I guess this is what you do when your highly anticipated album stiffs. In a recently published new interview, Axl Rose said of his former guitar mate Slash, "In a nutshell, personally I consider him a cancer and better removed, avoided — and the less anyone heard of him or his supporters the better."

Guns N' Roses' Chinese Democracy, released late last year, underperformed commercially, especially considering the years of hype it generated while in development, and the barrage of pub it enjoyed directly after its release.

Pretty transparent: Axl's trying to get himself in the new again. Congrats, dude, you succeeded. But it's doubtul that anyone's gonna run out and buy Chinese Democracy as a a result.

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This article appears in Feb 25 – Mar 3, 2009.

Eric Snider is the dean of Bay area music critics. He started in the early 1980s as one of the founding members of Music magazine, a free bi-monthly. He was the pop music critic for the then-St. Petersburg...