Updated: Is ‘Chinese Democracy’ going to be a flop?
From Billboard’s Ed Christman:
Music sales were down from 10 percent to 30 percent, and big-name albums released for Black Friday, the post-Thanksgiving kickoff to the holiday retail season, didn’t perform up to expectations, according to merchants contacted by Billboard.
Most interesting in the Billboard story is estimates on the sales of a couple of the releases that were supposed to buoy the industry this season, emphasis added:
Sources said that Kanye West’s “808s & Heartbreak” will sell in the range of 425,000-450,000 units, significantly down from 700,000-975,000 units previously projected.
Guns N’ Roses’ “Chinese Democracy” is expected to clock in at 250,000-260,000, not the predicted 300,000-784,000 units.
The GNR factoid is potentially devastating, because the album is being sold through only one store, Best Buy, and one assumes that Christman’s source can therefore speak with some authority.
The last two bands in this category (’70s or ’80s warhorses cutting remunerative deals with big box retailers that use their artistically tepid comeback product as loss leaders), AC/DC and the Eagles, did 750,000 and just shy of a million. On the other hand, those artists used Walmart, a much larger retailer.
What caused it?
1) Rock fans aren’t particularly bright, but they do know that Slash and Izzy Stradlin helped write most of the original band’s hits; not to many people are under the impression that this is anything but an Axl Rose solo album.
2) Rose didn’t help matters by being his usual lame self: This is a guy who as far as I know didn’t do a single interview to promote the decades-in-the-making new release.
3) That can’t be making his masters at Best Buy happy; that’s perhaps why there have been reports that the store itself hasn’t gone out of its way to promote its big holiday-season exclusive. Writes Digital Music News:
Best Buy positioned sales towers and end caps as promised, though the push was less than over-the-top. Best Buy is a big, warehouse-style retailer, and this release was easily missed by those skipping towards iPods, printers, laptops, and flat-screen TVs.
4) And together, those last two factors effectively negated the one thing Chinese Democracy had going for it. Part of the calculations of these arrangements is the oodles of enthusiastic publicity the entertainment press provides. To most people, the fact that a recording artist (i.e., someone who makes records and sells them) has a new CD for sale at a retail venue (i.e., a store that sells things) is not, uh, interesting. But in the weird algebra of such journalism, the equations “Paul McCartney + Starbucks” or “AC/DC + Wal-Mart” are suddenly front-page news.
… or even more, as this Reuters story has it:
“It’s just a remarkable moment in popular culture,” said Blender magazine editor-in-chief Joe Levy, without a trace of hyperbole. “It really is. We never thought we would get here.”
“A remarkable moment in popular culture”! This arrangement had been working well for everyone thus far. Leave it to Axl Rose to fuck it all up.
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Have you heard any of it? I listened to the six track on MySpace and it was hilariously bad. It was said that for years Rose would simply cut track fragments over and over again in the studio, and then play with them for hours on his computer. The whole enterprise has a frankestein feel, as if it’s a combo of the last fifteen years of music laid over with Rose vocals.
It’s not just bad, though: it’s a weird combo of reprehensible and pathetic. Granted, I have only heard the title cut, but that sounded totally disjointed and stylistically, like time had stood still for seventeen years. There was the stupid weedle wee solo, the thunky drums, lyrics, a string of words of one syllable that really barely made sense… All of that stuff - de rigeur for lite metal - was vile to listen to in the late 80s and early 90s, but it was in fact the aesthetic of the era. Heard now, it just sounds beyond ridiculous. That said, Axl and GNR really did have their finger on the pulse of the cultural idiocy of that last few decades, and I LOVE how the record got released in the midst of a giant recession… I feel there’s some really great piece waiting to be written about this, but the only review I read was Chuck Klosterman’s in the Onion and he took the record totally seriously. What a bone head.