Welcome to the (Fat-Shaming) Jungle, Axl!
Axl Rose gets it. He knows his persona as the bad boy of rock 'n' roll is now reduced to a meme, which he's trying to eradicate from the Internet. (Good luck with that, dude!) But Rose couldn't stop Vulture writer Bill Wyman from dissecting Rose's onstage appearance in the profile about the current Guns 'n' Roses reunion tour:
"I don't want to fat-shame the guy, but he simply asks for it. At the show, Rose wore a T-shirt with a picture of a woman bending over, shot from behind, with the legend "SHOW SOME CLASS," with the "CL" crossed out. Back in the day, Rose had an almost-feminine aspect as he swayed around stages. The same moves today would have done serious damage to the equipment onstage. His antic facial expressions, projected at huge size, were often just this side of comical, and sometimes on the other side of it. He sported a flannel shirt firmly tied around his waist for the whole show, probably to mask an ample backside. Another of the half-dozen or more different T-shirts he sported featured a topless woman wearing a gas mask. Her ample breasts were splayed broadly over his belly, which seemed to be battling valiantly against a set of industrial-grade Spanx."
Wyman get around to how Rose sounded live: "Rose's voice, in its prime a thing of wonder, is at about 70 percent power today." Oh. Ok.
Maybe Wyman focused on Rose because he is the frontman on the group? Nah. Other G 'n' R members were under scrutiny. According to Wyman, Slash looked "a bit worn physically, too," but Duff McKagan "looked like a million bucks" ( to be fair, a near-death experience would make anyone more health conscious.)
Rose's sartorial choices are firmly stuck in 1991. So are most men in their late 40s, early 50s. But was it really fair to say Rose asked to be fat-shamed? Does Tess Holliday deserve it? How about Liz Krueger, the fitness trainer who wore a body-con dress to a wedding reception? No one deserves it, even when the person's fronting one of the biggest rock bands ever.SaveSaveSave