Whether you’re straight-edge or not, there’s no denying that drugs have contributed to some of the greatest art ever made. From hallucinatory sequences in movies, spiralling developments in the world of modern art, to some, if not most of, the best rock songs ever made, illicit substances have played a part. But in the world of Guns N’ Roses, they also contributed to some of their worst tracks.
A disclaimer: While drugs have undeniably played a role in the development of art, opening up the mind to move things along, like taking The Beatles from clean-cut kids to experimental icons, or even simply keeping icons of rock afloat, there’s an obvious issue. Drugs have also led to the loss of so much talent, torn from the world too early due to overdosing or completely and utterly burning out. Too much mind-opening can be lethal, leading to incredible creatives having to fully abandon their post and retreat to recover. Some never do. So while drugs have contributed to some good stuff in music, they’ve also typically been the leading cause of tragedy.
This Guns N’ Roses story is luckily not one of tragedy, but more of stupidity with a side order of annoyance. At this point, right at the start of the 1990s, the band had been going since 1985 and become the new poster children for the sex, drugs and rock and roll image in a new decade. As hair metal and heavier sounds took over from rock and roll, they’d raced into the lead. But by the ‘90s, things were a bit different.
As usually happens, the fun and casual drug use by some had spiralled. In early 1990, they fired their drummer, Steven Adler, for breaking his contract, which required him to be clean, keen to ensure that drugs didn’t curtail the music. Adler was starting to get in too deep as his cocaine and heroin usage spiralled into addiction and began impacting his playing.
But the rules about drugs weren’t the same for everyone. While it led to Adler getting the axe, Axl Rose was playing a different game. He’d had his own history with addiction, having once overdosed during a period of being hooked on painkillers, but by the ‘90s, he’d become a hippie about it all. Instead, he was busy testing out homoeopathic medicine and regressing into his past lives to understand himself better, which basically meant doing a lot of mushrooms.
One night, while the band were making Use Your Illusion II, he was doing just that with a bunch of musicians. In the haze of the drug, they started jamming, then frantically working, and by morning, they not only had a song, but they’d recorded it and convinced the label to put it on the album as a last-minute addition. Did he tell the band? No. Were they happy when they found out? Absolutely not.
‘My World’ was a late addition, and it’s a strange one. This was supposed to be a political album that would stray further away from the rock and roll stereotype into something more mature and nuanced. So Rose’s drug-fueled track, singing “Let’s do it, Let’s do it” on repeat, never quite fit.
But also, take one second to listen to the track. You don’t need to force yourself to go any deeper than the six-second mark, if you can’t hack it, but you’ll instantly understand. “I didn’t even know it was on it until it came out,” the band’s guitarist Izzy Stradlin told Rolling Stone in 1992, “I gave it a listen and thought, ‘What the fuck is this?’”
What we have here is Axl Rose not only high, but high and attempting to rap over a beat that is more like hip-hop meets heavy metal than anything the band were known for, or anything the rest of the band wanted to do. While the mushrooms had sent Rose down this pivot, the rest of the band were still a rock unit. Hence, they weren’t so pleased when their singer had turned a corner without telling them and tacked it onto the end of the album. As if a sign of things to come, this track is perhaps part of the reason why Stradlin quit the band in 1991, growing tired of Rose’s curveballs.
Despite the bumps it caused though, this clearly wasn’t a road Rose wanted to commit to outside of the shrooms stupor, as by 1993, with The Spaghetti Incident?, things were back to normal.
