Hmmmm, I wrote CD off because I thought Better was officially released already and was literally creating no stir. I'll remain slightly optimistic yet, then.

So, basically just more bullshit?

I'm with you dude, I think there were NO blind-buys like everyone expected. Obviously fucking not at 300k!

Nah, it's a true statement. Mainstream or underground, people have to know what's coming out to buy it. You can't not promote something and expect everyone to learn about it and buy it, especially those who don't breathe GNR. Promotion isn't about quality, it's about mashing it into the head of the common idiot.

Really, GNR was as popular as you can get and now we're calling the mainstream assholes because they don't know enough about the album to care that it's come out? You're forgetting the teens of today were barely born when UYI dropped! To them, GNR is just another band. The guys who made Welcome to the Jungle and Sweet Child O'Mine. Estranged, who? Coma... huh? If you're gonna break into the world of the bigwigs (which had to have been Axl's goal all along, but to do it his way), you can't just sit around and hope shit happens.

Who is holding Axl back? Is it Beta and Fernando telling him internet rumors? Del James? Who in his camp has all this control? I know Slash said he surrounded himself with people who were milking him, but Slash also drunkenly signed his life away to Jerry Heller, so can you really trust him?

At this point, the album is out and it doesn't matter who is gone. Axl doesn't have the 17 year shitty history lesson to worry about. The future is his now. There's no bullshit to worry about now. He can get a band together and in a year after put out a CD like normal people. If he chooses not to do this, then he proves that once again he's his own biggest enemy and all the insults hurdled his way didn't really slow him down. Perhaps it gave him an excuse in his own mind that it slowed him down, but not realistically.

He's pissed over something, but adding shit to these same songs was never going to make them better. It's obvious he was part of the overproduction (which is fine, it doesn't ruin anything) and adding a little of this or a snippet of that isn't going to change these songs. We've heard 100 versions of each already and it didn't really matter which he picked.

The monkey is off the back and half of the detractors will now shut up or no longer care about GNR, so how he goes about the next steps are all on him. I hope he can pull it off.