I don’t understand why more of us aren’t goth.
The subculture celebrates humanity and human nature in a way the mainstream can’t ever really approximate or grasp.
It celebrates and embraces life and death for all they have to offer, translating the most confusing, passionate and complex pieces of the human experience into art that defines generations. The gothic tradition embraces innovation, creativity and nostalgia to create connections, sewing links between and across generations, one lace glove at a time.
The sterile distancing between us and our humanity that mainstream culture keeps us at is more disturbing than anything that goes bump in the night or lurks in a cemetery.
The brand of feigned, blind optimism that more or less runs polite society is feeling more hollow with each passing day. Forced optimism and bright, minimalist aesthetics are especially nauseating.
The blatantly facetious nature of mainstream pop culture will never cease to amaze me. It’s less of a critique of optimism, positivity or anything along those lines and more of an open question of why this particular way of expressing ourselves, or lack thereof, has become so commonplace and dominant.
Human nature is complex and fascinating, yet in polite society, these aspects are rarely celebrated in lieu of sanitized narrative and cold recollection. A lot of it feels plastered on when placed in the greater context of the human condition.
There’s no need to poeticize the mundane when what we view as mundane lies in the melodramatic. We face death every day, endure relationships and heartbreak and have unique, colorful lived experiences. Why don’t we revel in that?
Instead, we read sappy trope-based romances, listen to formulaic algorithm-driven pop and wear polyester microplastic garbage in a rather uniform manner.
Goths aren’t Satanists, edgy teens or death-worshippers. It’s sick and twisted that a subculture based around reverence of the human spirit and open embrace of life is so heinously misunderstood. Our moral-panic-induced misunderstanding of goths is harming us in the long run. There’s a lot that we can learn and embrace from goth subcultures for the better.
The goth subculture spans everything from the fashion and aesthetic realm to literature to music to radical political ideas. It’s anything but monolithic. As with any subculture composed of multiple subdivisions and established over multiple decades, there are bound to be offroads, adjacent viewpoints, squabbles and divisions.
This has its advantages, though. Namely, it can’t be boiled down to a single look, sound or attitude. It’s more of a loose philosophy that revolves around self-expression, community building and an open embrace of humanity not in spite of, but for its eccentricity and simultaneous novelty and universality.
The general consensus above most of this is that what most of us think of as goth is more or less stemmed from and centered around the music. The music itself originated from punk in the ‘70s. The most cited and beloved examples of goth music pioneers include but are not limited to, The Cure, Joy Division, Siouxsie and the Banshees and Bauhaus.
However, goth music often defies and transcends genre. There is goth pop, goth folk, goth rock and so forth.
Henry Jonas, technical director for Radio K at the University of Minnesota, said darker, heavier sounds and synths define a lot of early goth music sonically, partially resulting from music technology in the late ‘70s and ‘80s.
“You couldn’t sequence like a super complicated synth part or anything,” Jonas said. “So it was, like, the same four bars over and over and over again to be very hypnotic in that sense.”
Goth music is a great vessel through which the ails of human consciousness can be channeled. It’s well known for its aesthetic landscape, transcendental qualities and danceability. In one song you can find spiritual fulfillment, poetic lyricism and a good time — three birds with one stone.
You can’t talk about goth music or culture without talking about death. This fascination with our mortality pervades almost every component of the goth movement as we know it, but is perhaps most iconic and memorable in the symbolism and visual language it provides.
Jackson Werner, a web administrator at Radio K, said this fascination heavily dictates much of the music as far as aesthetics go.
“You think of a lot of like, fascination with death, the undead, our mortality,” Werner said.
Goth music is based largely around worldbuilding, Werner said, in that it creates an atmosphere through its sonic landscape and lyricism.
“I think goth music is also very good at creating a good atmosphere, a little bit more of like, it’s a little bit more vibe focused,” Werner said.
There is also a case for goth music and culture as not only a world itself but rather a lens through which to observe and romanticize our simultaneously futile, beautiful and tragic reality.
Perhaps it’s best to think of it less like wearing sunglasses indoors, darkening everything needlessly, but instead of wearing rose-colored glasses, albeit ones slightly tinged with dirt, dust and debris from generations of wear.
Goth music, while often clinging to the extremes of the human life cycle and emotional experience, does a beautiful job of capturing the more in-between feelings and longings as well.
Edward Wilson, a volunteer at Radio K, said goth music is often reduced to tropes that it doesn’t always follow, meaning that people miss a lot of its more universal themes outside of death.
“I feel like a lot of people don’t give goth music the benefit of the doubt, or enough of a try,” Wilson said. “They kind of all assume that it’s very just kind of sad music. For example, The Cure, a lot of their songs is just Robert Smith kind of talking about how much he loves his wife.”
Goth culture poeticizes beyond the mundane, which is why it holds such gravity and authenticity alongside its spiritual and transcendent qualities. Suffering is integral to the human experience, but so is yearning, and the emotions between love and grief.
I’m of the mind that some of the most loving, positive and beautiful things a person can experience are fashioning their unique look out of safety pins and old lace, listening to unearthly and otherworldly music and confronting what matters. A love for life is a full acceptance of what it entails, not merely an avoidance of anything that isn’t sunny or advertisable.
Nobody understands this more than goths.
