Tom Pepinsky

Author: tompepinsky

  • The Decent Album Hidden within Use Your Illusion I-II

    This month is the 25th anniversary of the release of Use Your Illusion I/II, the Guns and Roses double album widely considered to be the perfect illustration of what happens when a rock band gets so famous that no one will prevent them from making terrible decisions. The albums were bloated, overlong, full of clunkers, heavily produced, and oddly reminiscent of 70s arena rock. Reviewers were confused; although they received general praise, just about every single one has a line that starts something like “unlike the hard-charging Appetite for Destruction…” and ends up apologizing for “My World.” The albums sold like mad, but no one prefers them to their predecessor. There exists a genre of reviews and remembrances that attempts to rehabilitate the two albums as “not that bad” or “rather well orchestrated,” but it is forced.[1] Forget individual songs—as albums, and especially as a double album, Use Your Illusion I/II is a pompous mess.

    Growing up in the 1980s in Central PA, most everyone I knew was a fan of GNR’s Appetite for Destruction, and just about everyone was really excited about the release of their sophomore album. I count myself an early GNR fan, and distinctly remember where I was the first time I heard “It’s So Easy“.[2] I also remember going right out to the local Boscov’s when UYI1/2 were released, and with only enough money to buy one, grabbing a UYI1 CD and heading straight home to listen to it on my own, new, CD-equipped boombox. I had hoped for more of Izzy Stradlin’s grimy mix of hair metal and LA punk, full of splashy cymbals and power chords arranged over minor thirds, I got Axl Rose trying to pull off Meatloaf or Elton John.[3] I quickly put down UYI1 in favor of Blood Sugar Sex Magik and the Black Album, both released right around then, and just as heavily produced too, but much better.[4] I never even bought UYI2 until college, when I thought I might as well complete the pair, and have never purchased any GNR music since.

    I have always wondered “what might have been” with the Use Your Illusion fiasco. What would have happened had GNR’s handlers forced them to throw out the waste on the two albums, think hard about the album’s structure, and put together something coherent? What if, in an alternate universe, Use Your Illusion was just one album? Could it have been better?

    The rules underlying this exercise are simple: make a new album where

    1. Each track has to be a song that was actually included on one of the two albums.[5]
    2. The total album length has to be realistic.

    The point of this is not to imagine GNR writing a different album, but could they have done this particular album better. I would like to add an additional rule that eliminates some of the songs with the more openly crass and misogynistic lyrics, but it happens to be the case that songs like “Back off Bitch” and “Get in the Ring” have aged particularly poorly (never good to begin with, they sound downright silly now), so the rule is superfluous. And there’s no getting around the fact that such a rule was not applied to Appetite.

    Another stipulation—not a rule, just a condition—is that songs featuring audible guest appearances by other vocalists are penalized. This is otherwise known as the “Alice Cooper Penalty.” It is not applied to “Don’t Cry” because no one can hear Shannon Hoon singing on it.

    Use Your Illusion Track Listing

    SIDE 1
    1. “Right Next Door to Hell” (3:02)
    2. “Dust N’ Bones” (4:58)
    3. “Civil War” (7:42)
    4. “Double Talkin’ Jive” (3:24)
    5. “Pretty Tied Up” (4:48)
    6. “Dead Horse” (4:17)

    SIDE 2
    7. “You Could Be Mine” (5:43)
    8. “Don’t Cry” (4:44)
    9. “November Rain” (8:57)
    10. “Bad Obsession” (5:28)
    11. “Garden of Eden” (2:41)
    12. “Estranged” (9:23)

    8 out of the 12 songs are from Use Your Illusion I, which is appropriate because this is the album that had more Izzy Stradlin’ on it. Songs from Use Your Illusion II written by Izzy are more likely to appear than songs not written by Izzy. It is also the case, however, that Izzy is responsible for some clunkers on UYI1 that didn’t make it. The entire album clocks in at 65:07, 10 minutes shorter than either of the overlong original albums. It even allows for a ballad-y second side which might be likened to GNR attempting to do a side-two-of-Abbey-Road-meets-Bat-out-of-Hell.

