GNR Chinese Democracy Faith and Astroturf
by Amelia G : June 25th, 2008
I first came across Guns n’ Roses’ Appetite for Destruction when I was a teenage metal DJ on the radio in Connecticut.
A little background explanation: I got into doing this gig partly because I’d gone to high school overseas and the American overseas high schools I attended were woefully behind the times when it came to music. Like really behind. I used AC/DC and Rush lyrics in my campaign posters when I ran for class president. (I won. I mean, of course I did; there were AC/DC and Rush lyrics in my campaign posters.) I was shocked when I found out that Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven”, the big slow dance number where I went to ninth grade, came out more than a decade earlier than I would have guessed on a multiple choice test. So I arrived at college with more of an Aerosmith taste in music than the average student at a competitive, left-wing, East Coast school normally would have. Although I loved bands like Janes Addiction and The Dead Milkmen and The Cure and The Violent Femmes as soon as I was exposed to them, I held onto the hard rock thing because you never forget your first musical loves. Oddly, although my classmates identified as free-thinking liberal individuals, they seemed to hold the view that bands like Motley Crue and Dokken were for lower class stupid people. My annoyance at this classist hypocritical bigotry is probably the reason I became a metal DJ. I was frustrated that my classmates could be so close-minded about something like music. I enjoyed hard rock in my personal musical mix and I wasn’t about to fake like I didn’t just to impress people I went to school with. . . .
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