The downfall of Soviet Communism took 70 years, but "Chinese Democracy" appears to be in jeopardy after just two weeks. The Guns N' Roses album that was 17 years in the making climbed only as high as No. 3 when it debuted on the national sales chart. It has tumbled to No. 18 in its second week of release.
That's a disturbing sign for the most expensive to produce album ever in rock, the cost once estimated at $13 million. But the pop world just might have reached its limit in indulging frontman Axl Rose's appetite for production, which led to delay after delay, year after year.
"Fool me once, shame on you -- fool me 20 times, and I'll be done with you," says Guitar Player magazine Associate Editor Matt Blackett on the tepid public reaction to the album so far.
"Chinese Democracy" sold 261,000 copies in the U.S. in the first week following its Nov. 23 release as an exclusive at Best Buy stores -- a respectable figure in an age of diminished record industry expectations, but it's just half of what 18-year-old singer-songwriter Taylor Swift's second album, "Fearless," sold two weeks earlier.
What's more, the reconstituted GNR tallied one-third of what another veteran hard rock band, AC/DC, sold out of the gate with "Black Ice" in October. That album, a Wal-Mart exclusive, notched a 784,000 first-week sales figure.
Only two albums have crossed the 2 million sales mark during 2008, Lil Wayne's "Tha Carter III," which had a 1-million-plus first week in June, and Coldplay's "Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends," which came out a week later and posted 721,000 copies in its first week.
As of press time, GNR's management and record company did not respond to requests for comments for this article.
The GNR album was outsold by Kanye West's "808s and Heartbreak," which logged sales of 450,000 the same week, and Swift's album, leaving it at No. 3 for its chart debut. Second-week sales plummeted 78%, to about 57,000 copies, leaving its two-week U.S. total under 320,000 copies.
"I think it may have died in the November-December holiday rush of record releases," said Rita Wilde, program director at classic-rock radio station KLOS-FM (95.5), which has given limited airplay to the new songs.
"The biggest mistake they made was the release of the first single, 'Chinese Democracy,' " Wilde said. "It just didn't have it. When you wait so long for something, you want to make sure it has it. When we played it, people went, 'Eh.' "
