November Rain By Guns And Roses Has Over A Billion Views, Here’s Why?
More than a billion views since the video debuted in 1992, it was the first video from the 90’s to reach that many, why? That’s a subjective question to be sure. For starters, November Rain is a classic Guns N’ Roses song.
It is epic in scope as a song lasting just over 9 minutes and features the best of the band with Axl Rose on piano and Slash on lead guitar. By that time the original drummer Steven Adler had left due to abuse issues and was replaced by Matt Sorum. The band was never tighter.
How do you make a 9 minute video of a song? You go big and make it epic. That’s exactly what they did with this video. It was the last of the long form videos that you would see on MTV because shortly afterwards grunge music took over with shorter length songs.
November Rain starts with Axl waking up and going directly to whatever pain relievers were on his nightstand. From there we go to a concert appearance of the band featuring a full orchestra inside what looks like a symphony hall.
Axl is sings while playing the piano and then we are taken away to a small white chapel in what looks like a desert for a wedding ceremony. As is turns out, it’s Axl’s wedding to his girlfriend at the time, super model Stephanie Seymour.
She makes quite the beautiful bride and Axl has never looked happier than this moment when he is told to kiss the bride.
Then we get a fantastic guitar solo outside of the chapel, which by the way looks a lot smaller from the outside making you wonder how so many guests were inside.
We are then taken to a more posh wedding reception where the couple are happy and sharing the cake, but then for some reason we see Stephanie in a casket and Axl is grieving. What happened? It is never explained to the viewer, we can only assume that he is never meant to be happy.
It goes downhill from there when the wedding becomes a funeral for the bride.
The video ends with the bridal bouquet tossed the street followed by a steady rain, a November Rain. The last thing we see is Axl waking up from this nightmare, we can only hope that’s all it ever was, but we will never know