What is the greatest American rock band of all time? I suspect the answer might depend on from which side of the Atlantic you view the question.

From a British perspective, it wouldn't necessarily be America's biggest sellers, many of whom don't really have much purchase beyond their national borders, from the plush Seventies soft rock of Boston, Chicago, Kansas and Journey to the flashy Eighties hair metal of Motley Crue and perennial jam rock of the Grateful Dead. Even the most internationally successful American rock bands are often critically scorned in Britain, with superficial, showband aspects that see them dismissed as jumped-up pop acts, from glam rockers such as Kiss and Alice Cooper, to the overblown pomp of Meat Loaf, Bon Jovi and battle-scarred survivors Aerosmith.

Greatest band? Guns N' Roses' Axl Rose (right) and DJ Ashba at Sidney Myer Music Bowl, Melbourne, last year. Credit:Paul Jeffers

A new documentary series on BBC 4, Born To Be Wild, offers an intriguing list of possible candidates for the title, with three episodes tracing how rock changed with the political temperature of the times. Subtitled The Golden Age of American Rock, the series proposes a compelling narrative that covers the origins of the modern genre in the revolutionary anti-establishment peace-and-love movement of the late '60s, its gradual transformation into an overblown, conformist, multi-million-selling corporate business in the '70s, and its reformation under the influence of MTV into the flashy, pseudo-rebellious, pantomime rock of the '80s.

Although the series concludes with the gritty disenchantment of early-Nineties grunge, its final episode posits Guns N' Roses as "the ultimate American band". Over shots of a scrawny Axl Rose gyrating with leonine threat to the metal groove of a band obscured by manes of shaggy hair, a voiceover explains that "they had the swagger, theatricality and arrogance of the big Seventies bands like Aerosmith and Alice Cooper, but mixed in with the sleaze and energy of punk and British hard rock. They existed in the mainstream alongside pop stars and power ballads but they were completely anti-establishment."