Gothic Rock
Gothic rock music was my adolescence.
I wore tight black clothing from head to toe. I wore white poet's shirts and top hats and torn Joy Division shirts and black nail polish and blue hair and long trench coats and perpetual frowns. I played games, wrote stories and read books about vampires. I lit my bedroom with candles and treasured my ankh necklace. I collected magazines with titles like Gothic Beauty and Propaganda and Carpe Noctem and Johnny the Homicidal Maniac. When the day was sunny (and it often was in northern California), I'd bust out a black umbrella to hide my notages shows, mingling with other baby bats and exploring our little world. We were deliciously, wonderfully, sensually dark.
Goth isn't for everyone. It requires a sense of overblown angst and morbid theatricality, and an impossibly thick skin. But for a certain special type of person, all the funereal trappings of the subculture resonate with them. Even though I'm older and occasionally incorporate color into my wardrobe, there's still that teenage darkling in me that remembers picnics in old graveyards, moonlit walks with pretty goth girls, and the glee of breaking taboos, of violating what other people thought was normal.
It was a lot of fun.
I Hear You Calling, Mariaaaaannn...
Like most underground music scenes, Gothic rock's origins are open for debate. It was an offshoot of the late 70s punk scene that fused elements of glam rock and the Joy Divisionrock band Bauhaus' song "Bela Lugosi's Dead," which wound up on the soundtrack for the sexually charged David Bowie vampire film, ''The Hunger''. Early bands like Bauhaus, Sisters of Mercy, Siouxie and the Banshees, Alien Sex Fiend, Southern Death Cult, Christian Death and Fields of the Nephilim solidified the general tone of the music: heavy bass lines, deep vocals and a droning, gloomy sound.
As time has passed, the music has changed, dividing and subdividing in that weird way smaller music scenes do. As I entered college and could finally go to the clubs, the scene took on a heavier darkwave/industrial vibe and the dance music sounded less like a dirge and more like a bunch of angry Germans losing a fight with a broken washing machine. Marilyn Manson was also becoming popular, with his Gothic look and heavy metal sound, igniting fierce debates in the community about whether or not Manson fans were our dark little world's version of carpetbaggers. The goth scene I grew up with was all about dichotomy: mopeygoths and perkygoths, swirlygoths and stompygoths. Untangling this minutia will require much more space than what I've got, so allow me to introduce you to the big names in the game.
Top Sellers
Related Guides
*
Metal Music
*
Symphonic Metal
*
Electronic Music
*
House Music
*
Country Music
