Having only jumped around different songs streamed on Guns N' Roses' MySpace page last week, I'm only just experiencing the long-awaited "Chinese Democracy" now.
I'm a little leery of artists' "pet projects," those epic, personal visions that eat up a lot of time and money but almost inevitably end up appealing to very few diehards. For every "Citizen Kane," there's a dozen "Waterworld"s. But I'm determined to be as fair as possible, allowing for the fact that no album can live up to some 17 years of anticipation (except maybe Brian Wilson's "SMiLE," completed some 37 years after its original conception). And I'm taking it as a given that its reach exceeds its grasp, which in the grand scheme of things is much preferable to not reaching at all.
But I'm more interested in
your opinion. Does the album sound, as the New York Times' Jon Pareles puts it, "like a loud last gasp from the reign of the indulged pop star"? Is it more a noble experiment that falls short, a well-worth-the-wait masterpiece, or something somewhere in between?
Photo: Evan Agostini/Getty Images