Music & Marketing
Why Are We Still Talking About Guns N’ Roses?
How the Appetite-era GN’R is a blueprint for business and branding success…
As a bonafide Gen X’er, I loved the idea of Guns N’ Roses before I heard a single note of their music.
They were brilliantly marketed in all the rock rags of the day well in advance of their now-legendary debut album Appetite for Destruction in 1987.
GN’R produced a guttural and gritty sound and a street-rock cred that contrasted their Hollywood-hair-band-contemporaries of the late 1980s.
I bought the original Live Like a Suicide cassette at my local mall’s music store the same day I bought Appetite For Destruction.
My buddies and I road-tripped to Los Angeles in 1986 and 1988 with the sole purpose of seeing and experiencing the exploding “Sunset Strip” music scene.
As budding rock musicians ourselves, we modeled our late-’80s college band’s sound and style after bands like GNR, LA Guns, and Faster Pussycat, complete with the multi-colored bandanas, assorted cowboy hats and caps, and pants-tucked-inside-the-boots look.
But GN’R hit different. The energy was different. The danger was different. There was more of it, and it seemed real.
