Guns N' Roses - Style and Influence

Style and Influence

Guns N' Roses signed with a major label within eight months of their inception and topped national sales charts weeks after garnering late hours airplay on MTV. Appetite for Destruction is the highest-selling debut album of all time in the United States. Their peers in the music industry often spoke highly of the band. Joe Perry said that they were the first band to remind him of Led Zeppelin. Ozzy Osbourne called Guns N' Roses "the next Rolling Stones." The music of Guns N' Roses is a fusion of punk rock, blues-rock, heavy metal and glam rock. In the 1990s, the band integrated keyed instruments (played by either Rose or Reed, and accompanied on tour by Teddy Andreadis) into the band, and for roughly half of the Use Your Illusion tour, added a horn section to the stage. While Reed has remained on some of the Chinese Democracy demos, tours since 2000 have not included wind instruments, though the band has employed synthesized horns on some of their new songs.

A heavy influence on both the image and sound of the band was Finnish band Hanoi Rocks (singer Michael Monroe and Rose have collaborated on various occasions). Rose has stated that the band was massively inspired by groups like Queen, AC/DC, The Rolling Stones, and Rose Tattoo and that the sound of Appetite for Destruction was influenced by AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, Cheap Trick, Aerosmith, Van Halen, the New York Dolls, and Hanoi Rocks. Guns N' Roses has influenced many modern rock bands such as Avenged Sevenfold, Mother Love Bone (which would eventually become Pearl Jam), Buckcherry, Dir En Grey, X Japan, Hinder, The Darkness, Limp Bizkit and Manic Street Preachers, among others.

In 2002, Q magazine named Guns N' Roses in their list of the "50 Bands to See Before You Die". The television network VH1 ranked Guns N' Roses ninth in its "100 Greatest Artists of Hard Rock" special, and also ranked 11th on "Top 50 bands". Appetite for Destruction appeared in Rolling Stone magazine's special issue "The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time". In 2004, Rolling Stone ranked Guns N' Roses No. 92 on their list of the "100 Greatest Artists of All Time". "Welcome to the Jungle" had also been voted "Best Hard Rock Song" out of 100 others by VH1. Guns N' Roses were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in April 14, 2012, along with Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Faces/The Small Faces and the Beastie Boys, although Axl Rose refused to attend the event.