Culture

Axl Rose hates Trump as much as you do

The notoriously prickly Guns ‘n’ Roses frontman has morphed into a member of the #resistance.

Culture

Axl Rose hates Trump as much as you do

The notoriously prickly Guns ‘n’ Roses frontman has morphed into a member of the #resistance.
Culture

Axl Rose hates Trump as much as you do

The notoriously prickly Guns ‘n’ Roses frontman has morphed into a member of the #resistance.

Axl Rose, the Guns ‘n’ Roses singer who occasionally screams at audiences to “feel my serpentine,” thinks Ivanka Trump’s position in the White House is inappropriate. In fact, Rose thinks the White House as a whole is disgraceful. According to Rose, “Good people don’t listen to, acknowledge, nominate or elect people like Senator Jeff Sessions..” And when it comes to Representative Devin Nunes, Rose has this to offer: “Fuck Nunes.”

One of the few joys of Twitter is how it reveals sides of public figures rarely seen before, but the left-leaning political outspokenness is a relatively new look for Rose. For years, Rose’s politics were associated with “One in a Million”, a terrible song about how immigrants, “faggots,” and “niggers” annoy him. (In an infamous 1992 Rolling Stone interview, Rose defended his choice of words while lamenting that no one acknowledged an apology that he said appeared “on the cover of every record.”)

But anyone who has taken a peek at his Twitter account lately will notice a seemingly changed, or at least slightly more progressive, man. Though Rose has had a Twitter account since 2009, his tweeting frequency has increased as of late. Between shoutouts to his fans and tweets made up mostly of emojis, he sprinkles jabs at the Trump administration and commentary on its ongoing controversies. Rose is by no means prolific on Twitter, but when he does hit that “tweet” button it’s often to speak out against the D.C. officials in the news.

When did Rose have this change of heart? He's a notoriously private individual, and doesn’t give many interviews. But in the years since “One in a Million,” Rose has been inching toward the right side of history. In a 2010 interview, Rose expressed excitement at playing to a multi-cultural crowd in Abu Dhabi saying, “The Guns catalogue has stood the test of time… It crosses genres, it crosses religious lines, you know. It's music that people can relate to. That there is such a diverse crowd out there it makes it a lot of fun.” In a 2012 interview on Jimmy Kimmel Live, Rose revealed that while he wouldn’t be voting in the election, as his home state California is a blue one, politically he “leans Obama.”.

Four years later, when Rose learned of a waitress who was the target of racist bullying, he called her and invited her to attend an AC/DC concert where he would be performing. And now, Rose is free to say exactly what he thinks without requiring a middleman — a boon for a press shy artist. Nobody needs to ask him how he voted — his opinions are clear, for everyone to see.