On the frosty January day in 1992 when Guns N’ Roses came to Dayton, Ohio on their Use Your Illusion tour, I couldn’t sit still in math class. My teacher was a twenty-something brunette who let us to listen to music as we worked on our problem sets, and we would flip between the commercial pop station, Z.93, or the independent alternative station, 97X, discussing the merits of commercial rock versus the grunge bands coming out of Seattle that we were all starting to love. Guns N’ Roses was playing at the almost brand-new arena, The Nutter Center, with Soundgarden opening, and I had convinced my parents that I had to go, and that my older brother—home on winter break from his first year in college—could take me and some of my friends. I don’t think my parents knew that GN’R had caused a riot at their show just six months earlier at Riverport Arena in St. Louis, or about their wild reputation, but I was ready to see some blood.
In math class, we were talking about the possibility of a similar scene at the concert, imagining all of us caught up in ripping the new arena—named after the grandfather of one of our rich classmates—seat by seat; visions of chaotic violence and being trampled to the tune of a band that I loved. It sounded heavenly. “If I die tonight, at the concert, it would be worth it,” I announced, and my math teacher scoffed at me, telling me that it was a ridiculous thing to say. But I didn’t care—and I recognize the night now as one of my first moments of courting and desiring danger. Nothing anyone said could take away my emerging feelings of self-loathing; my baby death wish.
I was a thirteen-year-old brown girl: braces, already a 36C bra size, black Chucks covered in doodles, and I was deeply and blindly influenced almost entirely by white male artists. I read Jack Kerouac, and had Aldous Huxley quotes that I didn’t understand stenciled on the brown paper wrappings of my books. I had gone to see Terminator 2 seven times in the theater that past summer. At that time, there was no one who looked like me in popular media, definitely not on MTV. At the core of me, there is still the terrible sensation of feeling so completely invisible in the world; the isolation and loneliness of not seeing yourself reflected back anywhere, at a time when you are starving for any kind of attention or guidance. I was so often stewing in the rage that comes from feeling invisible. And then, I’d be home alone watching MTV, and there was Guns N’ Roses reflecting all that anger back at me. What else could I do but cheer on their callousness? Only now, from a distance of 30 years, can I identify the self-hate that was so deeply tied up in my desire for all things white, male, powerful and rebellious.
That time in my life was marked by a feeling of searching; of trying so hard to figure out what kind of person I wanted to be. I already felt a pull to be an artist, but there was no one guiding me towards art or literature that seemed to have anything to do with me. So I looked for it in whatever was available, spending hours watching MTV or kneeling in the aisles of the B. Dalton bookstore in the mall, reading books by Henry Miller or William S Burroughs. I played my brother’s Appetite for Destruction cassette tape on my pink stereo, folding open the tape’s insert to examine the Robert Williams image of a woman raped by a robot, which the album took its title from. This insert, the sex sounds on “Welcome to the Jungle,” the heroin references on Mr. Brownstone, scenes from Naked Lunch—all of these images of white male misogyny, violence, and excess conflated in my head to form the only model for rebellion I had access to.
That night at the concert, the whole arena was a bundle of anticipation as we waited for the lights to go down and the spectacle to begin. Soundgarden finally came on at 9:30 p.m., an hour and a half after the show was supposed to start. I’ll always remember recognizing for the first time bassist Kim Thayill’s South Asianness from a distance; a rare moment of seeing someone who looked like me reflected back in the pop culture I was consuming. We waited for hours in the brightly lit arena while rumors rippled through the crowd of almost entirely white drunken fans: “Axl’s private jet was held up;” “Axl was refusing to come out.” My brother and I climbed up to the lobby several times to call my parents on the payphone. When GN’R finally came out after midnight, the hours of waiting hadn’t soured my excitement. Axl ran around in tiny spandex shorts, his contempt for us his primary motivator. He spoke of how his stepfather was from Dayton and he hated the place, hated going to the Air Force Museum. “Fuck this town!” he spat at the crowd, and we cheered at his vitriol.
I think about that moment often: the power of that disrespect, and how it seemed godlike to me. Coming from an immigrant family, I had been raised on ideals of being twice as well-behaved as everyone else, stemming from the idea that we were guests in this country; essentially visitors. Seeing this man, howling into a microphone and being bold enough to scorn a crowd of people who had been waiting hours, who had paid good money to see him, felt deeply pleasurable, like being spit on or slapped by a lover—which is not a feeling that I could comprehend then, but I cheered my heart out. I, too, hated my suburban town, and the Air Force Museum that my family always took out-of-town guests to, forcing me along. I’ve read about Rose’s complicated life in the Midwest, and his abusive relationship with his stepfather. How powerful it must have been to come back and channel that pain in a stadium of that size, and what an act of extreme privilege.
By the time we left the arena, there was freezing rain pelting down hard. My brother lost a contact lens somehow on the way to the car, and the drive home was frightening—silent except for that urgent beat of the windshield wipers, and the gasps every time the car swerved. For a minute, I wondered if we really were going to die, and I’m not sure I wanted it any less.
This summer, Guns N’ Roses released a 30th anniversary reissue of Appetite for Destruction, and a box-set edition you can buy for $1000. Reflecting on the time that’s passed since the original album’s release, I listened to Guns N’ Roses on a long car ride across Los Angeles, where I now live—and marveled at how, in my 13-year-old mind, LA and the Sunset Strip are tied up with this band, and how my life and home in East LA has nothing to do with any of that. I still know all the words, but get fatigued after a while and switch over to listening to KDAY, the local old-school hip hop station that plays Ice Cube and Tupac every hour, music that became increasingly important to me as I got older.
When I look back on that Guns N’ Roses concert, I don’t feel anger or disgust about being there to witness such epic bad behavior, but only a deep sadness at how moments like this were braided into my adolescent feelings of self-hate. In my world at the time, so ruled by white supremacy, GN’R didn’t stand out as particularly racist. Slash, the band’s hard-partying guitar player, was biracial (his mother was black)—which was more color than you could say for most other “heavy metal” bands at that time. Their infamous song “One in a Million”—which has been removed from the reissued album—includes the lines: “Immigrants and faggots / They make no sense to me / They come to our country / And think they’ll do as they please.” It wasn’t a song that I listened to often, but its brashness read to me more about the power to say whatever you wanted. What feels better than being invisible? The idea that maybe I could be noticed for my difference.
The part of me that wanted to die at the Guns N’ Roses concert in 1992 was the same part of me that wanted to court racism out of the side-eyes and backwards comments and uncomfortable questions I had been raised on. Growing up an Indian-American girl in Ohio in the 1980s and 1990s was a litany of microaggressions, but I had no language for that then. There was only Axl’s howl as he opened that set with “Welcome to the Jungle,” and I remember closing my eyes, and feeling that sound vibrate in my chest—and at that time, it was everything.
Neelanjana Banerjee‘s writing has appeared in The Rumpus, Prairie Schooner, PANK Magazine, Chicago Quarterly Review, Teen Vogue, and many other places. She is the Managing Editor of Kaya Press, and teaches writing with Writing Workshops Los Angeles and UCLA.
