“GOTH, I BECAME ONE AND IT CHANGED MY LIFE”.
Even though I may have looked like everyone else on the
outside, I knew that I wasn’t the same on the inside.
Have you ever felt like you didn’t belong? That’s the way I always felt, especially during my early high school years. While other kids seemed to have no trouble making friends and fitting in, I always felt on the outside.
My interests were different to other people’s, and the things I liked to do, the music I liked to listen to and the stuff I liked to talk about seemed to go way over their heads.
Even though I may have looked like everyone else on the outside, I knew that I wasn’t the same. I felt like I was judged by other teenagers for being different. I always wished I could find friends who understood what I was going through.
One day I met a new girl at school. She was quiet, but I liked her right away. She always wore dark eye makeup, she listened to awesome music, and she had her tongue and eyebrow pierced. I found her fascinating and I immediately thought that I could be like her. I don’t know why but I was drawn towards her style, her behaviour.
After making friends and getting to know her, she started telling me all about the Goth scene and subculture, and about how she had found her place by living the Goth lifestyle.
I started going with her to see bands and she introduced me to all of her Goth friends. I was fascinated by the Goth culture and it was as if a whole world opened up for me, then after a while, I slowly converted and became a Goth myself. This is when my life became so much better. After I embraced the Goth lifestyle, I finally felt like I belonged somewhere. Suddenly I was surrounded by people who thought just like me, and who looked and felt just like I did.
I felt like I had stumbled across this amazing club that I had always secretly been a member of. All of a sudden, I had a bunch of friends that I could swap music with, hang out with and just be myself around. I think I was always a Goth deep down. That’s what I feel like, anyway. My new friends just helped show it to me.
I know now that what was missing all those years was a true sense of belonging. Feeling alone is worse than almost anything. Now I am so glad that I have found the Goth scene. It has really changed my life by helping me to realize that there are others who also feel like I do. Becoming a Goth didn’t just mean that I dyed my hair black and started wearing dark clothes; it also meant that I found a supportive bunch of friends and the feeling that I finally belonged somewhere.
Basic Facts of Goth Subculture.
The goth subculture started during the early 1980s in the United Kingdom as a gothic rock scene. This goth fashion could be termed as an offshoot genre of the post-punk subculture. Even though several such subcultures surfaced during that period, the goth subculture had been the longest surviving among them and had managed to even diversify and spread to other countries.
The goth scene, with its cultural proclivities and imagery, had been influenced to a large extent by the Gothic literature of the nineteenth century. However, the horror films and the BDSM culture had also become a part of the goths to a certain degree.
The goths have similar tastes in music, fashion, and aesthetics, though it could not be said that all the individuals with the same preferences are also goths, since there is no particular definition of how to be a goth.
The music taste of goths includes several music styles. The dress styles consist of punk, Victorian, death rock, and androgynous, along with mixtures from Medieval and Renaissance attire also. Normally, the dress would be a combination of one or more of these styles but black attire is the most common, with matching special goth fashion hair and makeup.
It is generally believed that the original goths were a tribe from East Germany, who were instrumental in the fall of the Roman Empire. However, the word ‘goth’ became synonymous with ‘uncultured’ and ‘barbarian’ due to the Christianization of Europe and goths were branded as pagans. However, the goth scene got a revival in the late eighteenth century when Horace Walpole published ‘The Castle of Otranto’ as a gothic novel in 1764.
After that, goth was associated with horror, darkness, supernatural, and morbidity. The gothic trend started relating itself to ghosts, vampires, graveyards, abandoned castles and churches, cursed families, nightmares, and other such melodramatic plots.
History of the Modern Goth.
The modern goth could be said to have originated in the late 1970s, when certain post-punk bands were labeled as ‘gothic’. The early 1980s, however, saw the emergence of the gothic rock as a separate subgenre and its followers assembled as a distinctive movement. The goth scene appears to have obtained its name when Steve Keaton wrote an article ‘The face of Punk Gothique’ in the British rock weekly magazine, Sounds, on February 21, 1981.
