Welcome to the Jungle

The single most efficient threat in rock: a delayed, seasick guitar figure that swims for eight bars, Axl's snarled "you know where you are?", and then the whole band arriving like a door being kicked in. Welcome to the Jungle is a warning issued by someone already lost — Axl wrote it about arriving in Los Angeles as a kid from Indiana, and the lyric is a hustler's pitch that keeps sliding into genuine menace: everything you want is here, and it will cost you exactly everything. His vocal is the wildest on the record, sliding between a serpentine hiss in the breakdown ("you're gonna dieeee") and a full-throat air-raid scream, with none of the polish his peers were buying. Slash and Izzy Stradlin lock into a rhythm that's more Aerosmith swing than metal chug, Adler's drums hitting hard and slightly loose, and Clink keeps the whole thing sounding sweaty rather than sculpted. It opens Appetite for Destruction because it functions as a mission statement for an album about appetite and destruction. Use it for the first two minutes of a workout, for pregaming, for any moment requiring an immediate transfusion of adrenaline and bad decisions.