elevendayempire wrote:

It's interesting to think that you could stick the 90s demo versions of IRS and TWAT together with Prostitute and This I Love, bulk it out with the better tracks from It's Five O'Clock Somewhere and you'd basically have the 96 GNR album...

And it's not even a stretch.

Snakepit is essentially a collection of Slash's GNR songs. Strip the orchestral arrangements from Prostitute and you'll get a very bare-bones ballad in the four-minute margin, albeit with an aggressive rhythm section.

In that sense, the 96 album would've been a definite step down from the produced-to-death UYI's. However, almost anything would've been viewed that way at the time. A more heartfelt, mature version of AFD in some ways. Had the band stuck together, it would've no doubt been viewed as a stop-gap release.

Pearl Jam was falling with No Code, while Marilyn Manson's Antichrist Superstar and Korn's Life is Peachy would lay the groundwork for the rest of the decade as far as nu-metal would be viewed - and there's a door I doubt GNR would've ever dared to open. GNR, if coming out with an album in '97, might've found some audiences from the alternative scene, the Radiohead/Faith No More crowds. Most of their former peers had sufficed to release collections, so it was generally going to be an uphill battle no matter what.

The ways the recording process in '96 has been described by Slash, Ax and others, Ax's leaning towards alternative metal seems to fit the bell. He did want to change the direction of the band; his seemingly obvious choice would've therefore been to introduce the bluesy hard rock sound of GNR into alternative; the hardest, loudest straight-up guitar album they could've made. That would've carved GNR a whole new niche in the genre and they might've survived in some form, even though world domination would've hopelessly fallen beyond the reach.

Some people would've obviously picked the band on deserting their roots and going with the flow, others would've noted how they'd be trying so hard to metamorphose into something new that it's not enjoyable anymore. Of course, some would've liked it, but I doubt that in the long run it would've been considered much more than one of those albums established acts push out every now and then.

Basically, it would've been about justifying their existence during the interim.