Guns N' Roses music video for "November Rain" directed by Andy Morahan shows no signs of stopping when it comes to racking up views. "November Rain" was the first-ever video older than YouTube to hit 1 billion views back in uly 2018, and now it's just surpassed 2 billion views this week.
"November Rain" was originally uploaded on December 25, 2009, meaning it took a shorter amount of time to hit 2 billion than it did for 1 billion. Our best guess as to why this might've happened was the 2022 reissue of Use Your Illusion I & II. Right behind "November Rain" is "Sweet Child O' Mine," which was uploaded at the same time and is currently at 1.4 billion views.
"November Rain" and "Sweet Child O' Mine" also hold two distinct records on YouTube – they're the first music videos from the '80s and '90s to surpass 1 billion views.
In a 2022 interview with Yahoo!, Guns N' Roses guitarist Slash discussed the one scene where he was filmed by a helicopter playing a guitar solo. In short, it scared the shit out of him.
"[Morahan] didn't tell me that they were going to be doing bomb shots with me with a helicopter! And when I got out onto the set and did my thing, I noticed that this helicopter would come back and forth at extremely fast speeds and get really, really low," the rocker recalled to Yahoo!.
"And I thought, 'Well, this'll be my last day on Earth.' …It was the kind of thing where you're just resigned to the fact that you're probably gonna die. And at that point in time, I was pretty much had that [mindset] — I didn't have very much fear of death in those days. Anyway, we shot it and I had no idea what it was going to look like afterwards. But it ended up looking pretty cool. But I didn't know it was going to be as memorable as it turned out to be."
Oh, and to address the thought you're about to have while watching the video – no, we still don't know who the hell was jumping out of that cake. All we know is that it's not former MTV personality Riki Rachtman.
"We had been up all night shooting at the Rainbow," said Rachtman. "And then we went straight to the wedding reception scene the next morning. Axl wanted it to feel like a real wedding, so all his friends were there. It's why I was there. When I see the video now, it's a lot of faces from the old scene. But the biggest misconception of the whole video is that I was the guy getting thrown through the cake. That wasn't me. Everybody seems to think it was, but it wasn't."
