What We Talk About When We Talk About Goth
Goths is my favorite album by the Mountain Goats. I feel absurdly cliché every time I say that out loud, because of course it would be. Something about it just appeals to the lowest weird teenager common denominator: songs about being ashamed of still liking the color pink, about longing for a past you weren't alive to see. We've all been like that. Who wouldn't fold?
I've been a goth for the past fifteen years—which, to me, meant stumbling upon the mv for Bauhaus' Ziggy Stardust on Youtube as a middle schooler, having a sexual awakening, and never looking back. Yet no one knows what I even mean whenever I use it as a self-descriptor, because goth might be the single most mystified word in the entire English language.
I was a child of the newborn internet—I did all of my early subcultural scouring on Youtube. They had a lot of beautiful girls on Youtube back then, with cakey white facepaint blurred by digicams and gravity-defying beehive hair, and their general consensus tended to be that Goth was a mindset. The music wasn't enough, the clothes definitely weren't enough; you were born with it and it wasn't Maybelline, and you would die with it if you were truly blessed. Few of us were truly blessed. Intriguing. Confusing. Kinda scary, for an italian preteen with a devout catholic family who lived in bumfuck nowhere. It was hard to tell if I qualified, you know.
At first glance, it would seem like it's a plague we've managed to escape in these last few years—you just have to listen to some bands, man, or at least that's the opening line. But then there's a bunch of bullshit that gets dragged along with it for no discernible reason, and it's all cooked up by the minds of either middle class fifteen year olds or people who never mentally grew past that age. Goth is "inherently political", which, like most other things of this nature on social media, gets resolved into being bisexual while wearing black lipstick and yelling at OnlyFans models for pretending to be bisexual while wearing black lipstick. And I'm just left here standing like... how did we get here?
I feel like nobody nowdays is able to grapple with the fact that not every single hobby of theirs can be inherently woke. Like people are deluding themselves into thinking every random fart they let out into the atmosphere is activism, and... man, Goth is a mindset again, I guess. Every stupid and frivolous subcultural activity is a mindset, and it's all centrist as fuck.
And in most cases, with Goth especially, it's so detached from reality; Goth, in the realm of Punk and its infinite children, has probably always been the least political it gets. Most of goth lyricism is about ennui, nihilism and detachment. It doesn't matter if we all die doesn't exactly scream leftism to me. The scene has been willing to protect known abusers for decades proven they were cool enough. Goth in itself cannot be praxis, but then again, this idea can be applied to almost anything lately, with the hordes of people deeply believing they are progressive simply by virtue of an identifying quality they inherently possess, instead of because they've done their readings and came to their own organically-formed opinion.
I do think transgression is something inherently interesting to explore, and I do think it's one of the few political values Goth inherently embodies. But man, everyone is so afraid of crossing any lines nowdays.
Maybe the darkly-inclined protoinfluencers of old were up to something, Goth is a mindset. It might be why I've clung to it for this long. I know few things about myself: that I love that which eludes understanding, that there's an inexplicable thrill in lifting a stone and finding a pit full of maggots, in sticking your nose where you shouldn't. That sadness and fear and disgust should be fully embraced as human emotions and not ran away from. That there's beauty in everything, especially where people don't see it. Goth is, above all, a bad taste-based subculture, and in this world, bad taste might be all we have left.
But also, as an addendum, I long for the day where someone asks about my favorite music genre and I can just say goth instead of launching into a lengthy explanation about oh, you know, post punk and some new wave and certain synth pop and... no, not exactly, what I mean is... We have to do something about our perception in the cultural zeitgeist, man.