Goth subculture
Goth is a music-based subculture that emerged out of nightclubs such as the F Club and Batcave in the United Kingdom during the early 1980s, as well as gothic rock, a genre that evolved from British post-punk. The goth subculture is centered around fashion, music festivals, clubs, and organized meetings.
Styles of dress within the subculture draw on glam rock, punk, new wave, new romantics and from the fashion of earlier periods such as the Victorian, Edwardian, and Belle Époque eras. The style most often includes dark attire, dark makeup, and black hair. The subculture also drew inspiration from literary and cinematic gothic traditions, including German Expressionism and classic horror films, with a flair for theatricality and camp.
In the 1990s and 2000s, the goth subculture entered mainstream awareness, with its visual style and fashion influencing various aesthetic variants such as cybergoth and mall goth, while facing public moral panic, with media often linking it to deviance and self-harm. The subculture further developed on early social networking sites such as MySpace and Pure Volume. During the 2010s and 2020s, goth fashion internet aesthetics such as Health Goth and Whimsigoth emerged.
History
During the late 1970s, the gothic rock genre emerged out of several British post-punk bands such as Siouxsie and the Banshees, Joy Division, Bauhaus and the Cure. However, it was not until the early 1980s that gothic rock became associated with a specific youth subculture.In February 1981, Sounds writer Steve Keaton published an article on "punk gothique", entitled "The Face of Punk Gothique", a term coined by UK Decay frontman Steve Abbott to describe their music. In the article, Keaton stated, "Could this be the coming of Punk Gothique? With Bauhaus flying in on similar wings could it be the next big thing?" Writer Cathi Unsworth believes that Abbott was the first to ascribe the term to the music and the goth subculture with which it would come to be associated, citing an interview in May 1981 where he once again used the term "punk gothique".In Leeds, the F Club became instrumental to the development of the goth subculture in the early 1980s, though had originally opened in 1977 as a punk club. By July 1982, the opening of the Batcave in London's Soho provided a prominent meeting point for the emerging scene, which was briefly labelled "positive punk" by the NME in a special issue with a front cover in February 1983. The scene and subculture was centered around the Batcave, and spearheaded by artists such as Alien Sex Fiend, Specimen, the Mob, UK Decay, Sex Gang Children, Rubella Ballet, and Southern Death Cult. On June 14, 1983, BBC radio DJ John Peel noted the NME had dropped the term "positive punk" and had now opted for "goth" to describe the scene and subculture.
File:The Cure Live in Singapore - 1st August 2007.jpg|thumb|upright|Lead singer and guitarist Robert Smith of the Cure|leftSome of the bands that defined and embraced the gothic rock genre included Bauhaus, the Cure, the Birthday Party, UK Decay, Virgin Prunes, Killing Joke, and the Damned. In the United States, deathrock developed in California during the late 1970s and early 1980s as a distinct branch of American punk rock, with acts such as Christian Death, Kommunity FK and 45 Grave at the forefront.
By the mid-1980s, bands began proliferating and became increasingly popular, including the Sisters of Mercy, the Mission, Alien Sex Fiend, the March Violets, Xmal Deutschland, the Membranes, and Fields of the Nephilim. Record labels like Factory, 4AD and Beggars Banquet released much of this music in Europe, and through a vibrant import music market in the US, the subculture grew, especially in New York and Los Angeles, California, where many nightclubs featured "gothic/industrial" nights and bands like Black Tape for a Blue Girl, Theatre of Ice, Human Drama and The Wake became key figures for the genre to expand on an nationwide level.
The 1990s saw further growth for some 1980s bands and the emergence of many new acts, as well as new goth-centric U.S. record labels such as Cleopatra Records, among others. According to Dave Simpson of The Guardian, "n the 90s, goths all but disappeared as dance music became the dominant youth cult". As a result, the goth movement went underground and fractured into cyber goth, shock rock, industrial metal, gothic metal, and Medieval folk metal. Marilyn Manson was seen as a "goth-shock icon" by Spin.
Art, historical and cultural influences
The Goth subculture of the 1980s drew inspiration from a variety of sources. Some of them were modern or contemporary, others were centuries-old or ancient. Michael Bibby and Lauren M. E. Goodlad liken the subculture to a bricolage. Among the music-subcultures that influenced it were punk, new wave, and glam. But it also drew inspiration from B-movies, Gothic literature, horror films, vampire cults and traditional mythology. Among the mythologies that proved influential in Goth were Celtic mythology, Christian mythology, Egyptian mythology, and various traditions of Paganism.18th and 19th centuries' literary influences
The figures that the movement counted among its historic canon of ancestors were equally diverse. They included the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Friedrich Nietzsche, Comte de Lautréamont, Salvador Dalí and Jean-Paul Sartre. Writers that have had a significant influence on the movement also represent a diverse canon. They include Ann Radcliffe, John William Polidori, Edgar Allan Poe, Sheridan Le Fanu, Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde, H. P. Lovecraft, Anne Rice, William Gibson, Ian McEwan, Storm Constantine, and Poppy Z. Brite.File:Frontispiece to Frankenstein 1831.jpg|thumb|Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus has come to define Gothic fiction in the Romantic period. Frontispiece to 1831 edition shown.
