Paradise City Is Too Long (don’t treat it like a capital crime)

Is this a safe space? I ask, rhetorically on my own blog, to signal to the savvy reader that I am about to delve into a Topic of Controversy. As that savvy reader may also have guessed from the title of this post, we are discussing the length of that evergreen sports anthem Paradise City by Guns N Roses. Specifically that its about 45 seconds away from being one of the greatest songs ever committed to the recording studio. Now I am anticipating two major objections to this statement so let me deal with them in turn.

First, what do you mean greatest song I heard it twice at little league games last week and five times on Classic Rock Radio in between some middle aged guy with a beard slandering any and all music produced after 1989 and the entirety of Def Leppard’s Pyromania. Fair enough, but its not the song’s fault (and for once not entirely Axl Rose’s fault) that its been overplayed absolutely to death. Just for a second I need you to walk with me into a world where this song hasn’t engendered abiding hatred by being beaten forcibly into your brain for the last several decades and just listen. Take in that ride-of-of-Valkyries-esque opening lift, the easy expansive chords like possibility themselves, and the devolution of that uplifting opening into gutter-gritty chaos after the scream of the whistle and if you still can’t separate it from its tragic association with sweaty children and neckbeards then you A) must be losin’ your mind and B) are blind (yes, I do think I’m very funny).

Now on the second objection which is that I am simply a fool and philistine with the attention span of an IPad-addicted post-Covid kindergartener to not appreciate this masterpiece in its entirety. Now I get it, I have myself bemoaned the curse of the radio edit for cutting incredible songs short for the attention spans of the masses, I have multiple songs on my personal playlists that scrape the 10-minute mark (by this band included) and I wrote a final paper for my high school English class on why Paradise City did a better job of explaining lost utopias than did Of Mice and Men (side note, this also probably explains why I don’t have a real job). But the thing is that its really only the verses that rival Steinbeck, the chorus – iconic as it is – is kind of silly. And that’s mostly what we get in the grey-haired region of the runtime. There’s so much energy built up after that whistle and extra choruses interspersed with an evolving pattern of frantic- but-forgettable instrumentation lets all that glorious opening juice leak out until by the end you can barely remember how we got here. Now, walk with me once again into unreality and consider a world in which Paradise City ended with just one (or even two!) more choruses after the final verse. Instead of ending with a drawn-out wheeze it would end with a kick in the teeth and keep you coming back for more.

Without getting further into this bands constant struggle to kill their darlings since I already have a three-part post about that, I love long songs (and many long GnR songs) but this might be the one for which I can accept the wisdom of the radio edit.