Say, boy, where ya comin' from? Where'd ya get that point of view?

Well, points for trying. Neil Shah at The Village Voice makes an argument that you don't hear many other rock critics making—that Axl Rose's laziness and refusal to release a damn album already is, in itself, a work of art.

Axl's idiosyncratic career confronts us with a kind of paradox: If being a rebel is your job, why work when you don't want to?

This sounds like overthinking. Rose's stage-and-recording studio fright doesn't seem as rebellious as it does scared. He's made attempts at comebacks before and gotten winded or scared before he had to meet the audience. At this point, I suspect Axl is less like Andy Kaufman—an artist who willfully pissed off his audience—and more like Syd Barrett.