Guns N’ Roses Brings Epic, Life-Affirming Show to Hard Rock

You’re in the jungle, baby. You’re gonna…thrive?

Seriously, though, there is something enlivening and life-affirming, healing and inspiring, about a Guns N’ Roses concert in the year of our lord two-thousand-and-twenty-six: Once upon a time, the group — which raised the ’80s Sunset Strip glam-infused hard rock scene to apotheosis and essentially drove the money-changing poseurs out of the rock n’ roll temple — may have lived up to its designation as “The Most Dangerous Band in the World.” In the decade since the iconic trio of vocalist Axl Rose, lead guitarist Slash, and bassist Duff McKagen set aside twenty-three years of acrimony and recrimination to launch the 2016 Not in This Lifetime…Tour, however, the band serves as something of a traveling revival, showing sellout crowd after sellout crowd who arrive to hear “Mr. Brownstone” and “Paradise City” but instead are given a subtextual sermon on the dividends real forgiveness, ego-death, and comity can pay. 

As Rose sang Thursday night during the quote-unquote “official kickoff concert for the 2026 Formula 1 Crypto.com Miami Grand Prix” at Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Hollywood on “Estranged,” the final single off 1991’s sprawling and initial implosion-priming 1991 album “Use Your Illusion II”:

When you’re talkin’ to yourself
And nobody’s home
You can fool yourself
You came in this world alone

This isn’t to say the work any of the classic lineup players did…well, not alone, but separately lacked value. (Sorry, but the 2008 Axl-helmed Guns N’ Roses epic Chinese Democracy and the 2004 Scott-Weiland-plus-reconstituted-Gunners Velvet Revolver debut Contraband are fucking great.) Yet the power of the re-drawing of the three under the Guns banner is undeniable. First of all, the well of legacy, influence, and visibility the band draws from is almost impossibly deep: Not only is 1987’s Appetite for Destruction the best-selling debut album in U.S. history, but only a few months ago the album simultaneously returned to the Billboard 200, Top Hard Rock, and Top Rock and Alternative charts…nearly forty years after its release. In an atomized and distracted culture, Guns N’ Roses still has our attention. 

And then there is the remarkable live show which, though surely lucrative on an almost inconceivable level, is anything but a cash grab. 

Let’s start first with Exhibit A, the setlist. A Guns N’ Roses cynically chasing filthy lucre would show up, play the hits with one or two curveballs and a cover, and be back on the bus in an hour and ten. No one is showing up to play a wild, unpredictable almost three-hour set of twenty-seven songs that pays respect to both their work together (virtually all the MTV-era hits; deeper cuts like Use Your Illusion Is “Coma”; the December 2025 single “Atlas”) and apart (Chinese Democracy stemwinders “Better” and “This I Love”; Velvet Revolver’s “Slither”) as well as several scorching covers ranging from Wings’ “Live and Let Die,” Dylan’s “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” and Glen Campbell’s “Wichita Lineman” to The Misfits’ “Attitude” (which appeared on Guns’ 1993 covers album The Spaghetti Incident? and a left field tribute to Ozzy Osbourne via Black Sabbath’s “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath,” complete with the deep, grinding staccato crunch of the closing stanzas and Axl believably roaring “You bastards!” 

As for Exhibit B, I simply point you to the easy rapport and camaraderie the current lineup has on stage, intermingling between each other with the casual, easy swagger of old pros with little if anything to prove. Axl seems — dare we say — not just content but truly happy. Jovial, even. His voice does bear the marks of years of hard riding in service of an unmatched rasp n’ howl, but he still sounds great and in no way resembles the diminishment some asshole clickbait dishonest clip harvesters present. Age is real (Rose is 64) but so is this man’s very-much-living legend. The stage no longer seems for him like a battleground upon which he is fighting an all-out war with the world or his demons. The vibe is more like a platform from which Rose shares with the world his incredible musical gifts as well as the tools and anthems to bolster the crowd in their own battles. 

If W. Axl Rose can find and share peace, what in the ever-living hell is our excuse?

Guns N’ Roses returns to the Hard Rock on Tuesday, May 5.