In this video I’m talking about the very first album I ever bought with my own money: Guns N’ Roses’ “Appetite for Destruction.” Not this exact copy—my first one was the CD—but this record hit me like a lightning bolt and it’s honestly where my real music journey began. I give a little background on the album too: released July 21, 1987, it dominated the charts, sold over 30 million worldwide, and in my opinion it’s basically the definitive rock album of the 1980s. I also get into why I never really lump Guns N’ Roses in with the hair metal bands of the era. Yeah, they had the look, but the vibe and the attitude felt like a shift back to the roots of rock—real hard, heavy stuff—and you can draw a line from that into what came later in the ’90s. I tell the story of hearing “Welcome to the Jungle” for the first time on a school trip to Toronto, staring at that cover like it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen, and then buying the uncensored version at Sam Goody because, of course, I wanted the “bad” version. Finally, I show the copy I own now—an original 1987 Specialty pressing I picked up at the Austin Record Convention—plus I talk about the alternate “robot” cover, the 2018 remaster options, and those massive deluxe box sets that are really only for the hardcore collectors.