Sweet Fruit from Groans

You can find true beauty anywhere, even at a beauty pageant. A couple of nights ago, before bed, I received the following text in a group chat from the wife of a close friend: Why didn’t SHE open for Demon Hunter? accompanied by a screenshot of a supermodel’s face with a microphone:

Turns out, this is Ignacia Fernández who, in addition to vying for the Miss World Chile crown, is also the lead singer of Decessus, a death metal band from Santiago, and she was singing one of her own songs. The clip went viral and her performance was enough to earn her a top-twenty finish and a place in the final competition, which she then went on to win. Maybe this helps her sell some records and book some gigs. Maybe this will lead to even larger redemptive possibilities, where most pageants dare not tread, a recognition that true beauty is only possible after acknowledging true darkness.

My first death metal experience was in the summer of 2002 at the Cornerstone Music Festival on the dusty plains of southern Illinois. Other metal bands were playing, but my boys and I were there for the newest one: Demon Hunter. I had been adventurously listening to live music since college and was open to anything that contained an intriguing balance of complexity, mystery, and authenticity. Just like the first time I saw Bob Dylan live, at the Demon Hunter show I was twenty feet from the stage and speakers. My ears were blown, I couldn’t understand any of the lyrics, but I knew I was in the presence of something powerfully transcendent — way more than what could be contained in a recording. I didn’t get into the mosh pit. I stood, balanced, with my feet shoulder-width apart, the way you stand on a packed train when there’s nothing to hold onto. I braced myself on the edge of the pit while sweating boys, older and younger than me, threw themselves into whatever they could find, including us, as they circled in a dust cloud of fury directly in front of the stage. Only one of our guys jumped into the pit. An addict (now clean) who limited himself for the week to Camel Lights and Old Milwaukee we found at a dive bar in a double-wide on a farm a few miles away, he was no stranger to all manner of chaos. After that show, throughout the rest of the festival and the rest of that summer, he kept talking about his time in the pit: “Someone knocks you down. Then someone picks you up and hugs you. In the name of Jesus. WTF!?”

A few years later, I was teaching first-year writing at Uganda Christian University and was quickly introduced to the soul-draining grind of grading hand-written essays. At least twice a month, I’d walk home with 100 essays to read and assess for content and mechanics. If the power was out, which it often was, this had to be executed by candlelight. Maintaining the energy for this work required several correctly oriented essentials, the most important of which was music. I had dozens of AA batteries to power my 2003 Discman and hundreds of CDs I’d carefully selected and packed into carry-on-sized cases. Only two bands could get me through essay grading sessions: Nine Inch Nails and Demon Hunter. Their thoughtful and urgently articulated desperation matched mine and fueled me through countless piles of college-ruled A-4 papers covered with second-language paragraphs in blue and black ink accomplishing a variety of gradually more complex rhetorical goals. I left my red ink, sweat, and tears on each page before humbly returning them to their creators in hopes that my comments would help them improve their ability to share their unique meaning with future audiences. I didn’t spend too much time pondering it, but I organically began to recognize an affinity between Demon Hunter and Nine Inch Nails. Though they aren’t the same genre, they passionately agree that something is wrong that needs to be fixed.

A few years later, still in Uganda, recently married and about to become a father, I began experiencing the symptoms of panic anxiety disorder. For two years’ worth of dark nights of the soul, struggling through unpredictable and uncontrollable panic attacks thinking they were heart attacks, strokes, or aneurisms, without a therapist, without medication, without a tangible reason for hope, Demon Hunter became essential. One of a handful of life-raft songs running on repeat in my soul during that season was their “Not Ready to Die.”

Twenty-two years after seeing them in the Illinois dust, I saw Demon Hunter again in a metal venue in Charleston, South Carolina. I was joined by another friend who was at the 2002 show. This time he brought his twenty-year-old son.  I was ready for a fun, cathartic night of gritty metal nostalgia, but we experienced much more: the revelation of a flourishing scene of sacred lament. Demon Hunter headlined the show, but each opener delivered a worthy dose of the same essential spirit Demon Hunter had been channeling for a score of years. Impending Doom, whom I’d never heard of, filled the room with a dose of desperation just as urgent as Demon Hunter’s, and somehow darker and deeper. I slept in a dive hotel that night for twelve uninterrupted hours — the longest, deepest sleep I’ve experienced since becoming a husband and father. Since that show, I’ve been to all the sacred death metal shows I can access. I’ve got a shelf in my closet of band shirts — some I’ve seen, some I aspire to see — each with its own extreme, dripping font, with explosive and jarring images of skeletal gore and spiritual desperation. Most of my conversations are minutes away from a reference to anxiety disorder, The Jesus Prayer, or a sacred death metal band.

Two months ago, some of that original crew from that first 2002 Demon Hunter show gathered in West Chicago for Demon Hunter’s latest tour, along with my buddy’s wife. Since we’re all still sort of buzzing from that show, she had to share when she saw the Chilean contestant singing on Instagram.

Apart from her now unforgettable face and lips (with which she maintained an embouchure that, with the sound turned down, could have just as easily been crooning her version of Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You”), I don’t know much about Ignacia Fernández, her family, her story, all the work that led to her being on the stage that night. However, I’m sure it took a great deal of courage for her to go where no Miss World contestant has gone before.

After watching the one-minute video, I fell asleep with the idea of something beautiful, daring, and hopeful happening on an unlikely stage. The next morning, I remembered the video, then faced the fear that it might be a product of AI, like zebras diving at the Olympics. That fear dissolved when I found a clip of the hosts of a Spanish-language morning show bantering back and forth about the merits of Fernández’s pageant performance, complete with a man in a chef’s hat mock growling into an egg beater clutched between his fists. I didn’t let the cynicism of the ignorant drown the hope for transcendence. I shared the clip at the tail end of each one of my high school English classes, together with yet another impromptu plug for what lament makes possible for my students, most of whom seem worried by my passion for death metal.

Maybe I don’t explain it completely enough. Maybe too much adrenaline flows when I try to put words to such important value.

Maybe we need to wait for Ignacia Fernández to explain it. Maybe she’ll be interviewed in a day or two on a global news network or late night show. Maybe someone will ask, “Why would you sing death metal in a beauty pageant?” Maybe she’ll sit for two contemplative seconds, with her perfect posture in her perfect dress, wearing her delicate crown, a publicly acknowledged Queen of Beauty, scanning the faces of the waiting audience while we scan her spotless face and glowing smile. Then she’ll reply, “Death metal is music. Even if it doesn’t reach beauty, all music should aspire toward it. Failure, mistakes, personal deficiency, guilt, pain, and loss, no matter how uncomfortable, are essential elements of human life. Death metal is born in lament, pain, suffering, declaring that something is wrong, that something valuable has been lost. Lamenting that loss of peace, justice, faith, hope, and love, the things we need the most, is an essential step toward redeeming life. St. Augustine, acknowledging that grief is good for us, asks why it is good for us: ‘How does it happen that such sweet fruit is plucked from the bitterness of life, from groans, tears, sighs, and lamentations?’ God orchestrates the answer to that question in each of us. Not all death metal is searching for the glorious beauty of forgiveness, redemption, and peace, but the posture of all death metal and the willingness to fight the brokenness is what makes human beauty possible.”

Maybe. Maybe not. But her courage to sing her song makes true beauty possible.