How Grunge Music Prepared Me for the Priesthood
Kurt Cobain committed suicide in 1994. I was a Sophomore in High School. I was also the lead singer and guitarist of a grunge band at the time; Nirvana was our greatest influence. When we learned of Kurt's death (and we all remember exactly where we were when we did), my band friends and I (groupies in tow) made our way to the basement studio and played Nirvana songs for hours in tribute to our fallen idol.
If you are of the older generation, you might think of the beatniks. They were unconventional. That's what Nirvana was for the 90's. Think of Led Zeppelin or the Doors in the 70's, or the punk rock Ramones of the 80's. In the 90's, we had grunge, which was just as non-conformist. Its music represented a rebellion against the mainstream commercialization of rock music
As it does in every generation, consumerism usurped the art of song writing in the 90's and enslaved the creativity of the artist under the demands of materialism and popular expectation. Grunge rebelled against that. Big hair bands, like Guns N Roses, were seen by some (by me and my friends, anyway) as having sold out to big industry. And although those bands, together with the likes of Metallica, were respected for their technical skill and song writing, their preference for stadium concerts made them come off as priggish and having traded the life of an artist for the life of a celebrity, and they took no little flak from the grunge community for it.
To be sure, Nirvana admitted that they could scarcely resist becoming the very thing they detested. Kurt Cobain was an exceptionally talented song writer and his melodies remain as unique as they are memorable. It was inevitable that they would be marketed, which was always difficult for Kurt in particular. He didn't want to be mean spirited, but he didn't back down from publicly decrying how record labels and the music industry in general tend to destroy the very thing they vow to love, namely, music. Kurt's suicide was ultimately the result of the temporary insanity one suffers under the influence of drugs, but he was on those drugs because of his knowing no better way to escape from the ways of an insane world.
But I entitled this column, How Grunge Music in the 90's Prepared Me for the Priesthood. Now is probably a good time to explain why. Here are just three reasons.
Grunge clothing was somewhat crude; it challenged the tendency to dress as the world tells us to dress. Grunge music itself was raw and unfiltered; faults and mistakes were incorporated into the fabric of the songs. And grunge welcomed the messiness of life; in its mosh pits (large groups of people throwing themselves into one another) friendships were formed, which were not all that different from those forged in combat.
As a priest (and indeed, as a Christian) I challenge what popular fashion tells me I must wear. I pray also to be unafraid of incorporating my own faults and mistakes into the fabric of my life. And most importantly, I try to welcome the messiness of community, believing that friendships can emerge from being thrown together with others.
Those are some of the ways that I think grunge has helped to prepare me for the priesthood. It is not cool to be a Christian, per se. The Christian is more like a beatnik than a pop culture pawn. Christianity is a rebellion. And those who belong to this rebellion sing the songs of Christ, not because Jesus is cool, but because He is not. +