Goodbye, Guns N' Roses transports the reader into a mind-altering trip through the colors, scandals, nihilism, and mythology that make Guns N' Roses so much more than another "hair metal" band. A valentine and a breakup letter to one of rock's most controversial bands. Goodbye, Guns N' Roses is a genre-rattling attempt to explain the appeal of America's most divisive rock band. While it includes uncharted history and the self-lacerating connoisseurship of a Guns N' Roses fetishist, it is not a recycled chronicle - this book is a deconstruction of myth, one that blends high and low art sketches to examine how Guns N' Roses impacted popular culture. Unlike those who have penned other treatments of what might be considered a clichéd subject, Art Tavana is not writing as a GNR patriot or former employee. His book aims to provide an untethered exploration that machetes through the jungle of propaganda camouflaging GNR's explosive appeal. After circling the band's three-decade plundering of American culture, Goodbye, Guns N' Roses uncovers a postmodern portrait that persuades its viewer to think differently about their symbolic importance. This is not a rock bio but a biography of taste that treats a former "hair metal" band like a decomposing masterpiece. This is the first Guns N' Roses book written for everyone; from the Sunset Strip to a hyper-digital generation's connection to "Woke Axl," it is a pop investigation that dodges no bullets. Goodbye, Guns N' Roses transports the reader into a mind-altering trip through the colors, scandals, nihilism, and mythology that make Guns N' Roses so much more than another "hair metal" band. Art Tavana is a writer who resides in the suburbs of California. He was previously a columnist at Playboy and LA Weekly, where he procured an L.A. Press Club award for a profile on reclusive guitarist Izzy Stradlin. In the summer of 2015, internet trolls manufactured a rumor that Axl Rose was late to a show because he refused to press pause on his VCR. The story alleges that Axl Rose was backstage before a concert in St. Petersburg, Florida, on December 28, 1991, and fixated on watching Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze (1991). Guns N' Roses was about an hour late for their performance in the Suncoast Dome that night, and while the story probably isn't true, as sources close to the band have claimed, the fact that it was so believable further illustrates Axl Rose's image crisis in 1991, which is similar to the Duvall's unjustifiably self-indulgent surfer, who sips coffee as he commits war crimes. "Charlie don't surf," he tells his terrified troops. Charlie is how American soldiers would describe the Viet Cong. Between 1991 and 1993, Axl Rose would wear a slogan T-shirt with "Charlie Don't Surf" printed on the back, with a portrait of Charles Manson on the front, who once carved a swastika over his nose and brainwashed his followers with copious amounts of LSD. Under the shadow of Vietnam and Manson, Axl Rose would become a postmodern right-wing hippie-a fascist liberal. Axl Rose was promoting Manson when he sang an anti-war song that evoked civil rights, just as Geffen P.R. was in perpetual damage control mode following "One in a Million." I cannot think of a job as emotionally draining as being a member of Geffen's P.R. team in 1991, where failure to communicate seems to have been their tagline. Axl Rose even wore the Charles Manson T-shirt in the cinematic video for "Estranged." Unlike Cradle of Faith's "Jesus is a Cunt" T-shirt, which pictured a masturbating nun, the Charles Manson T-shirt was never popular merch worn or hawked at Guns N' Roses gigs. Charles Manson, frankly, was out of vogue in the nineties, and without the internet, purchasing the Manson T-shirt was difficult

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