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| Pictured: Alternate Universe Axl Rose. |
The reason that these lyrics are bad are not the reasons usually given. There are certainly a number of terms used that fall far below acceptable cultural sensitivity levels, even for the time that it was released, and those issues have only gotten worse with age. Yet despite the fact that Axl uses derogatory words that he definitely should not have, the song itself is not racist, homophobic, misogynist or xenophobic in the sense that it validates or glorifies those bigotries. The song's narrator is a literary fabrication, a character, and not one we are meant to think good things about.
Rather than tearing this apart by individual lines or sections, I am going to print the lyrics below and then discuss them at the end.
Guess I needed some time to get away
I needed some peace of mind
Some peace of mind that'll stay
So I thumbed it down to sixth in L.A.
Maybe a Greyhound could be my way
Police and niggers, that's right
Get outta my way
Don't need to buy none of your
Gold chains today
Now don't need no bracelets
Clamped in front of my back
Just need my ticket, 'til then
Won't you cut me some slack
You're one in a million
Yeah that's what you are
You're one in a million babe
You're a shooting star
Maybe some day we'll see you
Before you make us cry
You know we tried to reach you
But you were much to high
Immigrants and faggots
They make no sense to me
They come to our country
And think they'll do as they please
Like start some mini-Iran
Or spread some fucking disease
And they talk so many goddamn ways
It's all Greek to me
Well some say I'm lazy
And others say that's just me
Some say I'm crazy
I guess I'll always be
But it's been such a long time
Since I knew right from wrong
It's all the means to and end and
I keep it moving along
You're one in a million
You're a shooting star
You're one in a million babe
You know that you are
Maybe someday we'll see you
Before you make us cry
You know we tried to reach you
But you were much too high
Radicals and racists
Don't point your finger at me
I'm a small town white boy
Just tryin' to make ends meet
Don't need your religion
Don't watch that much TV
Just makin' my livin' baby
Well that's enough for me
You're one in a million...
The first question you have to ask yourself is, "Who is the person that is one in a million?" I submit to you that person is the Axl Rose we all know, rockstar extraordinaire. So the narrator character of this song is singing to that Axl Rose. Who then is the narrator, the one with all the problematic ideas? Well, that is Axl Rose, too. An alternate universe Axl Rose who fails and runs back to his small town Indiana life and becomes way too much like his sexually abusive dad, or the guys who bullied him in high school. The narrator is the Axl Rose that Axl Rose did not want to become, the person who let their bitterness turn them into a stereotype of lower working class bigotry; which gets veiled by partial denialism of that bigotry, and justified by limited experiences.
By the end of the song it becomes pretty clear that the narrator character is a man living in a small town and working to scrape by, while blaming everyone else for his failure in life. This is the man Axl feared he might become if his musical career did not take off. The musician Axl Rose wrote the lyrics from his experiences, and he probably did have the sort of internally conflicted reaction to people of color, LGBTQ, immigrants and women due to the environment he grew up in. But that is not who Axl wanted to become. He wanted to become the internationally beloved and massively successful artist who knew better than to give those vestigial small town impulses the attention they sought. He wanted to become One In A Million, which he did after this song was written but before it was released.
This is the gross thing about this song, is that even before Axl arrived at his superstardom, his ego was already there. And the first thing he wanted to do when his corporeal being caught up was to say fuck you to all the people he grew up with by turning himself into a character that was just like them, and then using that character to brag about how great rockstar Axl Rose is while illustrating how terrible alternate Axl and his Indiana peers are.
When asked about the song over the years Axl has been backed into defending his language, but he has never taken the chance to explain exactly what his use of those problematic terms was trying to express. I think he felt so backed into a corner, as victims of childhood abuse often feel they are later in life, that he becomes too stubborn and flustered to give the song a proper explanation. Therefore I cannot say with 100% certainty that my interpretation of the song is correct, but I can find no other way to explain the content of the chorus in contrast to the verses, other than to split Axl into the two possible futures he imagined for himself when he wrote this. The problem with the unfavorable interpretations of this song is that they never acknowledge the chorus, or what sort of context it suggests about the possible message/meaning of the song.
Even more disturbing is that, in hindsight, 'one in a million' turned out to be extremely conservative. Not even close to one in a million people enjoy the sort of wealth, fame and success that Axl Rose has acquired during his career. He is at least one in a hundred million, so take that, ya fugkn Hoosier redneck truck monkeys!
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