• Location: United States, Wisconsin, Madison
• Music: Maroon 5 - This Love

"Edgy"

At the sandwich shop the other day, we were listening, as we often do, to Pandora's classic rock station. They play about what you'd expect to hear on a classic rock station, which is to say mostly guitar-based rock from the 60s and 70s with occasional forays into the 80s. Most of the latter are by artists who got their start in the 60s or 70s but continued recording into the 80s, like "I Won't Back Down" by Tom Petty, "I Love Rock and Roll" by Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, and "Learning to Fly" by Pink Floyd, to name three such songs I heard that night. But there are occasional outliers; that night, for example, they played two songs by Guns N Roses. I don't really have a problem with GNR being played on a classic rock station. Part of me rebels at the idea of "Welcome to the Jungle," a song that was popular when I was in college, being old enough to be considered classic rock, but another part concedes that it's more than 25 years old, which is considerably older than, say, "Stairway to Heaven" was when the classic rock format was created in the early 80s.

But the reason I mention GNR is because hearing those two songs from Appetite for Destruction reminded me of something I saw on my niece's^* Facebook wall the other day:



Two things about this amuse me. First, it's funny that my niece is making the same complaint in 2014 about the mass production of Guns and Roses shirts that early GNR fans -- the ones who knew them from the LA club scene, and when MTV was only playing their videos in the after-hours rotation -- made in 1988. (That I assume they made, anyway. Band fans like nothing more than complaining when their favorite bands become popular.) Second, it's funny that a sincere love of Guns N Roses has come to be seen as a sign of edginess among the youth of today. GNR was a massive mainstream success, with a half-dozen Top 10 singles and five multi-platinum albums. Liking GNR is about as edgy as liking, I don't know, Nickelback. It might be less.

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* Not my niece. Our familial relationship almost defies description, so for shorthand purposes I think of her as a niece.