Axl Rose is about as douchey a rock star as they get. This is comically, semi-tragically revealed in a long article written by John Jeremiah Sullivan for GQ and included in “Pulphead,” a collection of his essays from 2011. Last week, the book was named  # 81 on the best 100 books of the past 25 years list in The New York Times.

As I was reading the Rose profile, “The Final Comeback of Axl Rose,” Guns N’ Roses’ familiar songs thwumped through my head, be it “It’s So Easy” to “Paradise City.” The music — hard, transgressive and nasty-catchy — has few metal peers.

GNR owns many great songs, almost all of them on their debut “Appetite for Destruction.” On a later album is the ballad “November Rain,” one of the band’s worst songs (next to their godawful cover of Dylan), yet beloved by millions. Pandering and juvenile, it’s a big sloppy dog kiss about a laughably clichéd love affair. (Google the lyrics. They’re shocking.) 

“November Rain” is as cotton-candy as a fawning celebrity profile by Maureen Dowd in the Times, or a Nancy Meyers rom-com, but in soft-focus with buckets of moody rain. Gummy, cloying. You want to gag.

Still, GNR fans regard it a masterpiece. They are distressingly mistaken. 

Metal power ballads are always troublesome. Most are dreadful. Take Poison’s “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” to Def Leppard’s “Love Bites” and all the synth-soaked dreck in between. (They’re not all bad: “Dream On” by Aerosmith, “Nothing Else Matters” by Metallica, “Wanted Dead or Alive” by Bon Jovi.)

“November Rain” is worse than all that. It’s flat-out embarrassing, a soapy tearjerker that only jerks something unprintable here. Slash is metal guitar royalty, but even his virilely earnest solo belongs on a Yacht Rock cruise to Night Ranger Island.

Though he notes it in passing, Sullivan doesn’t express an opinion of “November Rain,” which is too bad because he’d probably decimate it with atomic wit. (Unless  he likes it, then we’d have a serious discussion.)

Amazingly, “Rain” isn’t even GNR’s worst song. That would go to the above mentioned Dylan cover, “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” in which Axl Rose torments then strangles the classic tune to screeching death. It has to be the most mangled and irresponsible cover song in rock history. (The band also managed to muck-up Paul McCartney’s “Live and Let Die” in an overblown, histrionic rendition for which they clearly thought they were ideally heavy, but missed the point entirely.)

What I’m getting at in a wildly circuitous way is that you should read “Pulphead,” for its offhand humor, literary punch, throwbacks to New Journalism, and overall entertainment value. 

Sullivan’s prose and approach favorably remind me of fellow culture essayist Chuck Klosterman. Pages are paved in irreverence. Laser insights tango with lacerating opinions. Laughs are plentiful. And you’re all the smarter for reading them.

Like so many witty essays that graze the indulgent — be it Sullivan, Klosternan, Eve Babitz or the late Michael Corcoran —  they’re delightfully devastating. And there’s the kick. 

P.S.: After some 35 years, a cornrow-headed Axl Rose is still trying to keep together an iteration of GNR for recording and touring. I have no idea how that’s going. But I do know that in 2018, Rose appeared in an episode of “New Looney Tunes” as himself, singing an original song “Rock the Rock.” In 2021, Rose again appeared as himself in a cartoon, this time “Scooby-Doo and Guess Who?”

Perfect. One of rock’s natural cartoon characters has actually become one.