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The video for “Welcome to the Jungle,” Appetite for Destruction’s mission statement, mirrors the journey that an unsuspecting listener might take during their first spin through Guns N’ Roses’ 1987 debut. A fresh-faced, 25-year-old Axl Rose, so country that he’s got a long stalk of wheat between his teeth, gets off a bus and enters a landscape that screams “bad side of town”; neon lights flash darkly, a shady guy perched on the corner approaches him, black-stockinged legs catch Axl’s eye. Cut to a similarly dank club where, with the aid of Aqua Net, Axl and the rest of Guns N’ Roses are barreling through the track, while TVs flicker into A Clockwork Orange-style fantasia about the bad news lurking all around.

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The electric opening notes, played with sputtering enthusiasm by lead guitarist Slash, only hint at the terror that’s coming; Axl’s under-his-breath “Oh my god” cranks up the tension; and then, aided by Steven Adler’s lightly swinging drums and backing vocals that recall a demon choir, the full horror is exposed—a world where every vice is for sale depending on your mood for indulgence and your tolerance for sin. The chugging breakdown, which culminates in Axl’s shrieked “You know where you are? You’re in the jungle, baby! You’re gonna diiiieeeeeaagghghhhhhghghghgh,” is “Tubular Bells” through a Marshall stack, a horror movie in miniature for anyone who thought the rock’n’roll lifestyle was all fun and games.

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Amid the bumper crop of records from ’80s bands who graduated from Sunset Strip clubs to MTV’s newly minted “Headbangers Ball”—the self-titled debuts from glam brats Faster Pussycat and biker-bloozers L.A. Guns—Appetite stood out for how absolutely harsh it got, its chronicles of the wild life in Los Angeles plainly stated by the lye-voiced Axl while his bandmates bobbed and thrashed. The Los Angeles portrayed on Appetite inverts the ideal of Randy Newman’s ever-lovable metropolis, turning it into a place where the then-in-vogue term “drug war” meant fighting with the spectre of heroin (aka “Mr. Brownstone”), where trickle-down economics meant buying cheap hooch on the last scraps of credit, and where paranoid fantasies were always justified. Women were beautiful and you could even put the ones with less utility in their place every so often. It was the jungle, baby, and you were gonna die.

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Appetite for Destruction didn’t only stand out because of its storm of bad vibes, although that sure helped. The band’s stew of influences—caustic punk, sinewy funk, Aerosmith, the Stones—helped make it a switchblade-sharp statement of intent. “In the last year, I’ve spent over $1,300 on cassettes, everything from Slayer to Wham! to listen to production, vocals, melodies, this and that,” Axl told the UK music magazine Sounds in 1987, and while Mike Clink’s economical production doesn’t have the gloss of Wham!’s Make It Big, studying influences beyond the glammed-up bills at the Troubadour played a large part in the band’s sound. - Pitchfork