A View Of Chinese Democracy, Part 1

I figured that it would make more sense for me to divide this into two sections-one where I give the backstory behind what I'll post the next afternoon and how I know the guy who got the downloads, and then the second part would be the songs themselves.

This is a link to an epically long post which talks about how the individual known as Mister Saint Laurent. In case you don't know, he is someone who I used to associate with (I also used to associate with his friends) until various things happened and I decided to stop hanging out with those friends, then MSL bashed the girlfriend of someone I know quite well, so that was it when it came to being pals with him-since then I've feuded with him and it's been ugly. But anyway…

If you do not want to read the epic post, I'll sum it up. MSL *lied* and *tricked* someone by offering up a few thousand dollars to him in exchange for some songs previously unreleased online from the Guns N' Roses album "Chinese Democracy", which I think will come out the day the Cubs win the World Series. I won't get into the history of what has been and hasn't been online previously, or even what's supposed to be on the album; that's mainly because I don't know a lot about it myself except from hearsay.

The story… oh yeah, the story is that he lied by offering up money to people to leak songs from the album that had not been bootlegged online before. The fours songs he got were the title track from the album, "The Blues", "There Was A Time" (some people are referring to the tune as "TWAT"; hey, why not? That may have been Axl's intentions anyhow) and a new version of "I.R.S." Indeed none of them had been bootlegged before. Obviously, those that gave the tracks to him believed he was honest when he stated he was going to give them money (or in the case of one guy, a guitar) in return. He made it clear in the diatribe that he had no intention of paying the moolah (and it's not like he couldn't afford to give someone thousands of dollars, based off of the wealth he brags about), so I can't help but feel some schadenfreude when, after giving the first three songs he got to some friends, the songs somehow got out and were leaked to a messageboard, where it spread like wildfire, garnering a lot of attention-so much so that MSL was interviewed on an Irish radio station about the whole matter. Wow.

While you may have to give admiration for getting the songs made public by such a scheme that in most cases you'd think would never have had any chance of actually succeeding, but again, the way that it was done, where he scammed some people into doing so, leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Yet, some people praised how he was an asshole and scammed those innocent people… ok, they're not really "innocent" for illegally having those songs, but they didn't deserve that kind of treatment… Yeah, he claims to be manic-depressive (although who knows what you can believe from him) but that won't get any sympathy from me. The fact that he said in a post that he wanted to know so badly how I would react just makes me laugh. If you think that I care what he and any other hater out there thinks, you got another thing coming… ok, so I'm quoting another hard rock band; an appropriate quote from Axl doesn't come to mind right now.

I'll be back on Wednesday with all the songs, but for now you can look at an interesting link which offers up MP3 downloads of a few songs of the new GNR, mainly live tracks.