Though well-intentioned, it has subsequently become the worst nightmare of everyone except major music labels and other corporate entities trafficking largely in intellectual property. The DMCA – or Digital Millennium Copyright Act – is the act that officially codified and criminalized internet piracy in America in 1998. They were taken by Jack Lue.AC/DC perform Shoot to Thrill with new frontman Axl Rose Guardian Read the 1991 profile of Guns N’ Roses, here in the TIME Vault: Misfit MetalheadsĬorrection: The original version of this gallery incorrectly credited several of the photographs.
The band at that time was on the brink of fame, just signing to Geffen Records and starting to amass fans (and freak out parents) all across America. The Gunners’ success is giving the kiss of life to a moribund record industry, and has kept rock ‘n’ roll from doing what it keeps threatening to do: expire.īut when these images from 19 were taken, they’d barely started down that rocky road toward controversy, fame, disputes and reunions. No one alive looks more like rock stars than Rose, 29, and guitarist Slash, 26, with their tattoos, their headgear, their emotional problems (Slash has frequently used heroin, and Rose is a manic-depressive) and their we-sold-our-soul-to-rock-‘ n’-roll attitudes. Guns N‘ Roses tenaciously clings to hard rock’s tradition of being loud, mean and obvious. What the Gunners play is very, very good. What sets the Gunners apart is that they are a genuinely electrifying band that neither looks nor sounds like the interchangeable Whitesnakes, Poisons and Bon Jovis that make up the drab MTV universe. Rock ‘n’ roll has always been filled with sexist, violent bands, but very few of them sell 14 million copies the first time out of the chute. It would be unfair to attribute all, or even most, of Guns N‘ Roses‘ success to their unrelentingly sexist and uncompromisingly violent lyrics or to their forays into xenophobia, racism and sadomasochism. Their lyrics and image roiled non-fans-but it also helped make them what they were, as TIME explained in 1991: Get your history fix in one place: sign up for the weekly TIME History newsletterīut their internal disputes weren’t the only source of Guns N’ Roses controversy. The reunion has been an occasion for eager fans to look back at the decade or so during which the band dominated rock, between their start in 1985 and their sort-of end in 1993, when the band didn’t exactly break up but essentially stopped being able to tolerate one another long enough to make a significant amount of music. More than two decades had elapsed since Slash and Axl Rose last played together when Guns N’ Roses first reunited earlier this month-a reunion that will be celebrated on Saturday, as they headline the Coachella music festival.