The prominent meeting of the emerging gothic subculture was the Batcave in the Soho District of London, which was opened in July 1982. The old-school goths were later described as ‘batcavers’.Even while these developments were going on in the United Kingdom, the goth scene in the United States was also finding its feet in the late 1970s and early 1980s, with the death rock branching off from the American punk music.
The early stages of the goth subculture growth in US was known as ‘dark culture’ or ‘dark wave culture’. During the 1990s, there was a surge in adopting Victorian fashion as goth fashion, inspired by the gothic revival in the middle of the nineteenth century and combining the morbid features of the Victorian culture.
However, the present goth subculture is highly diversified, with the characteristics of each group varying widely. The tastes and preferences differ significantly from one group to another, though many of them prefer to call themselves as goths even now. The new groups like to join the goth subculture on their own terms, instead of sticking completely to the previous identifying features.It had become quite difficult to characterize the precise boundaries of the definition of how to be a goth. In spite of all these developments, the goth subculture remains stronger than other subcultures.
The Foundation of Goth Music Bands.
One of the most important fundamental features of the goth subculture is the goth music bands. The goth bands tend to be broad in their approach to music, after having branched out of the punk culture.
The first bands that introduced the gothic rock and death rock music were quite a small group. Bauhaus, Siouxsie & the Banshees, The Birthday Party, Specimen, The Damned, Ausgang, 45 Grave, The Virgin Prunes, Southern Death Cult, Sex Gang Children, Alien Sex Fiend, Christian Death, and Kommunity FK were the most prominent among them. The names of the bands are indicative of the goth fashion and the goth subculture, with more association to morbid subjects like death and suffering.
The mid-1980s witnessed the proliferation of bands that embraced the goth scene and they became quite popular among the masses also. The Mission, The Bolshoi, The Sisters of Mercy, and Fields of the Nephilim led this resurgence. In the 1990s, the popularity of these gothic bands increased, while new bands like Beggars Banquet Records, 4AD Records, and Factory Records emerged in Europe. In the United States, the Cleopatra Records received immense response, along with Projekt Records, particularly from Los Angeles, Orange County in California, and New York.
Many nightclubs started featuring special ‘gothic’ nights. The Projekt Records brought a new music genre termed as ‘ethereal wave’, which is basically a subgenre of the ‘dark wave’ music.The goth scene and goth fashion had been enhanced with new styles of music such as death rock, gothic rock, Gothability, industrial music, experimental, EBM, punk rock, synthpop, and shoegazing over the past decade. At present, the emphasis is on death rock and positive punk, dominated by industrial, aggrotech, and synthpop styles of music, which is the most popular among the goth clubs. The ‘Drop Dead Festival’ attracts thousands of goths from all over the world.
Influence of Goth Fashion and Movies.
The influence of goth novels along with the poetry and music of the goth subculture on the goth scene is quite significant. However, the goth fashion was expressed more vividly in the movies and television shows through horror stories.
The horror movies of the German Expressionist Cinema that appeared after the first World War was adopted by the films of the Universal Studios in the 1920s and 1930s. During the 1960s, the portrayal of Dracula by Bela Lugosi, and the male gothic image presented by the Byronic Hero, along with the TV series like the Munsters and the Addams Family were powerfully appealing.
The mystique, elegant menace of the Dracula presented by Lugosi became a cult of its own among goths as well as the general audience as a lesson on how to be a goth. This extraordinary influence is revealed by the first album of Bauhaus, ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead’, which was released in August 1979. This music is considered by many as the starting of the real goth scene in goth subculture. The goth fashion was further nurtured by the albums, ‘Siouxsie Sioux’ of Siouxsie & the Banshees and ‘Dave Vanian’ of The Damned.
The influence of Bram Stoker — Dracula and other horror images on goth fashion was reflected in the goth scene through the adaptation of appropriate dresses and other props like swirling smoke, cobwebs, rubber bats, etc. Naturally, the goth subculture got further association with the themes on morbid, occult, and supernatural subjects, these forming the serious underlying element of how to be a goth.
