Released as the final track on 1988’s GN'R Lies, “One In A Million” would prove to be one of Guns N' Roses' most controversial songs.

The song is said to be semi-autobiographical and also a form of dark comedy by the band. Axl Rose moved to the city of Los Angeles from a small town in Indiana, and having had some negative experiences with the groups he wrote about in this song, those events colored his perception when penning the lyrics.

Whether from harassment by police, seeing people being ripped off by black hustlers selling fake goods at the Greyhound station, being treated as an outsider in his own country by immigrant store owners, or an attempted rape by a gay man while hitchhiking, these experiences gave birth to the song. Fed up with it all, he sings about trying to get away from it.

Axl explains much of this during interviews in Rolling Stone Magazine in August, 1989 and April, 1992.

Rose said to Interview Magazine in 1992:

I’ve only performed the song “One In a Million” twice. l don’t perform it, because l think it’s too dangerous and l don’t trust people with the song. I don’t trust the audience with the song. I don’t want to do “One in a Million” on stage and know that there’s a lot of people out there in the crowd who are prejudiced and it’s gonna help fuel their fire. It’s enough to handle the fact that it’s on a record and people use it for their own anthems for their own prejudiced-ness. I question myself every day. Should l pull it? Should I leave it? Do l leave it for the sake of artistic integrity? Do I pull it, do I censor myself? But wait, I’m against censorship. It’s a really hard issue to constantly deal with. The only way to deal with it is to communicate about it. l don’t like the damage that that song does, l don’t like the prejudiced-ness, l don’t like the way the song fuels people’s prejudiced-ness, and that’s a problem for me.

As for Slash (who is half-black), he had reservations about the song, which he expressed in a 1990 Musician magazine interview:

Everybody on the black side of my family was like “What is your problem?” My old girlfriend said “You could have stopped it.” What am I supposed to say? Axl and I don’t stop each other from doing things. Hopefully, if something is really bad, you stop it yourself … I can’t sit here with a clear conscience and say ‘It’s okay that it came out’. I don’t condone it. But it happened, and now Axl is being condemned for it, and he takes it really personally. All I can say is that it’s a lesson learned.

Ultimately, the song was excluded from the 2018 Appetite For Destruction boxset (which included the rest of the GN'R Lies album), seemingly an acknowledgement that the song was in poor taste. The decision was unanimous and didn’t require debate, according to Slash.