Former Guns N' Roses Guitarist Slash Says Stupid Thing

"She has this amazing rock 'n' roll voice and she's sort of a closet rock 'n' roll singer. She's got a lot of balls. For a female rock singer she's one of the best women I've ever heard." That's Slash the rock 'n' roll guitarist, talking about Fergie. Yes, fucking Fergie from the Black Eyed Peas. Perhaps you've heard her singing on such hits as "I Gotta Feeling" or "My Humps" or "Help Me I'm Going To Choke To Death On My Own Vomit But Not In The Cool Way Like Hendrix Or John Bonham Just In The Way That Results From Writing A Long Sentence About Fergie From The Fucking Black Eyed Peas." (That last one is not a real song.)

Now, I like Slash. He was the lead guitarist for the great Guns N' Roses. His solos on songs like "Sweet Child of Mine" and "November Rain" achieve a certain kind of standing-on-a-mountain, ripping-the-world-open glory that defined bombastic rock perfection in the late '80s and early '90s, which was exactly when certain people from New Jersey might have been most into exactly that sort of thing. Today, Slash is promoting a new album. It is a solo album. And not being a singer himself (if Slash tried to sing, the cigarette would fall out of his mouth), he needed to get other people to sing the songs. He got some people you might expect, like Iggy Pop and Ozzy Osbourne and Chris Cornell from Soundgarden. But he also got Adam Levine from the top-40 pop group Maroon 5 and, yes, fucking Fergie with her humps and her hair and her stupid sneakers and shit. Last year, he got Fergie to sing on a really, really shitty remake of the classic Guns N' Roses song "Paradise City" that also featured the once-excellent rap trio Cyprus Hill not sounding good. The song on the new album is called "Beautiful Dangerous," and Slash has been bringing Fergie out to sing it and "Sweet Child of Mine" in concert lately. This brings us back to what Slash said about Fergie. Which is stupid and wrong on many levels.

First of all, Fergie sucks-we've already established that that is my opinion. Secondly, the phrase "for a female rock singer she's one of the best woman I've ever heard" doesn't make any sense. What other kinds of female rock singers are there besides women? (To give Slash a break, this part of the stupidity could be due to a poor job of punctuating by the Reuters reporter who transcribed the interview. If what he in fact said was, "She's got a lot of balls for a female singer. She's one of the best women I've ever heard…" Then that's different and, clearly, not as stupid. And it actually seems likely that this might be the case.) But still, worse, really, is the bullshit at the root of the statement. There are lots of great female rock singers. Lots with "a lot of balls." Lots lots better than Fergie, or for that matter, Scott Weiland, the lame male singer for Slash's lame post-Guns N' Roses band, Velvet Revolver, the ridiculously unoriginal name of which tells you pretty much all you need to know about just what kind of corporate-construct not-so-super supergroup it is.

Most famous now for being a junkie, Scott Weiland used to sing for the grunge-rock band Stone Temple Pilots, who were about the worst of the many Nirvana knock-offs that flooded the scene around the time Guns N' Roses went out of style. Stone Temple Pilots hit it big in 1992 with a creepy paean to date rape called "Sex Type Thing." Here's a bit of the lyrics, which Weiland wrote:

I am, I am, I am
I said I wanna get next to you
I said I gonna get close to you
You wouldn't want me have to hurt you too, hurt you too?

[...]

I am a man, a man
I'll give ya somethin' that ya won't forget
I said ya shouldn't have worn that dress
I said ya shouldn't have worn that dress

Etc. So, yeah. He sucks. His songs suck. And his voice is as indistinctive in its mimicry of Kurt Cobain as Fergie's voice is in its recreation of Axl's wailing on "Paradise City" and "Sweet Child of Mine." Scott Weiland, Fergie, they both suck. Here's a quick, easy-to-think-of list of ten female women rock singers whose jock straps neither one of them could hold.

1) Stevie Nicks
2) Chrissie Hynde
3) Joan Jett
4) PJ Harvey
5) Grace Slick
6) Janis Joplin
7) Sinead O'Conner
8) Ann Wilson
9) Courtney Love
10) Pat Benetar

Shit, that's not even counting Etta James and Tina Turner, who we'll put in the "R&B/blues" category just to be gracious. But Debbie Harry, Annie Lennox, Cat Power, Patti Smith… you could go on and and on. Slash needs to get out more.