In 2018, Universal Music issued a 'Locked N' Loaded - Limited Super Deluxe Edition' of Guns N' Roses' debut album, Appetite For Destruction, with an eye-watering $1000 price tag. Housed in a wooden box covered with vegan leather, the box set featured an exhaustive list of Gn'R ephemera - rings, guitar picks, a. bandana, replica ticket stubs, collectible coins - plus seven vinyl twelve inch records featuring the original albums, B-sides, early EPs, previously unreleased demo recordings and much more. One thing that was conspicuously missing from what was billed as a 'Holy Grail' for fans of the Los Angeles hard rock band was the most controversial song they ever recorded, One In A Million. In a summer 2018 interview with Rolling Stone, guitarist Slash stated the decision to omit the song was taken collectively, adding, "It didn’t take long. There wasn’t a big roundtable thing over it."
One In A Million was originally released on the band's G N' R Lies EP, which coupled the quintet's 1986 EP Live ?!★꩜ Like a Suicide , and four acoustic recordings, Patience, Used To Love Her, You're Crazy and One In A Million. Patience was released as a single, reaching number 4 on the Billboard Hot 100, but it was the EP's closing track which garnered the most attention, as it featured some of the most objectionable lyrics ever released by any band on a major label. An account of Axl Rose's early experiences in Los Angeles after stepping off a Greyhound bus from Indiana, the song featured deeply offensive racist and homophobic slurs, with Rose railing against "immigrants", "faggots" and "n*****s".
At the time, Rose attempted to defend his use of the latter word by claiming that it "doesn't necessarily mean black" and also suggested that, if a rap group such as N.W.A. (featuring Ice Cube and Dr. Dre) were free to use the word, then he should be extended the same right.
Among the mock newspaper clippings on the album artwork, Rose, undoubtedly aware of the attention his lyrics would receive, included the semi-apology "my apologies to those who may take offense". But frankly his use of such hate speech was indefensible, caused upset within the band, and left many fans wondering about the character of the man who fronted their favourite band. Which, in turn, just annoyed the singer more.
"Axl resented being accused of being homophobic," his A&R man Tom Zutaut insisted. "He was also really pissed off about being called a racist."
In 1990, in an interview with Musician magazine, Guns N' Roses guitarist Slash, who is biracial, addressed the controversy for the first time, and admitted to feeling uncomfortable with the song.
"Everybody on the black side of my family was like, 'What is your problem?'" he recalled. “My old girlfriend said, 'You could have stopped it.' What am I supposed to say? Axl and 1 don’t stop each other from doing things. Hopefully, if something is really bad, you stop it yourself.
“It was something he really wanted to put out to explain his story, which is what the song is about," he continued. "Axl is a naive white boy from Indiana who came to Hollywood, was brought up in a totally Caucasian society, and it was his way of saying how scared he was and this and that. Maybe somewhere in there he does harbor some sort of [bigoted] feelings because of the way he was brought up. At the same time, it wasn’t malicious."
“I can’t sit here with a clear conscience and say, It’s okay that it came out." Slash continued. "I don’t condone it But it happened, and now Axl is being condemned for it, and he takes it really personally. All I can say, really, is that it’s a lesson learned."
In 2018, when the Locked N' Loaded collection was unveiled, Slash stated that One In A Million "just didn’t have any place in that box set." But the majority of the band's fans, and perhaps the majority of the band too, will still question why the song featured on a Guns N' Roses record in the first place.
