Coma (Guns N' Roses song)

"Coma" is a song by American rock band Guns N' Roses. It appears on the 1991 album Use Your Illusion I. At 10 minutes, 14 seconds it is the longest track released by the band, even though it lacks choruses.

Composition

The song starts with the instruments, and then the singing. After a moderately-sized vocal section, the beeping of a machine takes over, succeeded by another short singing session. Afterwards, more singing takes place, followed by a quiet, peaceful midsection of the song. Then, loud rock music resumes, and a loud, climatic, long singing section finalizes the song.

Mentioning of Song by Band Members

Slash states that he wrote the music to this song in a house he and Izzy Stradlin rented in Hollywood Hills, following the Appetite for Destruction tours.

In an interview, Axl Rose talks about writing "Coma":

In an interview, on August 31, 1990, with MTV's Kurt Loder on Famous Last Words, Axl talks about the song "Coma":

But I started writing about when I OD'ed 4 years ago. The reason I OD'd was because of stress. I couldn't take it. And I just grabbed the bottle of pills in an argument and just gulped them down and I ended up in the hospital. But I liked that I wasn't in the fight anymore and I was fully conscious that I was leaving. I liked that. But then I go, all of a sudden, my first real thoughts were that "okay, you haven't toured enough. The record's not going to last; it's going to be forgotten. This and that, you have work to do. Get out of this." And I went "No!" and I woke up, you know, and pulled myself out of it.

Girth (functional analysis)

In functional analysis, the girth of a Banach space is the infimum of lengths of centrally symmetric simple closed curves in the unit sphere of the space. Equivalently, it is twice the infimum of distances between opposite points of the sphere, as measured within the sphere.

Every finite-dimensional Banach space has a pair of opposite points on the unit sphere that achieves the minimum distance, and a centrally symmetric simple closed curve that achieves the minimum length. However, such a curve may not always exist in infinite-dimensional spaces.

The girth is always at least four, because the shortest path on the unit sphere between two opposite points cannot be shorter than the length-two line segment connecting them through the origin of the space. A Banach space for which it is exactly four is said to be flat. There exist flat Banach spaces of infinite dimension in which the girth is achieved by a minimum-length curve; an example is the space C[0,1] of continuous functions from the unit interval to the real numbers, with the sup norm. The unit sphere of such a space has the counterintuitive property that certain pairs of opposite points have the same distance within the sphere that they do in the whole space.