Believe it or not, years ago I didn't have a big issue with the name thing either. I looked at it like my favorite TV show. A recasting, reinvention for Season 4 or some shit. As long as the songs were good, that would be awesome.

As time as worn out and Axl has done nothing musically (even CD was a forced leaks album; "he was about to release the album" -- yeah right, it was supposed to come out in 2001), the more and more i've seen new Guns N' Roses as, "The Simpsons after Season 9", or "The X-Files after Fight The Future", or "Stargate: SG-1 after the move to Sci-Fi Channel".

Good, but a shadow of it's former self.

And ID is nuts if he thinks people don't slag on Axl for the name outside these boards. You bring up Guns N' Roses in reference to ANYTHING post-1993, and you're laughed at hysterically and made fun of almost anywhere (at least in my experience). I listened to DJ after DJ after DJ on the radio basically used the "Chinese Democracy" debut single as a platform to tell the world how much they think the song sucks and how much they think Axl and fake GN'R are a sham, and WHY they WON'T play the song.

Yeah, i'm not exaggerating.

Axl is not seen as a living joke. What is perceived that HE DID, is a living joke. And at this point, perception is reality, and reality has been written as history.

Do I care?

I couldn't give a flying fuck -- IF! -- he released new music. He could release new music on a small label like Frontiers Records with Baz and Whitesnake or whoever the fuck, and I wouldn't care... but the lack of material just makes him seem like a dying hack, and the BAND NAME is the BIGGEST CULPRIT of it.

Drop the name if future material is OFF the table. It's the RIGHT thing to do. Be a man of honor. It's not YOUR band. Not unless you convice the world that the current band IS Guns N' Roses, and have just as much of a right to that title, as the legends who created it.

Pretty simple really