This 1987 Classic Rock Song Was Ranked the Best Rock Song of the 1980s
Some songs announce themselves quietly before taking over the world. That's exactly what happened with Sweet Child O' Mine by Guns N' Roses — the song that Ranker users have voted the best rock song of the 1980s.
Duff McKagan Said The Song Was 'Like a Joke'
The story of how Sweet Child O' Mine came to exist is almost as famous as the song itself. Slash was warming up at a rehearsal in 1986, playing what he later described as a silly circular riff he fully intended to throw away. Izzy Stradlin heard it and asked him to keep playing. The rest of the band started building around it. Axl Rose, upstairs in his bedroom, heard it through the walls and came down with a poem he'd written for his then-girlfriend Erin Everly — daughter of Don Everly of the Everly Brothers. Within an hour, one of the most recognizable songs in rock history took shape.
"It was like a joke," bassist Duff McKagan later said. "We thought, 'What is this song? It's gonna be nothing.'"
They were wrong. The song appeared on the band's debut album Appetite for Destruction, released in July 1987, which initially struggled so badly that it debuted at number 182 on the Billboard 200. It took nearly a year of relentless touring and MTV pressure before the album found its audience, and Sweet Child O' Mine was the song that broke everything open.
The Only Guns N' Roses Song to Ever Reach the Top Spot on Billboard Hot 100
Released as a single in June 1988, it climbed to number one on the Billboard Hot 100 that September, becoming the only Guns N' Roses song to ever reach the top spot. Appetite for Destruction followed it to number one and has since sold over 30 million copies worldwide, making it the best-selling debut album in US history.
The riff itself — that chiming, circular opening pattern that anyone who has ever heard the song can hum from memory — was voted the greatest guitar riff of all time by Total Guitar magazine readers in 2004, beating out the opening of "Smells Like Teen Spirit," "Whole Lotta Love," and "Smoke on the Water."
Slash himself eventually came around on the song, though it took a while. "I hated that song with a huge passion for the longest time," he once said, "and it turned out to be our hugest hit."