    I will freely admit that this album is still not a particularly great album. However, if this were all that had been released in September 1991, we would not be remembering it as an indulgent, overblown mess. We would remember it as a major label sophomore effort by a band evolving in sound, comparable to, say, In Utero, but not, say, Pinkerton.

    NOTES

    [1] The argument, for example, that “Don’t Damn Me” is a good song is ridiculous on its face. Axl admits it that the song sucks in the song itself.
    [2] Sitting on my grandmother’s front porch in North Carolina, probably early 1988, with my older cousin playing the tape on her boombox.
    [3] HT to AB for the metaphor.
    [4] Even 12-year old me could tell that Nevermind was something different—and great—altogether.
    [5] I consider this rule to be somewhat artificial, considering that the actually-existing albums contained covers of songs by Wings and Bob Dylan, and UYI2 contains a cover of a song on UYI1. In a preliminary version of this list I replaced “Pretty Tied Up” with “Monkey Business,” which I have always believed would be have been a great GNR cover song. However, the prominent cowbell means that it is more a Steven Adler track than a Matt Sorum track, so ultimately this does not make the cut.

  • Five Hurdles in Academic Writing

    I have thought quite a bit recently about academic writing. Not so much about what makes writing successful, but rather what stands in the way of academic writing. Part of this is in advance of this year’s meeting of the American Political Science Association, which is an opportunity to many political scientists to think about what stands in the way of their own academic writing. Part of this is thinking about the academic job market, also set to begin soon, in which having a polished writing sample is essential. We all have quirks in our writing process, but there are five common hurdles that academic writers face. In my experience, they represent the major chokepoints in getting academic writing done.

    1. from idea to results. This is easy, but also not that interesting as a commentary on writing. The vast majority of interesting research ideas or writing projects never get off the ground for the simple reason that the research is never executed in the first place.

    2. from results to words-on-page This is the second major hurdle, transitioning from the stage of research to writing stage. “Writer’s block” most commonly emerges here. One reason is because the “results” from Hurdle 1 are almost never as self-evident as they seem (“writing is thinking” and all that).

    3. from words-on-page to first draft. This is the stage that transitions from ideas or results that have been written down to a coherent piece of writing in which ideas and argument flow together, in a narrative with logical structure. This is the distinction between “most of a paper” and “a paper.”

    4. from first draft to second draft. Successful writers rewrite, and this was just as true for Hemingway as it is for a PhD student. I’ve never written a first draft that was of publishable quality.

    5. from nth draft to final draft. With very few exceptions, even successful writers who have rewritten once already will need to rewrite again because of the peer review process.

    I think that many of the writing procedures that I learned in high school are best understood as tricks to move you past these hurdles. Outlines and note cards (which I still use) are strategies to blur the distinction between results and words-on-page, for example (Hurdle 2). Workshopping and informal peer review is a technique to encourage revisions (Hurdle 4). The “memo to reviewers” is a technique for sizing up Hurdle 5.

    Relatedly, one under-appreciated argument in favor of coauthoring—beyond the benefits of leveraging different types of expertise—is that it allows for authors with different writing strengths to contribute to a single written output. Some authors are good at getting words on the page. Others are better at putting together first drafts, or revising them.

    Here is a personal reflection on one article of mine. The idea first emerged from an email conversation with an old college friend in fall 2007. I did the background reading and cobbled together the statistical research in spring 2008. Then I sat on these results, right in front of Hurdle 2, until spring 2012, when I used my teaching of a course on comparative methods to start to put some words on the page. From there to a first draft was relatively easy, but it took quite a bit longer to cross Hurdles 4 and 5. Even in this ultimately successful case, it is helpful to think about where these hurdles emerged and what ultimately got me past them.

    A final note on the theme of APSA: many scholars use conference deadlines as ways to incentivize themselves to write. When you think about that in terms of the five hurdles I’ve listed above, this is the perfect recipe for a conference chock full of most-of-a-papers and preliminary drafts, which is exactly what APSA and other academic conferences are. I am surely guilty too. It would be better if we all thought of conference deadlines not in terms of Hurdle 2 or Hurdle 3, but instead in terms of Hurdle 4. I especially hope that graduate students take note of this, rather than learning from what they see around them.