts his days with Alka-Seltzer, amphetamines, and an “It’s showtime, folks!” in the mirror. He’s a generational talent who alienates lovers and collaborators with selfish, mercurial demands; on his deathbed, he hallucinates an extravagant, phantasmagorical Broadway routine that allows him to share all the love and regret he was unable to express in real life through the power of song and dance. With director Andy Morahan on a long leash for all three videos, Axl went full Gideon—mourning, frostbitten, quite possibly lost at sea— but Izzy was MIA, having quit the band before filming “Don’t Cry,” presumably because he had his fill of ego-tripping.

By this point, even with lineup upheaval (like Adler, Stradlin was swapped out for retro rocker Gilby Clarke), it seemed like the GnR whirlwind had reached a kind of equilibrium. Turmoil would linger—the band’s co-headline stadium tour with Metallica was marred by third-degree burns, public beefs with openers Faith No More, and yes, more riots—but the band remained by all metrics a successful commercial and artistic enterprise. Illusion shipped double platinum, and reviews were overwhelmingly positive (from Greg Kot’s Chicago Tribune rave: “There’s enough good—even great—music on both discs to justify the extravagance”). For an artistic declaration spun whole cloth out of sturm und drang, it’s almost too poetic that Axl’s final Rolling Stone cover in ‘92—a therapy session where the hot-tempered frontman is described as “soft spoken and contemplative”—was followed by Nirvana’s CORPORATE MAGAZINES STILL SUCK mission statement two weeks later.

The zeitgeist had spoken; the world’s biggest rock stars had been dethroned by their antithesis, almost as quickly as they were crowned themselves. Nirvana would soon deal with their own internal chaos and follow-up angst, but their Alternative Nation regime change was irreversible, popularizing thrift store aesthetics and progressive attitudes that were a direct rejection of GnR’s biker bar worldview. The band laid low, as much as any multiplatinum concern could, and treaded water with 1993’s covers compilation “The Spaghetti Incident?”, but their days of moving the cultural needle were behind them. Once they reconvened to start a new chapter the following year, Axl’s creative whims—by then industrial and loop-based—would drastically alienate his remaining bandmates. “He had a vision that GnR should change,” said Geffen A&R Tom Zutaut, “and Slash had an attitude that Guns N’ Roses were Guns N’ Fucking Roses.” Unstoppable force meets immovable object, roll credits.

For the next two decades, everyone went their separate ways. Slash toured solo, collected snakes and pinball machines, and served as the public face of “rock” while dropping licks at award shows; Duff wrote books and started a wealth management firm for musicians. For a brief period, the two linked back up with Sorum and erstwhile Stone Temple Pilots frontman Scott Weiland in the ill-fated supergroup Velvet Revolver, while Axl soldiered on with a quixotic new “Guns N’ Roses” best remembered for braids, Buckethead, and the multi-year vision quest that was Chinese Democracy, still the most expensive rock album ever recorded.

Then in 2016, with great fanfare but little explanation, Axl, Slash, and Duff reunited to headline Coachella and embark on the Not In This Lifetime… Tour, settling scores—complete with Adler drum cameo—and smashing box-office records like nothing ever changed. As of now, the “classic” trio is still at it, selling out sports complexes around the world. Reviews may be mixed, but crowds seem happy; hearing “Estranged” ring off at maximum volume in a soccer stadium tends to have that effect.

That the profoundly volatile Guns N’ Roses simply exist is perhaps the most surprising possible outcome. Their double-stuffed Illusion both predated the playlist era and predicted the album-as-data dump; even without new music, the band has 30 million monthly Spotify listeners, more than Bon Jovi or Metallica (Nirvana has 31 million). Eric Weisbard’s 33 1/3rd book calls GnR’s two LPs our “last great moment for tyrannosaurus rock,” which, on a chronological level, is fair. But in 2024, you can cop GnR baby onesies at Target next to neon Nevermind smiley tees, both denuded from all meaning other than “shirt.”

On a long enough timeline, everything will fossilize, and the chief T-rex saw it coming. “Time is short/Your life’s your own/In the end we’re just dust n’ bones/And that’s alright.” Tastes change, perspectives evolve, but GnR’s rebellious, unsanitized id still resonates. Use Your Illusion is both a testament to the band’s excesses and an attempt to exorcize the forces that brought them there; its pomp does not make its existential bent less sincere, no matter if the band would rather hang with Traci Lords than Tobi Vail. If you want to gaze into the abyss with them—or simply tap back in for another primal, hyper-melodic scream—these two volumes will perennially have you covered. It’s always showtime somewhere.