Axl Rose demands Google take down unflattering pictures

Axl Rose doesn’t want to be internet famous. More precisely, he doesn’t want to be a meme.

The Guns N’ Roses lead singer asked Google to remove several unflattering photos of him, which have been used to create the “Fat Axl meme.”

In 2010, a Winnipeg Free Press photographer covered a Guns N’ Roses concert, where he snapped the images that ran with the paper’s favorable review. However, the photos caught the attention of Gauntlet, a heavy metal news site that republished the photos under the headline, “OMFG Axl Rose is fat.”

The meme rewrites Gun N’ Roses lyrics to mock the singer's appearance, such as: “Take me down to the bakery city/where the pies have cream and the cakes are tasty.”

“Copyright image of Axl Rose,” the notices filed by Web Sheriff on behalf of Rose read: “Please note that no permission has been granted to publish the copyright image so we cannot direct you to an authorized example of it.”

Rose isn’t the first celebrity to fight back against an unflattering internet picture. In fact, the practice and resulting viewership spike have a name – the Streisand effect. According to The Washington Post, it’s named for an incident in 2003 where Barbara Streisand tried — and disastrously failed — to erase an aerial picture of her mansion from an online database used by researchers who study coastal erosion. Her efforts became a news story, giving the photo a lot more attention than it would have received on its own.

Read more from The Washington Post.