The biggest influence in goth subculture was brought about by Anne Rice, who depicted the vampires in her works as entities struggling with tragic sexuality, loneliness, and eternity. Her works became highly popular during the eighties and the nineties as an integral part of goth subculture.
Ideology of Goths is not Violence but Tolerance.
Due to the association of the goth subculture with death, suffering, and morbidity, the most common perception among the masses about the goths is violence associated characteristics. However, this is not true. Even though the importance of the mood and the related aesthetic presentation are overwhelmingly related to the dark and mysterious in goth scene and goth fashion, goths are not violent people. They never support violence but advocate tolerance as the main feature or ideology of the goth subculture.
The main direction of goth subculture is not towards hatred and violence but towards identification, recognition, and grief over all personal and social evils that are normally ignored by the mainstream culture. The principle of how to be a goth is based on the above premises of understanding the evils and tolerance towards them.
This is the chief characteristics of the goths, which is best expressed by the goth music. If this fact were appreciated, then the goth scene would not be considered as something abhorring, which should be shunned.
Further, another special aspect pertaining to the goths is their basic nature of being apolitical. Since the goth subculture does not express itself through political messages or arguments supporting any kind of social activism, they differ considerably from the punk and the hippie movements. The rebellion function is very minimal and muted in goth scene.
The basic ideology of the goth subculture is its emphasis on individualism and creativity, a tendency towards intellectualism, a mild expression of cynicism, and a high tolerance for diversity. However, the most fundamental aspects of goths pertain to apolitical aesthetics and simple ethics, which is why the goth subculture still exists, while the other movements have slowly died out. The young people are attracted only by these aspects in spite of the negative impression of the general public about goth subculture.
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Always feeling alone and misunderstood, the teen in "Gothus: The Ultimate Goth Guide," experienced an epiphany when she discovered the Goth culture. She found friends, people with mutual interests and a sense of belonging. Her days of feeling lonely and being an outcast ended.
Goth is more than a look, it’s a lifestyle and a way of thinking. It has its roots in the United Kingdom in the early 1980s, but quickly spread around the world. The Goth scene has undergone extensive changes since its early beginnings and now contains subcultures of its own. The term Goth was first used to indicate a genre of music, but the media and society quickly redefined it to represent those segments of the population that dressed and looked a certain way.
In the early Renaissance era, the term Goth was synonymous with the term barbarian. Unfortunately, much of modern day society viewed modern Goths in the same way, leading to misunderstandings and misconceptions about the Goth lifestyle and philosophy. Instead of elegance and mystique, many in traditional society saw Goths as scary and threatening, even going so far as to accuse them of devil worship.
The Goth culture has a shared taste in music, fashion and aesthetics. Goths often dress in black, use black makeup and many dye their hair black, though it’s a personal preference. Goths embrace a number of clothing looks, ranging from deathrock and punk, to Victorian, Renaissance and Medieval styles.
Goths are not cultists. In general, they’re very intelligent and artistic in nature. They have individual tastes in music, adhere to different religions, work in various industries and have their own unique hobbies and interests. One doesn’t have to have the Goth “look” to live the lifestyle.
Goths tend to concentrate on larger issues concerning the world such as racism, hatred and war. Though individuals vary, Goths are mostly non-violent, tolerant and pacifistic. Unlike mainstream society, Goths find beauty even in death. Goth is a state of mind, reflected by their outward appearance.
Those within the Goth culture may cultivate an outward appearance that departs from societal norms, but they’re only scary to those who fear what they don’t understand. “Gothus: The Ultimate Goth Guide,” sheds much needed light on the culture and philosophies surrounding the Goth lifestyle. It’s a must read for anyone who wants to understand or know more about being a Goth.
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Everything you ever wanted to know on being or becoming a Goth!
The Ultimate Goth Guide.
Origins — Historical & Cultural.
The Goth Scene.
Get your Goth Name.
Goth Subculture.
Goth Ideology.
Goth Websites.
Religious Influences.
Fashion — Do’s & Don’ts
Goth Slang Explained.
Parents. About your Goth Child.
Criticisms and Controversy.
The Web’s First Edition of Gothus.
The Ultimate Goth Guide.
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