Goth

Abstract

G oth subculture emerged in the socioeconomic decline and Thatcherite politics of late 1970s Britain, on the heels of punk's infamous rebellion.Drawing on diverse fringe cultures, from Dada to garage rock, punk had catalyzed a generation of youth with its diy attitude toward music, fashion preference for safety pins and thrift shops, and contempt for massmarketed music culture.By the late 1970s punk was itself being exploited for commercial potential.Yet punk had also energized a surge of new styles such as new romantic, industrial, new wave, and hardcore.Amid this dizzying subcultural effulgence, a number of bands and personalities began cultivating what would soon become known as goth. 1 Many keynotes of goth subculture can thus be traced to the early days of punk.Punk had reveled in the crass and trashy-evoking ''flowers in the dustbin,'' to cite a well-known Sex Pistols lyric.As this style became intensified and romanticized, a gothic predilection for the dreadful and macabre emerged from within punk's ranks.Siouxsie Sioux, who began her career as a gothic doyenne in the Sex Pistols' scene, helped to popularize a look characterized by deathly pallor, dark makeup, Weimar-era decadence, and Nazi chic (fig.1).Punk's ethos-its militant, antisexual anarchy-was challenged by the gothic's romantic obsessions with death, darkness, and perverse sexuality.Punk's carnivalesque but often rigid male body (epitomized by the ''pogo'' dance) was supplanted by an androgynous gothic body.At the same time, punk's driving musical rhythms were infused with diverse gothic gestures.In his contribution to this volume, Michael Bibby explains how postpunk bands such as Joy Division provided important foundations for gothic rock.Through distorted guitars and foregrounded basslines, Joy Division articulated an aural melancholia that has since become central to goth style.Still other gothic musical inflections could be heard in the Sisters reassembled the sartorial history of postwar working-class youth cultures ''in 'cut up' form'' (26), goth launched an ongoing extension and revision of this practice.Goth incorporated elements of pre-subcultural literary, philosophical, and aesthetic traditions within a continuing process of cumulative genealogical construction.The spectacular style thus created was both motley and surprisingly coherent.Goth fashion was and remains a mix-and-match mélange of black and retro garments fashioned from leather, buckles, velvet, silk, pvc, chains, or lace.Goths may wear spiked heels, pointy-toed lace-ups, shiny thighhigh boots, or clunky Doc Martens.They may accessorize with sunglasses, top hats, capes, corsets, cravats, riding crops, or lunchbox purses.They may dye their hair black, white, red, or purple and wear it back-combed, teased, shaved, crimped, or spiked.Goths may sport tattoos, body painting, piercings, purple contact lenses, fangs, or decorative scarring; applying their makeup, they may favor whiteface, mascara, eyeliner, Kabuki-inspired face paint, or red, black, or purple lipstick and nail varnish.Goth fashion may incorporate elements of ancient Celtic, Christian, pagan, Egyptian, or Asian iconographies.The overall style of any gothic ensemble may evoke high chic, antique, retro-kitsch, punk, fetish, secondhand trash, or some combination of the above (see figs.2-6). 4 This cumulative and polymorphous style makes goth a comparatively unique subject for subcultural and ethnographic study.More than twenty years after its postpunk emergence, goth continues to thrive as an ''undead'' subculture, especially in large cities, suburbs, college campuses, and

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