Timeline of Sounds
The Jungle
On Guns N’ Roses and making nice.
Update 6/7/22: Level has a new home. You can read this article and other new articles by visiting LEVELMAN.com.
I sometimes wonder if Axl Rose sat Slash down in a room with no one else watching and apologized for talking about the “niggers” at the Los Angeles Greyhound station on the song “One in a Million.” I wonder if Axl Rose looked Slash in the eyes and told him he didn’t mean it. That what he was really trying to say was, “I found myself afraid,” or, “For once, I wasn’t as big as everyone made me out to be, and that is a terrifying tree to be shaken out of.” I wonder, mostly, if Axl Rose has ever felt any regret for anything. But particularly the moment when he wrote “One in a Million,” and then sang “Maybe a Greyhound / Could be my way / Police and niggers / That’s right / Get out of my way.”
It is a fascinating choice, to group both police and “niggers.” The song “One in a Million” is on the album Lies, which came out in the fall of 1988. The song is an outlier on the album — it’s the only song that Axl Rose wrote by himself, using just the bottom two strings of a guitar. It’s a song that the rest of the band pleaded with him to take off the album, but there it is anyway. In the second verse, Rose bemoans immigrants and homosexuals, singing: “They make no…
