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. Continue reading →
