Last week, Guns N' Roses announced plans to give their Appetite for Destruction LP the reissue treatment, dressing up their debut album with all manner of extras and bonus tracks. Additional tracks featured in the package include the band's 1988 EP G N' R Lies, which has undergone an omission.
As Alternative Nation points out, the band's "One in a Million," which finds Axl Rose using racist and homophobic terms, in addition to expressing anti-immigrant sentiments, has been left off of the tracklisting in the reissue.
One lyric in the song finds Rose singing, "Immigrants and f*****s / They make no sense to me / They come to our country / And think they'll do as they please."
The cover of Lies, mocked up to look like a newspaper page, features a small disclaimer in which Rose wrote, "This song is very simple and extremely generic or generalized, my apologies to those who may take offense."
After the song was condemned upon release, Rose initially defended his lyrics in a 1989 interview with Rolling Stone, telling the magazine, "Why can black people go up to each other and say, 'N****r,' but when a white guy does it all of a sudden it's a big put-down. I don't like boundaries of any kind. I don't like being told what I can and what I can't say. I used the word 'n****r' because it's a word to describe somebody that is basically a pain in your life, a problem. The word 'n****r' doesn't necessarily mean black."
Rose last made comments about the song in 1992, telling Rolling Stone that he "was pissed off about some black people that were trying to rob me. I wanted to insult those particular black people," while telling another interviewer that the song "was a way for me to express my anger at how vulnerable I felt in certain situations that had gone down in my life."
Of course, this is hardly the only controversy surrounding this era of G N' R, as even the originally planned album cover for Appetite for Destruction was eventually changed due to it portraying a graphic image of a woman who had seemingly been raped by a robot. This controversial image was included on the inner sleeve of the album instead.
Along with the box set's announcement, G N' R shared a properly remastered version of "Shadow of Your Love." The expanded "Locked N' Loaded" edition of Appetite for Destruction will arrive June 29 via Universal Music Group. You can get the details of the sprawling set over here and order it here.
The remastered version of Appetite for Destruction is also available on standard CD, deluxe CD, Super Deluxe Edition CD and Audiophile Edition vinyl via MusicVaultz.
As Alternative Nation points out, the band's "One in a Million," which finds Axl Rose using racist and homophobic terms, in addition to expressing anti-immigrant sentiments, has been left off of the tracklisting in the reissue.
One lyric in the song finds Rose singing, "Immigrants and f*****s / They make no sense to me / They come to our country / And think they'll do as they please."
The cover of Lies, mocked up to look like a newspaper page, features a small disclaimer in which Rose wrote, "This song is very simple and extremely generic or generalized, my apologies to those who may take offense."
After the song was condemned upon release, Rose initially defended his lyrics in a 1989 interview with Rolling Stone, telling the magazine, "Why can black people go up to each other and say, 'N****r,' but when a white guy does it all of a sudden it's a big put-down. I don't like boundaries of any kind. I don't like being told what I can and what I can't say. I used the word 'n****r' because it's a word to describe somebody that is basically a pain in your life, a problem. The word 'n****r' doesn't necessarily mean black."
Rose last made comments about the song in 1992, telling Rolling Stone that he "was pissed off about some black people that were trying to rob me. I wanted to insult those particular black people," while telling another interviewer that the song "was a way for me to express my anger at how vulnerable I felt in certain situations that had gone down in my life."
Of course, this is hardly the only controversy surrounding this era of G N' R, as even the originally planned album cover for Appetite for Destruction was eventually changed due to it portraying a graphic image of a woman who had seemingly been raped by a robot. This controversial image was included on the inner sleeve of the album instead.
Along with the box set's announcement, G N' R shared a properly remastered version of "Shadow of Your Love." The expanded "Locked N' Loaded" edition of Appetite for Destruction will arrive June 29 via Universal Music Group. You can get the details of the sprawling set over here and order it here.
The remastered version of Appetite for Destruction is also available on standard CD, deluxe CD, Super Deluxe Edition CD and Audiophile Edition vinyl via MusicVaultz.
