Criticism
The band has also received criticism throughout the years. The flagrant alcohol and drug abuse by some members of the group, and Axl's fondness for Charles Manson T-shirts, were used by the media to portray Guns N' Roses as a poor example and negative influence on their young fans. Lyrical content of songs such as "One in a Million" stirred controversy. The long periods of time that the band took to release albums were also a source of criticism: the band's second album, G N' R Lies, was actually an EP packaged with another older EP, and one of the songs was an acoustic version of a song from their debut album. It took four years for the band to release a proper follow-up to Appetite for Destruction, and it took Rose another 15 years after The Spaghetti Incident to release Chinese Democracy. Their controversial late appearances and "war" with Reading and Leeds festival have been criticized by artists and their peers in the industry. In October 2009, Ulrich Schnauss's record labels Independiente and Domino sued Guns N' Roses, alleging that the band had committed copyright infringement by using portions of Schnauss's compositions in the track "Riad N' the Bedouins" on the album Chinese Democracy.
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Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art—and, by analogy, our own experience—more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I.- men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep- hole and missing laundry list school.... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
“However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)