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Welcome to the Jungle

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"Welcome to the Jungle"
Song
This article is about the Guns N' Roses song. For the film, see The Rundown.
For the Entourage episode, see Welcome to the Jungle (Entourage episode).

"Welcome to the Jungle" is the first track from Guns N' Roses' debut album, Appetite for Destruction. It was re-released in 2004 as the first track on Guns N' Roses' Greatest Hits album. Perhaps one of the most well-known rock anthems of the 1980s, the song is still recognized and regularly played at sporting events worldwide.

Origins

"Welcome to the Jungle" was written by Axl Rose (lyrics; music) and Slash. According to Rose, the inspiration for the lyrics came from an encounter he and a friend had with a homeless man while they were hitchhiking through New York. [1] Trying to put a scare into the young runaways, the man yelled at them, "You know where you are? You're in the jungle baby, you're gonna die!". The incident made such an impact, Axl turned it into one of the most revered hard rock hits of all time. The eponymous line was also featured in the song "Underwater World" by the Finnish glam-rock band Hanoi Rocks, whom Rose has acknowledged as inspiration.

While the New York incident inspired the lyrics, the song was written in Seattle, and described Los Angeles. In a 1988 interview with Hit Parader magazine, Rose stated, "I wrote the words in Seattle. It's a big city, but at the same time it's still a small city compared to L.A. and the things that you're gonna learn. It seemed a lot more rural up there. I just wrote how it looked to me. If someone comes to town and they want to find something, they can find whatever they want." [2]

Another line, "I wanna watch you bleed" was originally written as an allusion to AC/DC's "If You Want Blood (You've Got It)", and that song's lyric "I want you to bleed for me," but Axl changed the lyrics about a week before recording because the timing of the revised lyric was better.

Video

"Welcome to the Jungle" was Guns N' Roses' first music video, directed by Nigel Dick and filmed on August 1 and 2, 1987 at the Park Plaza Hotel and 450 S. La Brea Avenue in Hollywood.

The video begins with Axl Rose stepping off a bus with a suitcase, dressed as a naive newcomer to the city, as the opening riff plays. He notices a man in a straitjacket (Rose, in another role) on television screens in a store window and he stops to look. The video then delves into deeper depictions of things such as shock therapy, military abuse and other poisons of the big city, showing the metropolis as the true jungle. At the end of the video, Rose is still standing in front of the television screens, but now has the attitude and attire of a rocker.

Other members of the band appear in various roles in the clip: Izzy Stradlin' portrays a drug dealer who approaches Rose when he steps off the bus (ironically enough, in the Use Your Illusion II song 14 Years Stradlin says "I've been the dealer/Hangin' on your street"). In the beginning of the video, Slash can be seen sitting on the ground in front of the TV store window, drinking from a paper bag. He has vanished at the end of the clip.

"Welcome to the Jungle" was not immediately successful. Initially, MTV refused to play the video. They only agreed to air the clip in the middle of the night as a special personal favor to David Geffen, the head of Guns N' Roses' record label; and then, only after they had censored parts of it, including some of the news footage and part of the sequence with drummer Steven Adler and his girlfriend in bed.

In spite of the early morning airtime, the clip caught viewers' attention and quickly became MTV's most requested video. The video and single received another boost of publicity when "Welcome to the Jungle" was featured in The Dead Pool in the summer of 1988.

"Welcome to the Jungle" and Noriega

The song was famously used during the Operation Just Cause invasion of Panama in 1989. When Manuel Noriega fled to the Vatican Embassy in Panama, U.S. troops surrounded the embassy and played loud music. Noriega enjoyed opera and detested rock music in general. The Washington Post News Service reported, "With U.S. troops at the Vatican embassy continuing to wage psychological warfare against Noriega by blaring rock music over loudspeakers and greeting him with a hearty 'Gooood Morning Panama'." And so, to irritate and intimidate him (and to enjoy themselves in the process), the troops set up their loudspeakers and blasted the Vatican embassy with some "good ol' kickass American rock 'n' roll" -- Guns N' Roses' "Welcome to the Jungle" was the first song to come roaring through the speakers. These were eventually stopped upon request by the Vatican. A few days later, Noriega surrendered due to international pressure. However, despite the popular conception that the music was a form of psychological torture aimed at Noriega, it has since been revealed that the entire operation was merely meant to prevent press organizations equipped with parabolic microphones from listening in on delicate negotiations occurring within the embassy. Reference.

Use in film and other media

  • "Welcome to the Jungle" has been featured in several motion pictures. In Clint Eastwood's 1988 film The Dead Pool, it was the song sung by Jim Carrey's rock star character; it was also featured on the movie's soundtrack. It has also appeared in Lean on Me and in Selena during the scene in which a barber is cutting a person's hair and several people are trashing a hotel room.
  • In the 2004 PlayStation 2 (2005 PC and Xbox) video game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, the song is included on the playlist of alternative-metal station Radio X. Ironically, Axl Rose voices the DJ of its rival station K-DST, which plays classic rock, where he routinely bashes Radio X as "whining teenagers who should just go away." "Jungle" also was used in commercials for the game.
  • In Celebrity Deathmatch, Axl and Slash's comments while fighting is taken from the lyrics of "Jungle".
  • The song serves as the opening for the syndicated sports program The Jim Rome Show and can also be heard at the bottom of each hour of the show.
  • In the video game Disgaea 2: Cursed Memories, the character Axel makes a reference to the song where he states, "Welcome to the Colosseuem; we've got fun and games!"

Accolades

The song is considered to be one of the greatest hard rock hits of all time. It was ranked #2 on VH1's 40 Greatest Metal Songs.[1] In addition, "Welcome to the Jungle" ranked #467 on Rolling Stones' "The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time". Also, it was #764 on Q Magazine's 1001 Best Songs Ever [3] and #26 on VH1's 100 Greatest 80s Songs Most recently, the song was named the "greatest song about Los Angeles" by a poll in Blender magazine. [4]


Notes

  1. ^ "VH1 40 Greatest Metal Songs", 1 May-4 May 2006, VH1 Channel, reported by VH1.com; last accessed October 20, 2006.

References

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