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100 Greatest Singers of All Time

64

Axl Rose


Busacca/WireImage
64/100

Born February 6th, 1962
Key Tracks "Sweet Child o' Mine," "Paradise City," "November Rain"
Influenced Josh Todd (Buckcherry), Marilyn Manson, Chester Bennington

"Axl sings the most beautiful melodies with the most aggressive tones and the most outrageous, freakish range," says Sebastian Bach. "There's maybe five people in the world that can sing in his range." Slash once described the sound of Rose's voice in slightly different terms: It's like "the sound that a tape player makes when the cassette finally dies and the tape gets ripped out," he said, "but in tune." It's immediately identifiable, with a combination of brute force and subtlety that is easy to overlook amid the sonic assault of Guns n' Roses. Ballads like "Patience" and "November Rain" reveal a startling intimacy, even vulnerability, but it's his fearsome screech on full-throttle metal like "Welcome to the Jungle" that can still peel paint off the walls, more than 20 years later.

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