Goth(s): Classic or Dud

Funny, Ned, I was once gonna write a Busby Berkeley style goth review, "Goths-a-poppin'!" Your show sounds better, though.

"I was FUCKED BY THE DEVIL/He sure FUCKED THE SHIT out of me." The Debasement Tapes collection is hilariously wrong as well.

Fret not, Arthur, I like your vision as well. And hey, been to the new Amoeba yet? :-)

Hi Ned, no, I haven't been there. Currently unemployed and relatively broke so I think I'd go mad, darling, simply mad if I set foot in the joint. But we should get together soon and maybe Amoeba's just the place. We can go out to eat at Chan Dara on Cahuenga afterwards.

I was one, back in the day. For a few days out of each week anyway. Because, you see, I'm completely useless with style commitments.

Also, DG's right. Goths are the least snobbish of subculties. Much friendlier than hippies. And they seem to embrace all types: gay, transgendered, handicapped, overweight, anorexic, OLD--anyone can be a goth.

As an Ex-Goth (and not even one of those silly people who say "I wore all black, I listened to Bauhaus, I sat in my room and burned insence and read Rimbaud and thought about death... but I WASN'T a goth, honest!" as if denial and nihilism were an inherant part of goth- hood... oh, wait, they are! Never mind!) I can only give you my take on it. I can't speak for Goth now, or what it's become, I can only say what it was for us, then, back in the 80s.

What many people seem to object to is the po-faced seriousness of it all. Revelling in nihilism and teenage angst and dressing up like a vampire and obsessing about death at the beginning of your life is an inherantly silly thing to be doing. The make-up, the clothes, the mime-washing-a-windshield dancing, all very silly.

But some of us KNEW IT. We laughed at it even as we were doing it. It was a way of coping, a way of dealing with our own adolescent angst, depression, fear, coming into sexual awareness at a time when sex became frightening and could KILL you. It wasn't fear of death, it was fear of immortality, which is a much more frightening thing when you are 18. The thought that you could go on forever in this horrible half child, half adult, undead unalive state was worse than the thought of suicide.

And the look... I touched on this in the first thread I bent towards Bauhaus. It was a deliberate rejection or parody of the excesses of the 80s. The 80s were about gaudy colour, big hair, larger than life, exagerated design, so goths were about nothing but black, even bigger hair, larger than death, exaggerated ugliness. Fashion in the 80s was about peacock celebration of glitz and gaudiness. Goth celebrated ugliness, corruption, death, make-up used to disfigure rather than accentuate sexuality.

It started as a bitter pisstake of New Romantic; the dour, Northern anti-style of proto-Goths like Joy Division meets the art school through the ages German expressionist weirdness of Bauhaus and the Japanese kabuki stylisation of Siouxsie.

I can understand why the goth subculture goes on today, it's just no longer where I'm at. But that doesn't mean I can't still laugh at it. ;-)

Robt. Smith in lippy = sign that genderfucking has ceased to be an absolute good. Garbage's "Androgyny" single = sign of its slide towards being an absolute bad.

Odd sentence structure here, let me help it along here:

"Robert Smith in lipstick = a sign of goodness and truth, and the knowledge that the world is a fine and good place, where bunnies play happily."

Much improved.

I still haven't, by the way. And I can't see why I'd want to!

http://elvira.com/gfx/throne.gif

Someone had to link to this, might as well be me.

3 years?

Are all the goths dead now then?

massive goth banger!! i think i've played it...5 times this morning. i would totally play this out at the club. if i had a batcave to spin at.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5V1c3Hnypw

Basement of your store, it can happen.

look Ned i'm on the ILX!

Hurrah!