FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Music

Are You a Enough of a Rich Asshole to Buy this $999 Guns N' Roses Box Set?

The Locked N' Loaded collection includes skull rings, temporary tattoos, and 49 previously unreleased songs. The shame you will feel upon purchase comes at no extra cost.

Famed rock music ensemble Guns 'N' Roses confirmed this morning that they will release a remastered version of their 1987 debut album, Appetite for Destruction, on June 29. It'll come out on a few different formats, but nobody really cares. Because, holy Hell, take a look at the Locked N’ Loaded box set, the high-end package. Here, please, watch this unboxing video, which moves at a pretty rapid pace but still lasts for well over two minutes:

Advertisement

Look at all that shit! That's so much shit!

That's a four-CD "super deluxe edition" with the Appetite remaster, the self-explanatory B-Sides N' EPs, the equally well-formatted Sound City Session N’ More recordings, and the confusingly titled Live ?!*@ Like a Suicide EP. You'll also get a load of music and a previously unseen video for "It's So Easy" on a Blu-Ray disc, and there'll be six 7-inch singles and a copy of Shadow of Your Love on yellow vinyl thrown in. There are 49 previously unreleased songs in total. I cannot believe that they have 49 unreleased songs to get through.

But the music will seem less important when you open up your embossed faux-leather dollhouse to find five metal band skull face rings, five metal band skull face lapel pins, and five metal guitar picks with band skull faces and signatures. There's a two-inch collectible coin (?), a seven-inch large hole adapter (??), and some temporary band member tattoos (!!!). Elsewhere, there is a USB stick. And the word "lithos" comes up regularly.

Now, obviously, you have to be a rich asshole to buy this. It'll set you back $999, an amount of money that I'd really like to think would make the idea of 10,000-copy worldwide limit redundant. And you, reader, will look very silly if you spend that money. When—or if—you welcome guests into your home, you will have to hide this box, because the shame will overwhelm you. But all you will find to cover it with is a large Guns N' Roses lithograph. One day, you will inadvertently leave your Izzy Stradlin thumb ring on when you leave the house.

But, purely from a conceptual standpoint, this is an excellent idea from Guns N' Roses who, in 2018, are the physical manifestation of a $999 box set. If Radiohead can sell people $200 vinyl copies of Kid A that carefully exploit vinyl holograms to make it seem like the listener has friends who aren't on message boards, then one of the world's most comically ostentatious rock bands—middle-aged men who still conjure up images of hot pants top hats and drunken brawls—should be able to do this.

I implore you: Do not buy the Locked N’ Loaded box set. But do stand back and admire the the people who thought the world needed skull rings and temporary tattoos with their faces on them.

Follow Alex Robert Ross on Twitter.