![]() ![]() " at which point we realised we could do nothing but this). (And with much thanks to reader Iain Mathieson, who sent an email with the tempting claim "I don't think you can get much more pompous than. Dr Pepper have promised a free drink to every single person in the USA if it actually gets released this year I will match that with a can of Irn Bru for everyone in this office) those times will come again. Perhaps when new album Chinese Democracy finally surfaces (it's been 15 years in the making so far. ![]() But then, they don't really make rock ballads any more. They just don't make 'em like this any more. We all burst into spontaneous applause.Īlthough the video - still, apparently, the 13th most expensive ever made, and head and shoulders above most offerings in terms of cinematography - is ostensibly based on a short story by Del James called Without You, it is really just a retelling of that age-old tale: boy meets girl boy marries girl reception gets rained on girl gets shot in the face.īut my GOD it's bombastic. Axl has a bit of a cry, the song performance in the theatre, that we haven't mentioned much because it is comparatively dull, ends and then the video does too. In the ninth minute, in a triumph of symbolism, the bride throws her bouquet in bright sunlight, and as it passes through the air, the white roses turn pink, then red, then land on her grave in the dark and the rain. The action moves to the graveside, this time without Axl (apparently due to the fact that he didn't show up for the video shoot that day, rather than any plot-driven reason) but we see him later on. So we've all got work to do.Oh, no, that's Axl Rose. Of course, lest we confuse any of these metrics with actual staying power, here's one more statistic for you: As of this writing, Guns N' Roses' classic video for "November Rain" is roughly 286 million views behind " Axel F" by Crazy Frog. The titles bubbling just under a billion - songs by Shakira, J Balvin, Mike Posner, One Direction, ZAYN and Coldplay, among others - are all far more recent, while other dominant '90s videos (Nirvana's " Smells Like Teen Spirit," The Cranberries' " Zombie," et al) at least so far sit in the 750 million range. We thought memes traveled quickly in those days, but we had no idea.Īt least for now, the reign of "November Rain" feels pretty safe. Just think about how much YouTube's reach and user base has expanded since 2007: The first iPhone didn't launch until that year, vastly fewer people had broadband access worldwide and music license-holders first viewed YouTube primarily as a den of piracy to be policed (encapsulated, perhaps, in long-running, recently settled "Dancing Baby" case, which saw Universal Music Group suing a mom for uploading a video of her baby dancing while a Prince song played in the background). Of course, if the practice of rickrolling had been born this morning instead of more than a decade ago, "Never Gonna Give You Up" might sail past "November Rain" by Christmas. Other versions pepper the site, adding a few hundred thousand views here and there. The original prank video, titled " RickRoll'd," was posted in 2007 then removed because it was a terms-of-use violation, then later re-added, now has 77 million views. That prank led many, many people to a rip of Astley's video on YouTube, but that wasn't the authorized video, which didn't hit the site until 2009 and now has 456 million views. Take the case of "Never Gonna Give You Up," the 1987 Rick Astley chart-topper that spawned the Internet phenomenon known as "rickrolling," the practice of hyperlinking to what promises to be sought-after content but which turns out to be the "Never Gonna Give You Up" video. November Rain not only provided the Guns N’ Roses’ albums with a centrepiece, but it also became a massive hit when released as a single, reaching No 3 on the US Billboard Hot 100 and No 4 in. What YouTube metrics for older songs don't always provide, then, is an airtight sense of how often videos have actually been viewed in the Internet era. The official music video for November Rain resynced with the new 2022 orchestral audio. ![]()
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