I am in Cleveland, where the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame just concluded its 27th annual induction ceremony yesterday (April 14, 2012). Unfortunately, I was not able to attend any of the events, but the inductees have been on my mind. When I learned that Guns N’ Roses was to be inducted this year, I was taken back to the summer I first heard Appetite for Destruction. It was August of 1987 and my family was visiting the beach in North Carolina. My sister and I had met two out-of-a-John-Hughes-fantasy towheaded surfer kids at the arcade and billiard hall at the end of the pier. Of course, we were smitten, and my surfer guy ended up being my first real kiss (it was sadly kind of gross), but I mostly remember hanging out at their home listening to this cassette tape they were playing over and over. It was somehow dangerous to me, and it wasn’t just the album’s cover art (I found skulls to be sincerely evil back then). There was an edge to it that cut like a razor, and it seemed to be slashing away the whole bill of goods I had been sold for most of my life. When we got home, I went to the local head shop/record store and bought my own tape, rewinding it continuously and studying it fervently as I tried to wrap my mind around the dark truths it seemed to reveal.

Years have passed, and I still think that album was a tour de force, but recently I have been contemplating its theological value. What is an “appetite for destruction” and why did so many feel it. Then, in conversation with my husband over the hullabaloo of Axl’s refusal to be inducted with his former band mates, it became clear to me that this record bore honest witness to these guys’ dark nights of the soul. There was despair in the work – of love, of drugs, of trust, of personal value, of social capital, of life itself – and it does not really let up except in track # 6 “Paradise City.” Even the soft spots in the record are filled with nostalgia, loss, and a sense of hopelessness (e.g., “Sweet Child of Mine”).

This album came late in the 1980s. When I think about the context of the album’s release, it is easy to see why Appetite’s no-nonsense rage cut through it all like a hot knife through butter. What did we have then? 1) The Cold War ~ recall Reagan’s famous behest, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall;” 2) the early and terrifying onslaught of AIDS; 3) farm crises in the Midwest; 4) banking and economic crises; 5) the first and second great waves of hair metal bands; 6) the Iran-Contra Affair; 7) Pac-Man; Space Invaders; Asteroids; Pong; The original V miniseries; 9) Whitley Strieber’s Communion; and 10) Tootsie. If it were not AIDS or the Bomb, it would be aliens or Dustin Hoffman in drag. No wonder people were feeling despair.

I get kind of grumpy, perhaps grumpy like Axl, when I think about how mind-bending it was to grow up in that decade. But, in the aftermath of it, I think it sensitized a whole generation to a prolonged dark night of the soul. What is more, I think there was and is theological virtue to people holding on in the midst of despair, even if they seem to be failing at it. The fact that so many artists in this era showed up at all, albeit ill-tempered and drugged-up as they were, is a witness to the resiliency of people searching and enduring.

During last week’s Holy Week liturgies, I found myself pondering the stillness and anticipation of the Triduum. I spent time imagining those moments for the original players – huddling together, fearful, tense, uncertain, witnessing a terror of violence, tentatively surfacing after the storm. I don’t like to pass over too quickly the silence of Holy Saturday, because I think it represents those perennially transformative moments where humanity’s courage has to become Promethean in order to endure life’s circumstances. There is a certain rebirth of the spirit that comes from facing down such destruction, and I think in some way this is what was so grippingly captured in Appetite for Destruction. Some dark nights are really quite dark, and during them it is good to have company howling back at … nuclear annihilation; inky, blinky; and pinky; lying politicians; Greys; etc. So, cheers, to these rockers, inducted and otherwise, for keeping us company. We will try not to let you mummify in that museum.