merch, and spent the majority of his time with a Brazilian family (who he appears to genuinely love, but are also, we must note, his employees). So how does Rose actually feel about the song? The contrast between his words (and those of Slash) and his actions certainly send mixed messages. Superficially, at least, he always seemed like an unlikely bigot: he hung out with Ice-T and The Pet Shop boys, declared Elton John and Freddie Mercury his favorite singers, wore Public Enemy and N.W.A.
Rose never made good on the promise to delete the track from newly-pressed physical copies of the album, and it’s readily available on streaming services like Spotify to boot. If they hate blacks, and they hear my lines and hate blacks even more, I’m sorry, but that’s not how I meant it.” Rose took this blame-shifting stance further when speaking to Rolling Stone in 2000, at which point he vowed that beginning in February of 2001, all future pressings of Lies would omit the track, not because he felt remorse for having written it in the first place, but because the lyrics were “too easily misinterpreted.”īut that was bullshit, too. “However that song makes feel,” the singer later added, “they think that must be what the song means. It inspires thoughts and reactions that cause people to have to deal with their own feelings on racism, prejudice and sexuality.” “My opinion is, the majority of the public can’t be trusted with that song. Unfortunately, Rose never actually offered a stronger condemnation of the song, instead opting to blame his own fans for misconstruing its message. “This song is very simple and extremely generic or generalized, my apologies to those who may take offense.”Įven Rose admitted that’s a weak-ass redress in a 1992 interview with RIP, where he confessed that “Going back and reading it, it wasn’t the best apology, but at the time, it was the best apology I could make.” After rhetorically asking the reader if they’ve ever “been made to feel like you don’t belong here by an individual who can barely speak English” or “attacked by a homosexual,” the text concludes: There is, in the most technical sense of the word, an “apology” for the song on the cover, but it’s very brief and tucked away amongst a whole lot of other text, some of which is every bit as hateful as the lyrics themselves. It was a tough little period.”Īnd so Lies arrived with an apology for the song on its very cover…
I was hugely embarrassed that it was on something that my name was on. But the more issues we had, the more adamant he was about putting the song on there. I knew where he was coming from, once he explained it, but that didn’t validate it to make it worthy of putting on a record.
That was a brash, ignorant kind of statement Axl made. To hear it from Slash, the band’s biracial lead guitarist, the fact that “One in a Million” ended up on Lies at all was due mostly to Rose being a petulant, contrarian brat (which is not hard to believe). When asked about the song in 2016, Slash had this to say: Unsurprisingly, “One in a Million” was always controversial, likely by design (in 1992, Rose told Rolling Stone, “I used words like police and n***rs because you’re not allowed to use the word n***r.”).