W. Axl Rose (born William Bruce Rose Jr. on February 6, 1962) is an American musician.
He is best known as the lead vocalist and lyricist for the hard rock band Guns N’ Roses and has been the band’s lone permanent member since its foundation in 1985.
Rose, who has a distinctive and powerful wide-ranging voice, has been called one of the best vocalists of all time by many media sites, including Rolling Stone and NME.
Rose was born and reared in Lafayette, Indiana, and relocated to Los Angeles in the early 1980s, where he became involved in the local hard rock scene and joined many bands, including Hollywood Rose and L.A. Guns.
He co-founded Guns N’ Roses in 1985, with whom he achieved considerable popularity and recognition in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Appetite for Destruction (1987), their debut album, has sold over 30 million copies worldwide and is the best-selling debut album of all time in the United States, with 18 million units sold.
Its full-length successors, the twin albums Use Your Illusion I and Use Your Illusion II (1991), were also hugely successful; they debuted at No. 2 and No. 1 on the Billboard 200, respectively, and have sold a total of 35 million copies worldwide.
Axl Rose is the only original member of Guns N’ Roses still alive. He was inducted as a member of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2012, despite his request for exclusion. In 2016, he partially reunited the “classic” lineup of his former band with AC/DC.
Why did Axl Rose turn down Hall of Fame?
Axl Rose submitted a “Thank you, but no thanks” letter to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ahead of Guns N’ Roses’ induction next weekend in Cleveland. Rose’s decision appears to be motivated by bad blood between him and numerous former bandmates from the original 1985 lineup.