Gothic literature is a genre of fiction that combines romance and dark elements to produce mystery, suspense, terror, horror and the supernatural. According to David H. Richter, settings were framed to take place at "...ruinous castles, gloomy churchyards, claustrophobic monasteries, and lonely mountain roads". Typical characters consisted of the cruel parent, sinister priest, courageous victor, and the helpless heroine, along with supernatural figures such as demons, vampires, ghosts, and monsters. Often, the plot focused on characters ill-fated, internally conflicted, and innocently victimized by harassing malicious figures. In addition to the dismal plot focuses, the literary tradition of the gothic was to also focus on individual characters that were gradually going insane.
English author Horace Walpole, with his 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto is one of the first writers who explored this genre. The American Revolutionary War-era "American Gothic" story of the Headless Horseman, immortalized in "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" by Washington Irving, marked the arrival in the New World of dark, romantic storytelling. The tale was composed by Irving while he was living in England, and was based on popular tales told by colonial Dutch settlers of the Hudson Valley, New York. The story would be adapted to film in 1922, in 1949 as the animated The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, and again in 1999.
Throughout the evolution of the goth subculture, classic Romantic, Gothic and horror literature has played a significant role. E. T. A. Hoffmann, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, H. P. Lovecraft, and other tragic and Romantic writers have become as emblematic of the subculture as the use of dark eyeliner or dressing in black. Baudelaire, in fact, in his preface to Les Fleurs du mal penned lines that could serve as a sort of goth malediction:
C'est l'Ennui! —l'œil chargé d'un pleur involontaire,
Il rêve d'échafauds en fumant son houka.
Tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre délicat,
—Hypocrite lecteur,—mon semblable,—mon frère!
It is Boredom! — an eye brimming with an involuntary tear,
He dreams of the gallows while smoking his water-pipe.
You know him, reader, this delicate monster,
—Hypocrite reader,—my twin,—my brother!
Visual art influences
The gothic subculture has influenced different artists—not only musicians—but also painters and photographers. In particular their work is based on mystic, morbid and romantic motifs. In photography and painting the spectrum varies from erotic artwork to romantic images of vampires or ghosts. There is a marked preference for dark colours and sentiments, similar to Gothic fiction. At the end of the 19th century, painters like John Everett Millais and John Ruskin invented a new kind of Gothic.Films and television
Some of the early gothic rock and deathrock artists adopted traditional horror film images and drew on horror film soundtracks for inspiration. Their audiences responded by adopting appropriate dress and props. Use of standard horror film props such as swirling smoke, rubber bats, and cobwebs featured as gothic club décor from the beginning in The Batcave. Such references in bands' music and images were originally tongue-in-cheek, but as time went on, bands and members of the subculture took the connection more seriously. As a result, morbid, supernatural and occult themes became more noticeably serious in the subculture. The interconnection between horror and goth was highlighted in its early days by The Hunger, a 1983 vampire film starring David Bowie, Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon. The film featured gothic rock group Bauhaus performing Bela Lugosi's Dead in a nightclub. Tim Burton created a storybook atmosphere filled with darkness and shadow in some of his films like Beetlejuice, Batman, Edward Scissorhands, Batman Returns and the stop motion films The Nightmare Before Christmas, which was produced/co-written by Burton,As the subculture became well-established, the connection between goth and horror fiction became almost a cliché, with goths quite likely to appear as characters in horror novels and film. For example, The Craft, The Crow, The Matrix and Underworld film series drew directly on goth music and style. The dark comedies Beetlejuice, The Faculty, American Beauty, Wedding Crashers, and a few episodes of the animated TV show South Park portray or parody the goth subculture. In South Park, several of the fictional schoolchildren are depicted as goths. The goth kids on the show are depicted as finding it annoying to be confused with the Hot Topic "vampire" kids from the episode "The Ungroundable" in season 12, and even more frustrating to be compared with emo kids. The goth kids are usually depicted listening to gothic music, writing or reading Gothic poetry, drinking coffee, flipping their hair, and smoking.
Morticia Addams from The Addams Family created by Charles Addams is a fictional character and the mother in the Addams Family. Morticia was played by Carolyn Jones in the 1964 television show The Addams Family and by Anjelica Huston in the 1991 version.
A recurring sketch in the 1990s on NBC's Saturday Night Live was Goth Talk, in which a public access channel broadcast hosted by unpopular young goths would continually be interrupted by the more "normal" kids in school. The sketch featured series regulars Will Ferrell, Molly Shannon, and Chris Kattan.