2,305 Words On “Sweet Child O’ Mine”

The unsettling culmination of Slash’s solo wails this hollowness home. The gloves are o , the sleeper awakes, and wanky pop-metal arpeggiating gives way to genre-defying, wah-wah-drenched fury. No longer anchored by the strictures and certainty of a structure that proved rotten and false, Slash’s melody lashes out at the darkness, comes up empty, and lashes out again. Over and over, like the neglected cry of some abandoned creature, like the grasping arms of a drowning man.

Seemingly exhausted, the guitar drops and our narrator’s voice resurfaces—deep, growling, and utterly changed. No more eyes of the bluest skies, no more smiles of childhood memories. Just a simple question, over and over. He’s asking his beloved, and he’s asking us. He wants to believe. He wants to keep on making pop records where boy meets girl and the DJ spins the tale. He wants to write intelligent articles for optimistic rock ’n’ roll magazines that negotiate the fine line between celebrating music and commodifying it. But first he must ask a simple question, over and over: “Where do we go now?”

The question repeats and builds, until it breaks loose into a falsetto wail, re-joined by the guitar, which amplifies and annotates it. The whole imprecatory riot crescendos in an epic complaint that demands an answer it knows it will never get. Twenty years later, here, at the edge of the future, we still don’t have an answer. Some of us have even given up asking the question. “Here we are now / Entertain us.”

My cynical Marxist friend says, “Rock ’n’ roll will never die as long as you have a product to buy.” And yet I find myself up all night looping “Sweet Child O’ Mine,” struggling to explain its brilliance in a way that invites all creatures great and small to rally around its shining profundity—a weathered, defiant, still-flying banner of existential refusal. Am I a loon for finding sublimity in something so sappy?

Yes and no. Spinal Tap’s Nigel Tufnel brilliantly observes, “There’s a fine line between stupid and clever.” Sublimity and sappiness exist side by side. Good sublime art risks sappiness, but avoids it. Great sublime art is simultaneously sappy and sublime; its sappiness makes it all the more sublime. I know I should laugh at such art, and the fact that I’m crying makes me cry all the more. The original BBC episodes of The Office are saturated with this kind of sappy sublimity. David Brent’s reading of John Betjeman’s “Slough” brings me to tears every time.

Come, friendly bombs and fall on Slough
To get it ready for the plough.
The cabbages are coming now;
The earth exhales.---

Likewise, the best pop music is always somewhat stupid. Lowell George of Little Feat described pop music as “smart/dumb”—smart and dumb at the same time. Smile lyricist Van Dyke Parks concurs: “Just as the best comic books can turn cliché into high art, so can the best pop music. Brian [Wilson] does that. He can take common or hackneyed material and raise it from a low place to the highest, and he can do it with an economy of imagery that speaks to the casual observer—bam!”

The “bam” of “Sweet Child O’ Mine” is in Slash’s guitar playing. It’s one thing to write an essay bemoaning the de-centering of contemporary humankind in a postmodern society. It’s another thing entirely to play a wailing guitar solo that viscerally embodies that de-centering. Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan said we are born into a world of pure being, which language cannot fully express, so we are always longing for a Real we can’t describe. Slash’s solo doesn’t describe this Real, but it compassionately describes the longing we feel at having been severed from it. Without the words to properly express our estrangement, what can we do but wail? Paul of Tarsus wrote, “We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express.” The guitar solo at the end of “Sweet Child” intercedes with groans that words cannot express.

But whom does it beseech? To whom does it pray? Slash’s solo is not the heroic voice of the Nietzschean atheist, defiant to the end in his renunciation of the Christian worldview. Nor is it the would-be voice of Dylan Thomas’s dying father from “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night,” raging against the dying of the light. Nor is it the whimpering voice of the defeated warriors and their hounds from Ezra Pound’s “The Return.”

These were the swift to harry;
These the keen-scented;
These were the souls of blood.

Slow on the leash,
pallid the leash-men!

Instead, Slash’s solo is our voice—2,000 years after a resurrection we never witnessed, facing a future that seems more or less insoluble. We’re not deluded into believing we can return to the idealized modernism of the ’50s. And still we’re not yet willing to throw in the towel and succumb to nihilistic despair. We still hope beyond hope. We groan. We struggle. And we cry out—not defiantly into the void and not to some man-diluted, manufactured god who can’t satisfy. We cry out to the God we hope is actually there. Paul Simon sings,

The rage of love turns inward
To prayers of devotion
And these prayers are
The constant road across the wilderness
These prayers are
These prayers are the memory of God
The memory of God

Slash’s solo is fueled by the despair and desperation and painful longing of these prayers.

Most pop songs settle for an escapist visit to Lover Land. “Stay lady stay / Stay while the night is still ahead.” “We’ve got tonight / Who needs tomorrow?” Admittedly, such escapism doesn’t solve the world’s problems, but it’s better than one of Mogwai’s interminably angsty, post-rock instrumentals.

“Sweet Child O’ Mine” is brave enough not to take sides. It doesn’t simply pin its hopes for the satisfaction of mankind on idealized romantic love and a big brass bed. Nor does it mow over the daises and burn down the malt shop. It does something more complex and ultimately more redemptive. “Sweet Child” posits an ideal worth fighting for, admits that the ideal is not currently achievable, and dares to ask, “Why the discrepancy?” This question continues to echo unanswered from shitty dashboard radios tuned to shitty classic-rock stations in shitty green Impalas throughout our land.

“Tom’s days were days of splendor and exultation to him, but his nights were seasons of horror. Injun Joe infested all his dreams, and always with doom in his eye.”

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
and what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? —W.B. Yeats

Where do we go now?

Watch Curt Cloninger read this essay live on ABC News here.