Dancing About Architecture:Chinese Democracy?
Words:Scott Harrell

Every generation has its great mysteries. Sometimes they're huge and era-defining – what really happened at Dealey Plaza? (Look it up; it's pretty important.) Sometimes they're only vaguely zeitgeist-y in a pop cultural sense, and largely irrelevant – who shot JR? (Don't bother looking it up unless you're a dismal stand-up comic jockeying for a slot on VH-1's I Love The '80s: Part Whatever, We're Out of Ideas Again, And Flavor Flav Is Missing; I think it was Kristin, but really, who gives a fuck?)

But like everything else in our culture, the mysteries are cheapening, becoming more soundbyte-y. If we have to give it more than one cigarette's worth of consideration/conversation every once in a while, well, we won't. We're not going to spend our lives trying to figure out who populated Easter Island with volcanic busts, or even attempt to understand Watergate. We want to know with whom our exes are sleeping, and have forgotten we care four minutes after we've found out. We want to know what's going to happen on Lost next week, and get pissed when somebody tells us. We want to be the first to illegally download an album we'll never listen to all the way through.

About the closest we can come to plumbing the deep unanswered questions of our time is this:

Will Chinese Democracy really ever come out?

Talk of the next Guns N' Roses album is once again making the rounds. This time, several sources close to the record (names omitted for fear of reprisal by various paranoid, litigious, psychic-toting individuals) say the full-length is actually done.

Yeah, yeah, I know. Who cares? But a lot of us do, in a kinda/sorta/not really/but still sorta kinda way. Think about it. Over the last decade and a half, the pop-culture cycle of relevance has sped up immeasurably. If what we anticipate fails to materialize pretty much immediately, we tend to move on to something else, and we rarely go back. In the case of Chinese Democracy, however, pop time seems to stand still, or at least display an uncharacteristic willingness to defy its own fickle nature.

Remember how breathlessly we awaited the arrival of Interpol's second album? Of course we don't. We don't even care that we don't remember being excited about it, and it was only, what, five years ago? Do we really think we'd still be waiting for Interpol's sophomore effort, had it yet to materialize?

Hell no. We would've grudgingly accepted She Wants Revenge instead of gleefully maligning them, and moved on.

(I've seen She Wants Revenge twice, and it was never good, but everybody seems to not care about Interpol and She Wants Revenge equally, so that kind of validates She Wants Revenge, in a way. Or proves my point. Or nullifies it. Whatever.)

In an environment of ravenous consumption and nonexistent hindsight, the “do you think Chinese Democracy will ever come out?” phenomenon has exhibited incredible staying power. Why? Because, politically and economically speaking, the folks who first heard Appetite for Destruction at 16 also turned out to be the first generation to, as adults, get completely fucked by America's policy of deficit spending? (Read: The first time they heard it was the last time they were anywhere in the neighborhood of happy.) Because Velvet Revolver is so terribly banal that we have to repeatedly return our gaze to Axl Rose, even though we know that Slash and Izzy totally made GNR? (Read: We still know that Slash and Izzy totally made GNR.) Because, somewhere deep inside, we hope that Axl Rose might be the misunderstood genius he suspects himself to be? (Read: Not fucking likely. He's good, but nobody's that good.)

Who cares?

Generational mysteries aren't about the answers, they're about the questions. Eventually, Chinese Democracy will come out, and it'll be an uneven effort from a talented guy who loves both Queen and the Sex Pistols, but can't figure out how to make everything fit without the help of some guys with whom he no longer has a successful, if dysfunctional, relationship. And however good it turns out to be, its appearance will mark the loss of a cultural question mark, from a a culture that desperately needs new unknowns.

So, what?

Hey, do you think At The Drive-In will ever do a reunion tour?