03-23-2008, 10:57 AM
Hi, this is my first post, and its quite long... but bare with it, I think there is a point or opinion in there somewhere! lol...
In the modern day "Goth" sadly is a fashion statement. It's being phased out now into emo I guess, which has to be a good thing for the gothic art forms!
Back in the early 2000's (when I was an impressionable teen) everyone "alternative" was a "goth", when in reality they were listening to American metal bands like Slipknot *vomits* and shock poppers like Marilyn Manson AKA that dollar grabbing chameleon on stilts... and wearing slightly occult or pagan "satanic imagery"... lol... like a pentagram, or an ankh. How misinformed and ignorant we were!! It was cool to be blasphemous to Christians by listening to "Antichrist Superstar", but it was probably more offensive to pagans that we were all wearing their religious iconography whilst "hating the world" *rolls eyes...*
But these disenfranchised kids have always been around, either as hippies (seen as decadent, experimental and sometimes occult because of their sexual openness in the eyes of their peers) punks (anti... everything pretty much, lol... an overly publicized but not particularly productive movement of the time to be honest!) or new romantics (again seen as decadent and sexually driven, thus dangerous to society in the 80's...) then grunge kids (seen as self destructive bums) or goths and now emos, both of which are seen as the new cult youth terror driving all our children to commit suicide etc...
We all know this is all mostly harmless. Some people overdosed on LSD in the 70's, some punks needed stitches on a weekly basis and SOME new romantics may have contracted STI's (just like anyone else at the time, regardless of their musical preference!) and some depressed teenagers have done some very stupid (and atrocious) things in recent years, and they may have listened to dark music... but it's all media hype.
People will always label themselves as something to stand out from the crowd, even if nowadays the crowd is mostly alternative people of some variety, so the middle class man in a business suit is often the minority!
I've always seen gothic as a way of depicting something that has a dark and repressed sensuality, whether it's sexual or spiritual or being in touch with the hidden self. It's about introspect I suppose and unleashing that repressed desire to be unashamed of the self in all its magnificence and grotesqueness.
It could be writing or reading an excellent darkly smoldering gothic romance piece that evokes that repression of the self that we face every day in a fictional escapism, or a more politically scathing satire or morbid twist on the world we live in, as with the old post punk goth rock bands, or indeed an expression of alternative beliefs as with other important (mostly pagan) goth rock bands.
Goth is a contradiction. It's 100% NOT about the image. But it is 100% about AN image. A true image of the self, of the good and bad, beautiful and ugly, mysterious and drab. Simply it is, or should be an expression of that in a creative form.
But thats just my opinion!
In the modern day "Goth" sadly is a fashion statement. It's being phased out now into emo I guess, which has to be a good thing for the gothic art forms!
Back in the early 2000's (when I was an impressionable teen) everyone "alternative" was a "goth", when in reality they were listening to American metal bands like Slipknot *vomits* and shock poppers like Marilyn Manson AKA that dollar grabbing chameleon on stilts... and wearing slightly occult or pagan "satanic imagery"... lol... like a pentagram, or an ankh. How misinformed and ignorant we were!! It was cool to be blasphemous to Christians by listening to "Antichrist Superstar", but it was probably more offensive to pagans that we were all wearing their religious iconography whilst "hating the world" *rolls eyes...*
But these disenfranchised kids have always been around, either as hippies (seen as decadent, experimental and sometimes occult because of their sexual openness in the eyes of their peers) punks (anti... everything pretty much, lol... an overly publicized but not particularly productive movement of the time to be honest!) or new romantics (again seen as decadent and sexually driven, thus dangerous to society in the 80's...) then grunge kids (seen as self destructive bums) or goths and now emos, both of which are seen as the new cult youth terror driving all our children to commit suicide etc...
We all know this is all mostly harmless. Some people overdosed on LSD in the 70's, some punks needed stitches on a weekly basis and SOME new romantics may have contracted STI's (just like anyone else at the time, regardless of their musical preference!) and some depressed teenagers have done some very stupid (and atrocious) things in recent years, and they may have listened to dark music... but it's all media hype.
People will always label themselves as something to stand out from the crowd, even if nowadays the crowd is mostly alternative people of some variety, so the middle class man in a business suit is often the minority!
I've always seen gothic as a way of depicting something that has a dark and repressed sensuality, whether it's sexual or spiritual or being in touch with the hidden self. It's about introspect I suppose and unleashing that repressed desire to be unashamed of the self in all its magnificence and grotesqueness.
It could be writing or reading an excellent darkly smoldering gothic romance piece that evokes that repression of the self that we face every day in a fictional escapism, or a more politically scathing satire or morbid twist on the world we live in, as with the old post punk goth rock bands, or indeed an expression of alternative beliefs as with other important (mostly pagan) goth rock bands.
Goth is a contradiction. It's 100% NOT about the image. But it is 100% about AN image. A true image of the self, of the good and bad, beautiful and ugly, mysterious and drab. Simply it is, or should be an expression of that in a creative form.
But thats just my opinion!