A: TRANSMISSION FROM INSIDE THE BUNKER (partially corrected)

[20 seconds of static]
AXL:...why it wasn't any fucking good? You know why? You know why? It wasn't any fucking good because it was boring, it was boring, it was the most boring fucken record in the history...[35 seconds of static]

1.    Deep in his underground bunker, Axl Rose is listening to the local reggae show on low-power radio. Tears run from his eyes like jewels down the emerald Buddha's cheeks at Wat Phra Kaeo. A strangled low keening sound escapes his throat from time to time as he rocks back and forth in half-lotus. He does not know the names of the songs. They change over so much from week to week. Much of the time he can't understand what the singers are saying. But they sing so beautifully, so evenly. And the echo on the electric keyboards: each studio might have its own echo imprint, Axl imagines. You might be able to tell the producer just from a particular reverb sound. He gets lost in this reverie, allowing his mind to wander this way and that. On a stone pedestal under a bell glass across the room, bound with wire, Eminem is running out of oxygen. No one can hear his cries. The sounds of reggae issue tinnily from the small radio in Axl Rose's hand.

Worry too much about realness and you'll get called a hillbilly. Rightly, too, probably: artifice isn't simple, nor without its considerable rewards; Beethoven isn't particularly real, but he's a raging bonfire of passion and pain and raw intellect. Still, when something reaches through the speakers practically screaming at you: "A human being made me! He is speaking to you now! He's in pain!" there is something primal about it. A lot of the popular post-emo folkie stuff that's big right now & still getting bigger tries to pull off the I'm-talking-to-you switcheroo on pretty much every song. That is why, for me, most of that stuff fails: it's banking on its pain all day. If you've managed to talk about your pain through several albums' worth of material with hardly a cracked smile to show for it, then you should feel better by now.

Wearing sunglasses indoors as is his wont, Axl Rose reclines in a hammock suspended from the ceiling and muses over his favorite question: If you were stranded on a desert island and could only have ten albums with you, what ten albums would they be? In his loneliness, in his isolation, in the near-total silence which has become his mien, this question gives him comfort. There is something so simple, so elegant about it. It appeals to him as a fine oaken table might, or a Tiffany lamp. What ten albums. If he muses on just those three words long enough they begin to sound foreign to him, a phrase in a language he doesn't speak. What ten. What ten.